After spending a day in fruitless pursuit of watching InDesign tutorials and then failing miserably in my own attempts to enter text, I decided to give it a rest.  I hope we’ll spend some time on InDesign tonight so I can get moving with the project.

In the meantime, I’ve sketched out the main design of the atlas by hand and created a series of images for use in the atlas.  The InDesign tutorial gave me some confidence that size and cropping doesn’t have to be precise, because you can rescale, crop, and do some minor transformations inside the document.

I also created a Sketchup of the schoolhouse/church from the 1920’s and then applied to color theme to the resulting image.  It looks kind of weird by itself, but the tone matches the tinting on photographs.  We’ll see how it shakes out – as I look at it more, I’m thinking it would be improved by reducing the saturation.
I’m thinking about a small genealogy chart or a network analysis graph.  Josh has put a lot of effort forth to help me find some alternatives to support my long-range research interests — the options seem to be growing, but nothing is a comprehensive solution. Some explorations last night led me to SOCNETV and Cytoscape.  Socnet is easy to use, but using it for original data input is tedious.  There also doesn’t seem to be a way to overlay multiple types of relationships ( I’ve only spent about an hour with it, so take what I say with a grain of salt). Cytoscape was actually developed for biology research, but the basic functionality is the same as any other network analysis tool.  It’s free and supported by federal research grants, which suggests some longevity as a research tool.  For the purposes of anything I build for this atlas, SOCNETV should be sufficient and require less of a learning curve.