Overview<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Shape of History is a site that takes inspiration from Elizabeth Palmer Peabody<\/a>‘s own historical charts. Peabody was an American educator, most well known for opening the first English-languaged Kindergarten in the United States, that developed a method of translating historical events into shape and color. The Shape of History uses the same method, where they present a century in a 10×10 grid, split into four quadrants, with each unit representing a year. Users of the sight can color code certain events in a century, and highlight years where such an event occurred with their assigned color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, say users wanted to highlight ever major American fire in the 19th century. They can assign different colors to the causes of fire (natural, man-made, accidental, arson, etc.) and then apply those colors to the years they happened. The purpose of this is to provide information in a much quicker, visual way – it is much simpler to understand the impact of something when presented in one simple picture, rather than through description and words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Shape of History was conceived by Laura Klein<\/a>. With the help of Caroline Foster<\/a> and Erica Pramer<\/a>, the site’s prototype was designed in Spring 2016. Later in the Fall, Adam Hayward<\/a> and Shivani Negi were brought on to help finalize the site that is now available for use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Significance<\/p>\n\n\n\n The site seems to be an effective representation of Peabody’s methods, and does a thorough job of explaining how it works. However, it does not have much else in the way of substance – it is a great digital recreation of a fascinating method of history, but does not have much else in the way of substance. As a digital humanities project it is fascinating and well made, but does not hold much significance otherwise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Overview The Shape of History is a site that takes inspiration from Elizabeth Palmer Peabody‘s own historical charts. Peabody was an American educator, most well known for opening the first English-languaged Kindergarten in the United States, that developed a method of translating historical events into shape and color. The Shape of History uses the same […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":69,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-61","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/ShapeofHistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/ShapeofHistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/ShapeofHistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/ShapeofHistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/ShapeofHistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/ShapeofHistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":166,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/ShapeofHistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/61\/revisions\/166"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/ShapeofHistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/ShapeofHistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}