Two Useful Websites

     In my project on Russian, classical composers under the reign of Stalin, the website TimelineJS would enhance my work because my audience would be able to see a visual of when the composers lived, wrote, and premiered their work. I am planning to focus on the last fifteen or twenty years of Stalin’s life in order to see specifically how he interacted with composers through World War II and to his death. He denounced several composers during this time and also awarded some of them the Stalin Prize for their compositions. A timeline would help my audience visualize when these things happened in correlation with other events; for example, did one composer receive a denunciation the same year that another composer received the Stalin Prize? This may lead my audience to question why, and I could include a link to a more in-depth article to explain the limited information presented in the timeline.

     A timeline would also help my audience deduce patterns of censure. Many Russian composers had to wait until after Stalin’s death for some of their pieces to be performed because they knew that their melodies could get them in trouble with, or killed by, Stalin’s secret police. A timeline would help my audience to see when pieces were composed as opposed to when they were premiered for the first time. Having this information on a timeline could show whether Stalin was prone to officiate worse censorship in some years as opposed to others.

     I plan on writing longer articles to exhibit certain composers, their compositions, and what was going on in the world that may have impacted the composers to write their pieces in a certain way. TimelineJS lets creators include hyperlinks in their timelines. This would be helpful for me because I could link to my longer articles. The timeline could, in a way, act like a site map or a database. It would be a way to entice my audience to explore people, places, and events in more depth by giving them visual context with dates.

     Another helpful website for my project would be a site like Many Eyes, though Many Eyes is no longer up and running. When it was in commission, however, it allowed common folk, like me, with limited graphic design skill, to create visual representation of data in the form of graphs, spreadsheets, infographics, or more. As I understand it, users were able to upload their data and it would be transferred to Many Eyes’ many data templates.

     This would be helpful for my project because I could present data about my topic in an appealing and easy-to-understand way. For example, many Soviet composers had to change their composing style and genre to avoid accusations of “formalism.” It would be interesting to see an infographic showing which genres of music were most popular for composers to compose in during different years of Stalin’s reign. As with the TimelineJS, this could reveal patterns in censorship. Additionally, it could show other data, such as volume of compositions per year and whether or not that changed during World War II. Data is often boring to read and hard to understand if it is simply written out. Infographics are a good way to present data in a visually appealing and understandable way.

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