Well, seeing as we are working on a project that focuses so heavily on visual mediums, images of course hold a great deal of importance.

That being said, we are incorporating a minimal variety of tools into our website. Our plans are to use Flickr and Timeline JS as they allow for a fairly simple, though effective, presentation of collected images.

Flickr will be used to show a variety of UMW yearbook photos as a sort of “UMW through the years” slideshow. Hint hint: a LOT of the male students had mustaches, and a LOT of them look simultaneously 40 and 20. It is a very strange dichotomy between their clothing and their hair choices that I feel perfectly encapsulates just how odd the 1980’s was as a decade.

Timeline JS will be used to present a flowing timeline of various cultural trends that cropped up during the 1980s. Be they particular music videos, films, or just particularly heinous outfits that were worn. The point is that the timeline format offers a way for observers to view the flow and evolution of these trends over the span of years.

There has not been any difficulty determining which tools to use. Abigail and I felt comfortable with Flickr and Timeline JS as they offer utility without sacrificing quality in any meaningful way.

As for the determination of what images to use, this boils down to an issue of too many choices. The yearbooks offer 10 years freshman and seniors, thousands of students, and potentially hundreds of different faculty members. Personally, I feel that I am going to opt for photos with groups of students. This creates the potential to show visitors of the site just how diverse the time period was (or was not).

As for various other images pertaining to overall popular culture, we run into the same issue of over-abundance of options. However, I think I will choose photos that show iconic people alone for the opposite reason as the group shots. These are people or moments that have been immortalized in the zeitgeist of the 1980s. As such, they should be appreciated on their own with minimal distraction.