Animations

Animations are a series of artificially-created graphic images that are played in rapid succession to produce the illusion of change. Animations can be recordings of manually drawn and manipulated images. Or they can be graphic objects manipulated by a computer program.

Animations can involve maps that show the change or borders, or the movement of people. They can show environmental or social change, such as the spread of urbanization.

A simple form of animation is an animated GIF, which is a series of several digital images bound together in a GIF file. A more complicated form is Flash, a proprietary format. CSS also supports some animation, as does Java. Animations often involve plugins, such as Flash, to display on web pages. Be careful with Flash, because it can be a security risk.

Resources

• HistoryAnimated.com provides several history animations. If you are asked to install Flash, it is recommended to choose “use once” or a similar option, to protect your computer.
• CSS Animations (W3Schools)