The project is called Lesbians, Feminism, and Social Change, OH MY!, it is a part of The Student Timelines of Women’s Studies 101 at Wheaton College in Norton, MA (Fall 2013) collection. The topics are Art, Beauty, Civil Rights, Health & Reproduction, Film, Labor, LGBTQ, Music, Political Inclusion, and Human Trafficking. The project was created by Ray Souza, Kimberly Belgrave, and Dani Dickinson. The project was created to give a brief overview of the history of lesbians around the world and feminist involvement in American LGBTQ movements and the progress that has been made through them.
The audiences of this project are women, people who are interested in the history of the LGBTQ movement with a focus on lesbians, and people who just want brief information/synopsis/breakdown of the LGBTQ movement. It is not for particular hard-core academic use, but rather for the public to give them an insight into the history of the LGBTQ movement and progress of lesbians.
This timeline covers moments in the American LGBT movement and international progress of lesbians in politics and media. The thesis of the project is trying to prove that progress has been made through these events and movements perpetuated by lesbians and women.
The project is minimalistic and only has a couple of pictures for illustrative purposes, with that said because it is minimalistic it is very easy to navigate through options and not have to look through another page to get to the one that the user is looking for. The homepage has a very organized block of subjects and the user clicks on one to discover a timeline on that subject.
The writing is clear and succinct but it is simplistic. The project is really only a synopsis on LGBTQ and lesbian movements rather than a drawn out analysis of a scholarly paper. Most of the text of the project is less than two paragraphs, very brief and only giving a summary rather than going into details.
Is there an About page, or other information page? Is there any technical information about the creation of the project?
There is an about page on the main page of the project, but not about the LGBTQ project specifically. In this about page there is mention of the use of TimelineJS, which was used for all of the projects.
Only pictures and text are included in the timeline. Minimal metadata is available, only the source of the photograph and the title are provided.
TimelineJS was the basis of the project; actually the entire project was just one Timeline. TimelineJS was chosen to exhibit the changes and progress over time and the history of the movement.
Because this project is only a brief history of lesbians and the LGBTQ movement it just gives a cut summary of the events. It gives less information quicker and covers more ground faster than a traditional research paper could, giving the user a baseline knowledge of the history of lesbianism and feminism in the American LGBTQ movement and progress of lesbians around the world.
-Julia
There are a lot of interesting timelines here. I think it would benefit from a stronger overarching structure and some contextual and interpretive layers, in order to connect them and talk about how the timeline itself fits in the larger narrative. Good project to talk about!