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:
- plot lots of historical events visually on a line;
- allow different types of event to be categorised, for example, publishing events, political events;
- allow for some interactivity, with the user being able to show or hide categories of events;
- allow events to be linked to other web pages containing more detail;
- allow icons on events;
- 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
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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