Saturday 1 March 2014

Decisive Chapters, Sections & Headings

As I've been doing general research into the topic of 'Volcanoes', I've been trying to work out a way of arranging all of that information into specific chapters, sections & headings.

To start it all off, I brainstormed everything I had researched on the topic, any questions I wanted to ask etc.
Digitalisation of my existing Hand-drawn Brainstorm

This covered a lot, so I started to break it down into specific categories. I want to aim towards having at least 4 chapters, so I created 4 questions. I can add more later if I see fit.

▸  What is a Volcano?
This question gives me room to explore the varying types of volcanoes, as we'll as move towards a more 'science' route in the explanation of how they're formed.

▸  Why do they erupt?
Again, from this question I can delve deeper into scientific explanations. There's room for me to use a lot of diagrams and interactions (e.g. animations) that will help explain why they erupt, as well as scope for me to link Volcanoes to other Natural Hazards (Natural Hazards = A subject covered by A-Level students).

▸  What damage do they cause?
Good opportunity for interesting demographics and statistics, as well as animations and videos/interviews from previous explosions and/or peoples experiences.

▸  Are there any famous Volcanoes or Eruptions?
There are a ton of documentaries on Volcanoes, so this will allow me to go in depth on several well known Volcanoes (e.g. Yellowstone National Park) and bring in content from external sources that monitor current active Volcanoes. Good scope for me to explore the history of Volcanic Eruptions and how they've shaped the planet we live on today.

I felt as if these questions gave me a good opportunity to create an iBook that was well rounded and covered a lot of ground within the subject of Volcanoes. If I decided to use these as my Chapter's, after an Introduction chapter and ending with a Conclusive chapter, I then needed to decide the subjects within and start to consider headings & article names. 
Digitalisation of my existing expansion on chapters

Above you can see how I have expanded on each chapter. There looks like a lot, but there's an average of around 5 sections within each Chapter. Each of these sections can now have their own page (or 2....or 3...) and will form my iBook. 

Then I turned all of these chapters and sections into documents, divided by folder by chapter name to make it easy for me to access and import information. As I fill each document with information I will build the content of my iBook page by page. Within these documents I can also apply styles to the text to differentiate between Headings and Subheadings etc. 

Each folder is numbered by the order I'd like it to appear in the iBook, as well as each section within those (see image below). Part of the brief is to create a narrative, and the questions that I initially came up with before I expanded into these sections are designed to run on from each other - a natural progression. They're also titled so they can be skipped to straight away - it's not necessary to read the entire iBook in order for a section to make sense. What I'd like to do, also, is have one page in one chapter (e.g. "What else erupts from Volcanoes?") link to a page from another (e.g. "Volcanic Ash"), to direct the user to a different page in order to find out more information.

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