I’m a big timeline fan. I’ve always thought they were fun to make for school projects, and as a visual learner they have always helped me make sense of complicated histories. As an obsessive organizer, I am particularly fond of color coordinated or otherwise embellished timelines. I think it not only adds a little pizazz, but also helps the reader navigate the information.
I’ve worked with Timeline JS before and think it is a really easy tool to incorporate into your own practice. My first experience with it was a collaborative timeline of German history for a Bauhaus seminar this year. As a class we each added events from a 20 year period to a communal timeline that spanned German history from something like 1700-1940. We covered a lot of information. The platform was easy to use collaboratively because it operates based on a Google sheet, so it constantly is updating to reflect what your peers are adding. We only had one issue of items not coming up on the final product because apparently you can’t have any blank rows in the sheet between events– overall a minor and easily fixable issue once we all understood what was wrong. Based on that experience, I knew I’d have an easy time making my own timeline using the platform, but wanted to see if I could tweak it at all to suit my specific needs. Interestingly, TimelineJS encourages you not to have more than 20 events for your reader to click through. I know our Bauhaus timeline had at least 75 events, probably more, and it was a little long but the length didn’t change anything about the tool itself, just the class’s attention span. Which reminds me, as a user or reader Timeline JS is also very user friendly. It has easy arrow buttons on either side to toggle through events, or you can swipe across the overall timeline at the bottom to move more quickly across a longer span of time to find a specific year. This is much more user friendly in my opinion than one of the other examples we looked at in class by BBC that was a History of England. Moving through that one is much more cumbersome and the individual events are less visually engaging to the reader. However, the BBC timeline is definitely not limited to just 20 events as Timeline JS apparently suggests, so they do a good job of presenting a truly massive amount of data.
For this week’s digital assignment I made a very basic and incomplete timeline of South African history. Sure enough, when I went to create my own timeline I thought it was easy to create events and to add text and images to them. I’ve been having trouble embedding links into my posts, so click here for a link to my timeline.
Something I realized this time around that I didn’t last time was that I wish I could overlay multiple timelines into one. What I mean is that I wish I could have had a “colonial” timeline and a “local” timeline that existed on the same spreadsheet/timeline, but were somehow distinct (maybe different colors? maybe one at the top of the screen one at the bottom?). As a side note, I know that “colonial” and “local” timelines are problematic in that those terms are very loaded, but the point is that I think it’s perhaps not the best way to have the European presence and local histories (whether Xhosa, Zulu, etc) charted on the same timeline. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to manipulate the data in a way that differentiated the two groups. Maybe that isn’t necessary as all the history has becomes so intertwined, but I still think it would be interesting to see just the events related to the Zulu kingdom, or just the Dutch colonial involvement for example. In an ideal world, I could color code the various events in a way that would correspond to overarching groups or themes (Zulu history could be blue, Dutch orange, British red for example) and then I would have a menu on the side that when one of those colors was selected, a timeline of just those events would pop up on top of the page so you could toggle through just those events more easily. A set up like this would show that there were a lot of events happening around the country at the same time. While the British and Dutch were landing on and arguing over the Cape Coast, the Zulu Empire was very much at its height and expanding as just one example. This could also help to remedy any length issues, as you could “shorten” the timeline by just viewing one group at a time.
Interestingly, one of the examples that Timeline JS provides is a timeline of Nelson Mandela’s life. Although much more specific in scope than my own attempt, it is interesting to compare the two. The formatting of the two are quite similar. In fact, there are a lot of similarities, including the image and structure of the event for Mandela being freed from jail (I promise not copied, it’s just the standard image of the event!). The similarities hint at the fact that there is very little customizing you can do using the tool, which really is my biggest critique. One thing I wasn’t crazy about that the example timeline did was that it includes the “time” of the event, however almost all of them apparently occurred at 12 am. I assume this was made in an attempt to fill in all the data fields of the spreadsheet, but it seems like superfluous information to then translate to the finished product unless the exact time of the event was truly relevant (I know not all of them occurred at midnight).
The other program we looked at this week was TimeMapper. I hadn’t used the program before, but it seems equally as intuitive to use. It also uses Google spreadsheets to organize and add data, which makes it really easy to use. One aspect that is cool is that it incorporates a map. Although, in the example they provided on the website (see the screenshot I added), the map wasn’t terribly helpful except for as a way to toggle through events. Still, the concept is interesting. Using the screenshot as an example, I’m not sure I really needed the pin in Italy to understand that Thomas Aquinas was Italian when the text clearly states that he was an “Italian Dominican priest.” I can conjure up a basic map of Europe in my head enough that this visualization didn’t elucidate anything new. Nevertheless, I can still definitely imagine using this map feature in a timeline on South African history as I think this would provide important visual context for where different events were taking place since there were colonial and tribal divisions that did constantly shift. This type of map-based timeline reminds me of the New York Times project “Riding the New Silk Road” that we looked at for class. While I think the map adds something to the NYT project, like in TimeMapper I’m not sure how much it really adds aside from a way to toggle through events. In both cases, I wish that the map provided more interaction to the user rather than just a way to get to the next static timeline event.
It isn’t totally clear from just a screenshot of the NYT project, but you can kind of see that the “map” is really just an interesting way to put events on a squiggly timeline. As you click through the timeline, you “travel” along the route from one static event or location to another, really just scrolling down the webpage. Each point on the map/timeline corresponds to one image and text. Sure, you get a geographic idea of where the events are happening in relation to each other, but I’m not sure I would really say you are experiencing riding on the new silk road through this format. Based on the NYT example, I’m less inclined to use TimeMapper over Timeline JS, because I’m not convinced that the inclusion of maps into a timeline adds enough to warrant the extra work. Maybe that’s pessimistic –I definitely tend to be critical to a lot of these tools– but I also know I have limited time and resources and want to be efficient in what I choose to incorporate into my own research.
In the spirit of collaboration and crowdsourcing that is so important for digital humanities, if anyone knows why I can’t embed anything into my posts, please help a scholar out! For the time being, here is the link to my timeline project. I’ve included it in hyperlinks throughout, but I know my theme makes it hard to see those sometimes and I want to make sure my readers can learn a little something about a few events in South African history and see how Timeline JS works!
So here’s the link: https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1D5sFTliTBMk2c8dxBek4ggXEVfEr7zVK_vv8zkjW8F8&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650