November 24, 2005

Research Techniques: making historical timelines

Historical timelines are sometimes useful in the humanities. I have two outstanding requests for the creation of such timelines to be used on web sites. I have just found an easy solution to this, using MindManager.

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.


- One comment Not publicly viewable

  1. Steven Carpenter

    Timelines in Flash would be easy enough, but after giving it some thought I realised that it would be difficult to make a Flash-generated timeline that scaled to a page as well as a DHTML-generated version. Not that a fixed-width timeline is unacceptable, but some recent experiments with AJAX and DIVS that produce timelines from the Newsbuilder feeds created reasonable results.

    07 Dec 2005, 22:34


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