Timeline for the Antarctica Exhibit

This is a rough timeline of the development of the Antarctica exhibit. It mentions the dates when specific changes or additions were made to the exhibit.

You may move upward to the metadocumentation now, if you like.

November 28, 1993

First images (cruise map and Marco Polo floor plans and deck map) scanned and initial HTML files written. SILS home page announced to NCSA and CERN. At this point, the exhibit is very hard for people to find unless they know that I'm working on it.

December 1, 1993

December 2, 1993

First image map set up for the Marco Polo floor plans (click on the deck map and get floor plans). I didn't have any thumbnails for the floor plans at this point: just the clickable ship diagram. This was originally part of what's now the overview of the Marco Polo section.

December 7, 1993

Added the bibliography section, including lots of archie stuff that I stashed away a couple months ago, and some new Veronica stuff. This was when I put the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 into HTML format. (It took about an hour and a half).

December 11, 1993

Completed scanning and OCRing the text from the Orient Lines brochure. Reorganized the "places we're going and things we'll see" section, adding a table of contents and links between pages.

December 12, 1993

Reorganized the Marco Polo section, adding a table of contents and thumbnails of floor plans. At this point, the exhibit looks good as another form of the brochure. This is also when the first "metadocumentation" was added, talking about how the presentation was created (this timeline, for example).

December 29, 1993

Scanned a bunch of new stuff from the 1994 Orient Lines Grand Antarctic Circumnavigation Tour brochure. I added more of the details about the ports of call, and updated the list of guests and lecturers based on the newer information in the brochure. I also added pictures for some of the guests, as well as one for Lars-Eric Lindblad.

January 6, 1994

Added some of the pictures scanned in on the 29th and incorporated them into the tour description (the picture of the landing group and the IAATA logo) and the Table of Contents page (the penguin family). The Table of Contents page previously had the tour map on it.

January 8, 1994

Added more of the information scanned on the 29th. This time, it was the guidelines for tourism and the Orient Lines reading list. I also reorganized the What I've already learned section so that it was broken up into three sections (Internet, books I've read, and the Orient Lines list). Previously, it was all one document.

January 15, 1994

Interest in this exhibit has been increasing steadily... Several people from around the University have mentioned that they've seen it, and I've had people from other Universities ask about how we did this, what's involved, and where to learn more.

I've sent the first announcement of this resource to the NCSA "What's New?" line. To make it a little more presentable, I've added sections to the About this exhibit section, including the Why? and Technologies parts.

I also added the section on my Grandmother today.

January 17, 1994

This exhibit was announced for the first time on NCSA's "What's New?" list today.

January 18, 1994

Today I added the sections on the recommended packing list and practical ship facts. These, again, came from the December 29 scanning session. Note how long it takes to integrate all of the material that is scanned so quickly...

January 21, 1994

Added references to Michael Witbrock's New Zealand material to the Christchurch section.

I also did another archie search and another Veronica search and added several items to the Internet resource guide.

And, today I finally added the live itinerary (!), which contains an up-to-date status report of the trip -- only interesting during the trip itself, of course...

January 26 - February 19

This is the period that I was on the trip. During this time, I wrote all of the journal entries on my Powerbook, adding them directly to the copy of the Mosaic exhibit that I keep on the Powerbook. In other words, my private copy of the exhibit was updated a lot during this time, but nothing on the Internet copy was changed at all. (Except, of course, for the live itinerary, which showed different information on a daily basis automatically.)

During this period, I mostly just changed the journal section, but there were some other changes which I did in my spare time, like the addition of the equipment section in the metadocumentation area.

The different organizational sguides for the journal were created as I wrote the journal. It started out just with the chronological index, but about halfway through the trip I added the location, highlights, and lecture sections. I plan to finish the people and things sections when I get back to Ann Arbor, since I want to use the Unix grep command to help me out with them.

March 2, 1994

Added my first pictures to the journal. These were the pictures of Christchurch from February 18th. I rapidly discovered at this point that putting the pictures directly into the journal entries wasn't going to work, since there were way too many pictures. On Macs, the system ran out of memory for inlining them. On X window systems, I ran out of colors.

March 5, 1994

Completed my first section of photos (the entire day of February 18th). I reorganized the journal entry for that day, adding a table of contents that had links to individual sections with pictures in them. This limited the number of pictures in each section to a reasonable number (six or seven at most).

I also left the original text-only journal entries as-is after the table of contents, so that all of my hyperlinks would continue working without having to change any pathnames. Eventually, I should probably update the links in the "photo-enabled" pages so that they point to other "photo-enabled" pages instead of the text entries, but for now this is ok.

Adding pictures is going to take a while! Mostly because I have to spend a lot of time figuring out which images I want from the 8 PhotoCDs, extract them all, and add the new pages with links, reorganizing as I go.

March 7, 1994

Adding pictures continues... Today I did the Punta Arenas pictures from my Canon camera, taken on January 27th.

Unfortunately, I've just discovered that my Sun CD-ROM drive and the SunOS 4.1.3 High Sierra device driver don't allow me to read multisession PhotoCDs (only the first session shows up), so I can't get most of the images off of one of my CDs. Fortunately, it's the one that I got two copies of, so I should be able to use the other copy to get the rest of the images. Otherwise, I'll have to use a Mac and transfer the files. Ugh!

March 17, 1994

This evening I added the pictures for January 28th (the Beagle Channel and arrival at Ushuaia, Argentina).

March 19, 1994

Added some more pictures for January 28th (the Beagle Channel and arrival at Ushuaia, Argentina). These pictures were from a second CD, which contained pictures from the Minolta (wide-angle) camera. They appear in this exhibit as the wider pictures.

I also added the pictures for January 29-31, which include Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego National Park, seals and sea lions on the Beagle Channel, the Drake Passage, and Deception Island.

March 23, 1994

Added the remaining pictures from January 31st, namely those from Livingston Island and Half-moon Island. These are my first penguin pictures!

March 26, 1994

Began adding pictures from February 1st, including the Neumeyer Channel and Port Lockroy.

March 27, 1994

Finished adding pictures from February 1st, including the Gerlache Strait and Paradise Bay.

Also, I finally found a way to make the journal section searchable.

March 29, 1994

Today I scanned and processed the National Geographic map of Antarctica which is now used in place of the old Orient Lines map, which was inaccurate. I created the map page and the image map, and did a lot of digital touchup work and processing to turn the eight scans of the map (it was too big to scan all at once) into coherent images.

Since I haven't received permission from National Geographic to release their map to the Internet, I've restricted access to the map files to University of Michigan systems.

March 31, 1994

Today I added the pictures from February 2nd (Port Lockroy, the Lemaire Channel, and Hovgaard Island, as well as some whales off Peterman Island).

April 11, 1994

Today I added a few pictures from February 4th (not enough to break up the file, even), and a bunch of the pictures from February 11th (our approach to McMurdo Station). I can feel myself slowing down... The open sea days are extrememly unmotivating for me, since the pictures are all so similar. I hope that now that I've taken care of the boring pictures up to McMurdo, I can get back on with the work adding the McMurdo Station pictures next.

I'll have to go back and do the open sea pictures (February 4-10) sometime later. Other than icebergs, there really wasn't much to see there anyway...

April 16, 1994

I finally added my pictures from McMurdo Station (February 11th and 12th). Boy, that was a long time coming... I wish they'd turned out better, but the weather was so bad it really couldn't be helped.

September 27, 1994

Added The New South Polar Times to the Internet resources section.

November 19, 1994

Added the public discussion section.

May 23, 1995

Moved the exhibit to a new Web server at SILS, and installed a new indexing and searching system in the Journal section.

August 16, 1995

Added a link to the Australian Antarctic Division to the Internet resources section. (Note that the personal correspondence with the author section was also added recently.)

September 4, 1995

Numerous additions to the Internet resources section, mostly based on leads from Ethan Dicks' personal home page and a few suggestions from others who have e-mailed me recently. I removed the short page between the exhibit's table of contents and the Internet resource listing, because it was superfluous.

I updated the biographical entry for Dr. Bernard Stonehouse, and fixed Kim Crosbie's attribution for These Rough Notes in my journal.

I also moved the journal's search feature onto the journal's title page for easier access.

Return to the metadocumentation...