David Karger, David Huynh, Brian Croxall, et alii,
This is something I'd like too. I've been trying this as an experiment on
my history classes to help my students visualize the chronological context
of the events they're reading about. I first provided templates for a
timeline html file and source xml file and asked them to create and
maintain their own timeline. The variety of technical difficulties that
ensued (platforms, editors, varying technical savvy), has made this
unproductive. So we've resorted to the unhappy expedient of using a {code}
block in a wiki page for collaborative editing of a common source.xml file
which I then periodically upload (via cut and paste) to a class web
directory. Part of the point of the exercise has been to get them
comfortable with a simple xml scheme since such file formats have become
ubiquitous even in the humanities.
This works, but is not altogether satisfactory. A collaborative tool that
is reflected dynamically in the timeline would be ideal. I'm excited by
progress on wibbit and timeline's integration with mediaWiki through the
wiki-url and wiki-section source-file attributes; however, my institution
uses the Sakai CLE, and the wiki component in Sakai won't support wibbit
any time soon. I suspect that the Sakai wiki could be hacked to allow it
to provide a source file directly to the timeline via a url, but that's
quite beyond my programming skills for the moment.
The reason I've invested some effort into making this work is that I'm
trying to convey to my students what "interactive" might *really* mean to
students of history. Timelines, as a way of visualizing data, are actually
of limited use -- just as visual representations of RDF graphs beyond a
certain very small size aren't very helpful. Something like the BBC's
flash timeline
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/timelines/british/index.shtml>,
for example, looks really nitzy, eye candy and all, and it claims to be
interactive, which it is, in the sense that you can move the timeline
around and get stuff to pop up etc. But in an important sense it's static:
you can't interact with the DATA. The advantage of Simile's timeline is
that the relatively simple and open access data format encourages the user
to mess about with the data itself - try different sets of events, edit
and expand the text content, create or abandon links to other information.
(you can tell I'm a fan).
What's lacking, for my immediate purposes, is what Brian is looking for
too:
>> a tool that would allow multiple users to edit the data set and that
>> would dynamically update the timeline
A wiki would seem ideal, or google-like editing of a plain xml file. The
pedagogical advantages seem clear.
Just thinking out loud here, but if anyone has some practical suggestions,
more than a few would be grateful I think.
Jon Crump
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Thu, 18 Oct 2007, David Karger wrote:
> Brian, if you are a cut and paste coder, I think you might be a lot
> happier using the "exhibit" system which wraps timeline. It lets you
> specify the timeline you want using plain html, and lets you specify the
> data in a more-human readable "json" format. check out
> http://simile.mit.edu/exhibit
>
> Brian L. Croxall wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been fooling around with Timeline for the last week, trying to
>> understand how the various functions work. This isn't easy for a cut
>> and paste coder teaching in an English department. I would like to use
>> Timeline in classes for students to collaboratively represent
>> historical events in a time period or to chart the events of a single
>> novel.
>>
>> As such, I am trying to figure out how to get the XML from a tool that
>> would allow multiple users to edit the data set and that would
>> dynamically update the timeline (i.e., Sally logs in to Google
>> Spreadsheets, adds a date and description to the proper fields, and
>> the timeline updates itself automatically from the published
>> spreadsheet). Is it possible to do something like this with Google
>> Documents or something like ZOHO?
>>
>> I've been working some with Exhibit, following David Huynh's
>> instructions for Google Spreadsheets, and trying to adapt them for
>> Timeline. I haven't yet been successful, however.
>>
>> Any advice will be very welcome. Thank you,
>> Brian Croxall
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