Jon, Brian, et al.,
Thank you for your messages. I'd like to understand your usage scenarios
a little bit better. How many students are in your classes, and are they
supposed to work on a common timeline at the same time or at different
times, or on different timelines? I ask these questions because I think
Google Docs and wikis support different styles/degrees of collaboration:
Google Docs supports few users working simultaneously while wikis
support many users working at different times.
I've created an exhibit with a timeline
http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/projects/timeline-exhibit/timeline-exhibit.html
that takes its data from a Google spreadsheet
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pLvsUS-CftHoFiglckykELw
The exhibit does use a bit of Javascript to create a custom timeline.
This is only necessary if you do want a custom timeline (e.g., with
decorators) rather than the usual 2-band timeline. I presume that as
instructors you can create the HTML files yourself and then allow your
students to edit the Google spreadsheets.
Note that by using Exhibit rather than just Timeline, you get a lot of
advanced features, including text search.
There is also the possibility of feeding a single exhibit several Google
spreadsheets. The students can be divided into different groups, each
taking care of a different aspect of the project. Their data comes
together automatically whenever each group publishes its spreadsheet.
You can also provide a wiki page URL for each item in the exhibit where
further discussion on that item can be carried out.
Please let me know how far this gets you. Of course, it's only a
temporary solution--I understand that you don't want any coding at all.
David
Jon Crump wrote:
> 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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