All entries for Thursday 24 November 2005

Research Techniques: making historical timelines

The requirements are:

1. plot lots of historical events visually on a line;
2. allow different types of event to be categorised, for example, publishing events, political events;
3. allow for some interactivity, with the user being able to show or hide categories of events;
4. allow events to be linked to other web pages containing more detail;
5. allow icons on events;
6. can be embedded in a web page.

One solution would be to create a Flash application for this. We might persue that for current timelines (as in ones of current events), as we can get the data from a Newsbuilder calendar. But for historical events, I tried something else – using MindManager. Here's the result of plotting some events from the 16th century:

This could meet all of the above requirements, including icons, links and categorisation. It also allows for filtering of events, for example if I apply a filter that only shows publishing events:

Adding the timeline to a web page is not quite as straightforward as it should be. But the creation and editing of the timelines is made very easy.

Robert O'Toole : 24 Nov 2005 15:27 |  Tags: Concept Maps E-Learning Teaching Techniques Warwick University |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem