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© April 2004
revised 26 June 2008
a note on site design
As will quickly become apparent, she-philosopher.com is not designed for the casual viewer, but for more leisurely scholarly inquiry.
I have had to make the usual trade-offs concerning image and file size versus load time, and have tended to longer HTML pages and larger images (especially for GALLERY exhibits) than is customary on most commercial sites.
Because she-philosopher.com is a scholarly work in progress, there is more material “forthcoming” than there is presently available. Coming material is listed in the PREVIEWS section of the site, in order to give visitors some indication of the web of connections that structure the site, and to keep me focused on what I need to do next. Elsewhere in the lists of “quick links” (sidebar on the right side of a page) and “Related Links” (page bottom of all GALLERY exhibits), an active hyperlink distinguishes material that is available from material that is forthcoming. While I know such hybrid lists can be cumbersome for visitors, they have proven a necessity for me.
While the site design is not flashy, it is, I believe, well-suited to the site concept. Pages are designed to load as quickly as possible, and to give visitors plenty to read while they wait on images. The site is designed to look good in multiple browsers (i.e., Firefox and Opera, plus Internet Explorer, aka IE), to be intelligible (and navigable) with or without images turned on, to accommodate both new and repeat visitors, and to display well in search engine results listings. Wherever possible, text has been rendered as searchable HTML (rather than graphics). I have carefully organized site content into hierarchies that support browsing as well as the sort of targeted entry consonant with referrals from search engines. And, I continue to experiment with ways to neatly juxtapose layers of content (e.g., using the Windows alert box to give English translations of Latin and Greek text).
On occasion, I have made use of rollovers so that images, too, can be layered. Since only one layer will display at a time in your browser, any information on a second layer will be hidden from view unless you run your mouse over it. (To see an example of a rollover, mouse over the right-hand image of the spread on “The Booksellers Shop” from Comenius’s Orbis Pictus, located directly below the Table of Contents listing for the top-level LIBRARY page.)
Electronic imaging technologies have tremendous potential for those of us concerned with facsimile reproductions of cultural artifacts from earlier periods. I have taken advantage of this in developing she-philosopher.com, and will continue to experiment with techniques and technologies that can enhance electronic viewing of 17th-century printed materials.
In this endeavor, I owe special thanks to Norma Karram and Paul Harris, librarians at UCSD, for their ongoing interest and assistance.
I wish also to thank the Special Collections departments at UCSD’s Geisel Library and UCLA’s Charles E. Young Research Library, both of which have allowed me to use a digital camera on archival materials. While the technology is benign, and does not contribute anything more to the deterioration of printed material than does the scholar who reads through an old book’s pages, the digital camera is capable of capturing more detail than traditional scanning methods. This proved an invaluable research aid in the case of the two engraved, oversized frontispieces for Chambers’ Cyclopædia, with their staggering amount of graphic detail (in particular, the names engraved on coins so small that it was impossible to make out the lettering with the naked eye).
You can view some of the digital camera reproductions in the GALLERY exhibit on Chambers’ Cyclopædia, where images are available in multiple sizes and resolutions for those who wish to study the engravings in detail.
QUICK LINKS
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