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One of the most important challenges in presenting a controversy is finding a way to map the controversy in a way that aligns structurally at a deep level with the controversy and at the same time allows for easy access to multiple levels of information that form the "stuff" of the controversy. During this prototype phase, we have chosen the controversies in part for the differences among them and the representational challenges they would therefore pose.

The first controversy, Brooklyn Museum vs. City of New York, was a largely press-based controversy -- conducted by both sides (often manipulatively) and commented upon in broadcast and printed media. The visual map we developed resembles a field of play, not unlike an elongated volleyball court, with the net in the middle representing a time-line and each courtside representing the two adversaries. We then mapped the pace and intensity of the controversy merely by stacking entry buttons to the various postings for each day as the controversy proceeded. Lulls and hot spots were instantly recognizable in the length of these stacked bar graphs.

The locally bases Watson Festival Purnel Center Controversy presented a different set of challenges. It offered multiple kinds of primary sources, including interview segments, and a more complex set of adversarial relationships and "players" (a local Rabbi, members of the local Jewish community, student creators of the art work itself, their faculty advisors and university administrators). Early on it became apparent that we might also use this controversy as an opportunity for role-playing on what we envisioned could be ultimately a highly interactive site.

The model we ended up using is comparable to an elongated subway map with multiple transfer points. In this way we could represent the participants - each one had their own line - points of conflict - where the lines crossed and relate both with the progress of time: right to left. Role playing became a truly interesting prospect the more we considered these crossing points-using the subway analogy. They could become transfer points, like stations, and afford a future user an opportunity to change rolls midway through the controversy's progress.

The most recent controversy, the broadcast coverage of the recent Iraq War, came ready-made with a structure from the start. It had already been developed and exhibited as an installation piece by David Tinapple, a member of the Center. David had used a graph of the Dow Jones stock averages mapped over time as a time line to link a set of simultaneously broadcasting set of monitors. This mapped the financial "mood" of the country in an interesting-and revealing-way into the ongoing coverage of the war.

Given the wealth of information contained in David's archive-over 800 hours of footage-accessibility and issues of "fair use" became key issues for our consideration. In the end, we developed various scenarios for parsing this wealth of raw information in randomized and/or more systematic ways.