I think it's going to be tough to sketch out the slider in a way that tells us much, but I also suspect that this isn't going to be the easiest thing to develop.
There's a demo slider in react here:
https://cell303.github.io/react-slider/
A lot of what we need is in rough form there:
- draggable handle
- sliding changes value based on location of handle
- display before and after handle changes color
but we'd need to add:
- graphic on slider should be timeline where the first point is the first document in the view-window and the last point is the last document in the view window. perhaps the key thing is that the spacing needs to be relative to separation in time between the datums -- this is how the slider gives you chronological information about what you're looking at, at a glance.
- change switch before and after to be drawing points that slide out of the middle box
- there probably needs to be a zooming effect at the top and bottom of the slider in order to give some sense of how the visual excerpt is being decompressed.
this is without looking at the code, though. it might be easier to start from scratch, but since time is particularly scarce right now, time-saving seems particularly useful. (before anyone throws tomatoes at me, I know that I'm not great yet with the time-saving tools that have already been presented to me either, project-management wise. my sense with this is that maybe sometimes it's better to be operating on even wrong instincts than to be doing something by rote, in the sense that when you fail, there's a chance of disabusing you of the bad instinct that wouldn't otherwise exist if you did it right because someone else showed you how. (A lot of what I've already learned here, I've been hungry for precisely because of this sort of realization!))
OK, it's Friday night. It's 1am on the eve of the fourth of July. I should take a moment to think about that date and what it means to different people depending on different experiences they've had. OK:
- Some of them I know a little bit about. I know there's pain, at least, and I don't need to know every source to know that there are many sources. But every source matters because of the pain, because every source is a clue to how we can learn to stop hurting each other.
- Very many of them I don't yet have much grip on, yet, I'm sure.
- But for a certain sort of person, I know it still means, above all else, a common fealty to the idea of this country.
Though I am concerned with everyone, I feel most responsible for the latter group, because they often wind their nationalism up in things I, a white straight dude, have an obligation to uproot in hopes of solidarity. I don't hate nationalists for their love of country. I love my country too, in my way. But I feel we should revisit our arrangements, and take a good hard look at the ground that is eroding beneath us while we squabble and squeak forward. Nationalism makes that untenable; it forces us to choose blindness because the alternative feels unholy. It sets us up with assumptions that we can't afford to have at this point.
I love everyone in my country, but I know how little we have in common at this point, compared to the things we each have in common with entirely different sets of affilities and loyalties and affiliations that know no borders, across cultural lines that decreasingly exist. This new world is no utopia; this is not an exhortation to embrace it for all its utility. We should proceed lightly. But the structures we are now using do not reflect us. Not only do they not serve us, they are no longer capable -- and not because they are corrupt; they are corrupt because they are no longer capable. Our government serves only as a grip on our backs for stateless entities to manipulate our lives, determine what our world is like. If nationalism keeps us not strong but weaker and weaker, it becomes an oxymoron, an abusive relationship.
Of course that's not the main problem with nationalism, but the dynamics of the conversation have changed. If nationalism goes away, the reasons why don't matter as much as the material change. And if we have too rigid a set of expectations for how that comes about, we may miss a reason, miss an opportunity, miss a hope to build a better world. I tremble at the thought of this change being orchestrated by technocrats or venture capitalists. The spectre of a hegemonic Internet monoculture owned and operated, a Pullman world entertained to a living form of death, haunts me. That is what is forming, because there is no conversation about the power dynamics of any of this shit. But the Internet has activated a self-preservational instinct before, with SOPA...