Zoomify Course Tools

Zoomify, a tool that allows Web developers to make high-quality images zoom-and-pan for interactive viewing on the Web, is being embraced by a growing number of educational technologists. Features of the product include: drag-and-drop image prep; easy Web page and Flash movie intergration; a powerful ActionScript API; hotspots (text captions, media graphics, URL links, etc.); universal viewing accessibility via tiny Flash movie; highly intuitive toolbar and navigation window; ability to remove/replace Zoomify splash screen; and Web-based annotation to indicate points of interest, labels, and notes.

At Harvard, the Instructional Computing Group (ICG) has integrated Zoomify into a number of recent course applications. ICG’s Project Portfolio page provides the following examples/descriptions:

For a course on Tokyo, ICG collaborated with faculty and Presidential Instructional Technology Fellows to select historical and contemporary maps from the Pusey Library, and developed a module (see image below) that allows students to view maps from the various historical periods covered in the course, with important locations marked and annotated. Using the Zoomify component for Flash, students can zoom in for detailed views of the maps, and can move between hotspots on the map.

For another course, this one examining St. Petersburg as a literary setting, students are able to view overlaid maps (see image below) and other comparisons between the storylines of the various works. Since the city’s neighborhoods and important sites have names from the Soviet and Imperial eras, seeing this information combined is particularly important. The maps are stored as images, and the descriptive information is stored in XML files that are read by the Flash application.

To aid in the study of Chinese literary history, ICG used Zoomify to present students with pairs of images for comparison (see image below). The images are maps that include representations of data, so students can compare different data from an era (such as concentrations of literary figures and a map showing important roads) or compare the same data from different eras (such as concentrations of literary figures from the Ming and Qing dynasties). Additional descriptive information is accessible for each map, and the student can zoom in to different areas of the map to see more details.

Finally, for a course entitled The Chinese Literati, ICG produced an online version of a unique 17th-century Chinese painted scroll, more than 40 feet long (see subsection of the scroll illustrated below). Clickable annotations explain the basic narrative of the painting, enabling students to focus on the work in its artistic and historical context.

Additional examples of educational projects employing Zoomify technology, including the Theban Mapping Project, the Punjab Archive, and Mars Quest, can be found on the product’s Customers & Case Studies page.