For some time, I’ve been toying around with the idea of making small semi-interactive interfaced presentations on various important aspects of early modern life and culture. My first attempt, which was quite long, explained the sensitive soul and is still in progress. Because that file is so large and unwieldly, I thought I would try a much smaller and simpler version. Here, I post a very rough experiment that could be useful to teachers who want to provide their students with a primer on Galenic humoralism. As of right now, the interactivity is relatively limited, but this version is primarily designed as an experimental test.

Unfortunately, I do not know JavaScript, and since Swiffy currently will only convert SWF files smaller than 1.0 MB to HTML5, I am stuck using the dying Flash platform. This was my reason for stalling on the sensitive soul project, but I thought I would post and work on a much smaller example to test the waters and to see if anyone would find such interactive mini-presentations useful.  If you would find such a resource useful or have any suggestions on how to tweak the style, interface, content, or anything else really, please let me know either in the comments or by contacting me directly. If this does turn out to be useful and would prove valuable to people, I will take your suggestions into consideration and produce a much more expansive and interactive version.

With that experimental caveat and plea for suggestions finished (and if you have or are able to use Flash), I give you the Humoral Man Beta:

Sorry, either Adobe flash is not installed or you do not have it enabled

If you want a full size file without the explanatory text of this post, click here.

Currently, this file takes an incredibly long time to load, but, if people think such an exercise would be useful, I will attempt to reduce the size and loading time. Again, please let me hear your feedback and suggestions.

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  1. colleen e kennedy says:

    This looks great! Yes, it runs a bit slowly right now, but it is fantastic teaching tool! I will be sharing this with my class when we cover “As You Like It,” “Twelfth Night,” and (in the future, when I eventually get to teach them) Ben Jonson’s “Every Man In/Out of His Humor.” I wanted to create a humoral quiz for students, not testing their knowledge, but having them determine their own humors based on astrological sign, personality traits, food preferences, etc. Let me know if you’re interested in that.

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