I want to move the ideas on DarkestDays from focusing solely on past materials and into a realm that can encompass the present and future as well. This would involve actually covering tragedies as they occur and predicting tragedies. This former would involve any tragedies that either have only been ambiguously recognized or are ongoing. The latter would be a sort of futures market on prediction, with credibility acting as the operant currency. Both would likely make the site both a lot more controversial and a lot more interesting.

The purpose of the site is to expose people to tragedies in a compelling way (suited for them) and then allow them the opportunity to educate themselves further about the specific nature of each. Still, my motivation for this project has always had a pragmatic bent. For me, education loses most of its meaning when it is divorced from actual changes in attitude and behavior. Moreover, I want this site to serve a prevention method. The point of this exercise as a whole should be to show people the social patterns that caused horrible events to occur precisely so they might be better able to perceive similar patterns aligning now or in the future. This is the strength of the case study methodology.

Future tragedies might not fit so well the current layout for tragedy pages. Most of the content areas will not be appropriate because no multimedia materials will yet exist through which one could present a case. The timeline wouldn't serve much of a purpose either, except maybe for the predictor to make a bunch of caveats about what preceding events will need to occur in order for a tragedy to occur. I can see this getting easily spoofed by someone predicting the apocalypse or some other dark millenarian fantasy, but perhaps that should be embraced in good fun. What I think is a more pressing concern that by predicting a disaster, one plays a role in sort of “willing it” into happening. While it seems to me that conventional wisdom would ask us to err on the side of caution by making false predictions just to alert the world that such a thing might occur, but I anticipate people arguing otherwise.

For disasters currently unfolding in the world, the issue is perhaps even more contentious. Let us engage in a thought experiment using the example of Darfur. Imagine someone, maybe Nicholas Kristof or some North African scholar, putting up a tragedy page about the ongoing genocide in Darfur. There is always a problem with writing history before events have fully unfolded, but on the other hand, it might awaken some more opposition. Which is more important, erring on the side of prevention with potentially unsupported accusations, or not slandering the Sudanese government. People might very well take issue with baseless claims and it would be very important to have mechanisms both for submitters to martial evidence for their claims as well as for detractors to air their counterclaims? I just don't know whether traditional forums will be able to adequately handle such disputes. Perhaps there is room for an all powerful arbitrator here.

This site is conceptualized first and foremost on as a case study methodology. Tragedies must be geographically, temporally, and socially bounded. Thus, if someone wants to start a page about racism in general, they cannot. They need to narrow this to a case involving “institutionalized racism” and specify a place, a time, and a specific population. Blacks in South Africa during the years 1948-1994. Even this is potentially too broad. This specificity is necessary because such material needs specific social context to escape the bounds of general social problems theory. It will also offer a unique way to compare tragedies across time and space. We need some kind of categorization or tagging system to allow different kinds of content with similar patterns to be linked together. For instance, there are many historical instances of institutionalized racism against people of African descent around the world, but we need either a taxonomy or a tagging system to help users link them together conceptually.

Individual tragedies as I have defined them above can be thought of as being brought about by a number of “social problems” or concepts that can be used to explain how a particular tragedy was brought about. For instance, apartheid in South Africa was not just a product of racism, but also imperialism, wealth inequality, militarism (one might say anti-communism), and also of ethnocentrism. If we want people to understand the root causes of these particular tragedies, we should endeavor to furnish them with information about these issues. However, to do so will likely require the inclusion of a new page element for social problems that is fundamentally different from that of tragedies. We cannot just link to a wikipedia article on racism and expect people to trudge through the mounds of text. Again, the informational resources are incredibly abundant, but the presentation of such materials to the public leaves much to be desired. Hopefully, this will not lead me down a path involving reconceptualization of the entire site.

Almost inevitably, this idea is getting drawn back to my old hopes and dreams for an online educational resource that would serve the same functions as a social problems class, but outside of an institutional environment and drawing on interactive technologies not suited for it. This could be a strength, but perhaps I really need to embrace it and start thinking more about how specifically it will be educational and interactive. In some ways, it is as if I am delegating the task of teacher (or at least presenter/storyteller) to the managers of individual tragedies. It is up to them to structure the material in the most compelling and educational manner. Still, they really can’t be asked to fulfill the role of the objective teacher, but since it hardly exists in the social problems context anyway, maybe this isn’t such a big deal. The other problem is how to find effective ways to get people to be able to abstract the bigger concepts about social problems out from the specific tragedies they are exposed to on the site. This is where the site perhaps needs to start presenting information more like a textbook and less like a storyteller. I do believe that we can work out from the knowledge base and structure of currently existing textbooks and just digitize the info, expand the multimedia resources surrounding it, and make the process much more interactive.

The other aspect of this idea I am still pondering over is the interactivity of the site as a whole. The site should be a resource that can be manually explored, but we also want to make sure that users do not just flatly experience the site through this kind of navigation. This entire project began because I wanted to offer people a way to be shocked, to explore the cause and effect of this shock, and try to improve its mechanisms. This is akin to something like StumbleUpon (which I love), but I want to get deeper data than like/dislike. I want to know how users are affected by exposure to such media, in terms of how their attitudes and behavior are changed by it in the short and long term. No social problems course I have ever heard of makes an effort to measure its impact in such a way. I don’t yet know what tools need to be incorporated to achieve this end, but I know that we need them. We will be aided by knowledge of user demographics and the incorporation of both quantitative and qualitative measures. If we look at this site either as a method of persuasion or education, then this knowledge would be invaluable to help us determine best practices.

How would the website look? How would the interface work? The opening page is really key to getting the project some word of mouth. I think a rotating series of great quotes and perhaps static images foreshadowing the content to come would build dramatic tension while the initial index page loads. This is definitely a site that requires a flashy front page. I was initially thinking of a flickr like dynamic black and white photo collage on a black background. The photos either grow bigger and then fade away or are simply faded in and out. The problem is that not that many high quality photos can fit on one page and that they would be devoid of context. How could the user identify the photo with the tragedy? A small descriptor that fades in as the photo fades out? They would also have to be rotated in order to adapt to new tragedies added and repeat visitors? My newest idea is to use a dark global map (Mercator projection) drawn from those NASA “world at night” satellite images. If we can drown out the urban lights from the image, it would provide a dark enough background for the tone of this site. Then, we could map the locations (not exact) of different tragedies with points of light and allow rolling over those places to reveal popout photos and short descriptions of those events. If a user clicks a photo, they are then taken to the profile page of that tragedy. Then, as to make the page fully unbreakable, we could put other links like About, Navigate, and See Random Content out in the oceans somewhere.

The tragedy page template includes a number of elements. Each page should has its identifying photo (which also appears in the index montage or map) displayed in the top right corner. Next to it should be a short textual introduction to what happened and why. There should also be a table showing the vital statistics of that tragedy (causalities, location, year, page views, manager, lost potential ($), social problems associated). Below that should be a timeline describing the events in chronological order and with links to different material relating to them. Below this will appear a listing of primary source resource categories - original documents, articles, books, websites, photos, videos, audio recordings and orgs working on the issue and its consequences). There should be a contribute link here for users to add new materials that they have found or created, and perhaps to donate as well. There should be a link to forums discussing the issue as well as descriptive links to different mashup content that has been created to illustrate the tragedy for different purposes and different kinds of people.

Another important question regards how design influences how people will use online information resources like this. Most people probably only use Wikipedia as a “just in time” resource for finding out specific info on a specific topic or set of topics. This is not how I generally behave, nor is it how museums normally work. Audiences come to museums not so much to learn, but to be exposed to content. This is only one of the motivations I am hoping to tap into with this project. Museums draw heavily on select user demographics (here I'm speaking mostly of voluntary attendees, not those compelled by education or civic institutions) precisely because of the sometimes stultifying way they present material. I would like museums much more if they provided a diverse set of informational resources in different formats to complement the items in their collection. However, I almost never see that done. Instead, you get an item flanked by a very dry paragraph or two explaining its origins and its significance in a fairly shallow manner. If we instead have no physical item, but just draw together a set of media describing an event or social pattern, will it hold the attention of Internet audiences? Will they look at lots of materials on one tragedy, or skip around looking at a few from each. Or will they sit for months on end consuming the material in total like I did with This American Life or Netflix's documentary movie collection? How can we organize the material to encourage a happy medium?