Presenting Mughal Gardens on the Internet

I recently came across this site, hosted by Smithsonian Productions, that has some interesting parallels to my project on Maqrizi. “Gardens of the Mughal Empire” attempts to demonstrate how sites were experienced. The viewer is invited to “follow in the footsteps of the Mughal emperors” and move from garden to garden. On the home page as the cursor passes over a site, the text in the left hand column changes, giving a brief introduction to what can be found there. This initial interface may be compared to my own site, where a Google Maps frame allows for browsing of individual mosques. My project is dependent on HTML while this one works through a smoother Flash interface, but the goal of letting a viewer browse and get basic information about a site, and then click down to get more information, is similar.

When the viewer clicks on a site he or she finds more detailed information about it, including a number of photos and historic pictures that illustrate the site. The photos I found frustrating because they were so tiny, even after I clicked to enlarge them. Here is the actual size of the pop-up window and the image:

OK, that’s a bridge, but I don’t find the image too helpful, nor am I able to really place it in geographical context. These pop-ups could easily be much larger and I don’t know why the choice has been made to present them so small.

There is one “interactive section,” offered for Shalamar Garden. It also links some of these photos with an outline of the plan for the garden:

This linking of images to a specific plan of the site I find to be effective at letting a viewer imagine the process of walking through a site. The images, however, are still comically small. This technique has been perfected by the “Virtual Walking Tours” offered by Saudi Aramco World. These presentations, such as the one for the Alhambra in Spain, use multiple panoramic images and narration to explain each scene. Such a presentation almost makes it possible to experience a place such as the Alhambra without actually going. This is a high bar, but it appears to be what “Gardens of the Mughal Empire” is striving toward in its presentation of Shalamar Garden.

A final note is on the “credits” for this website. I was stunned at the number of people involved:

Maqrizi.com just had me, with the exception of some valuable technical help at the get-go. For some reason it has become common to make Internet endeavors large group projects, as if that is being true to the Internet ethos, but this makes for the same problems as arise for multi-authored books. There is an inevitable loss of sharpness as lots of people get involved.. and certainly an avoidance of a personal vision for a project. I don’t believe an academic website should be any different than an academic book. At its best it is a singular and surprising presentation of material. Let us feel a guiding personality and passion!