Dear all,
To follow up on my comments yesterday, I have started playing with a simple
timeline modeled on the one David Huynh pointed out at
http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/projects/timeline-exhibit/timeline-exhibit.html.
My timeline is hastily thrown together, but successfully uses a Google
spreadsheet to create the events (some notable things from Hemingway's life,
for example).
There are a few things that I have not been able to do, however.
1. I have only been able to assign years to the events. I have tried formatting
dates in the various formats: MMM DD YYY; DD MMM YYYY; YYYY MMM DD; YYYY M DD;
YYYY-MMM-DD; YYYY-M-DD (three Ms represent letters for months, one M represents
a number for month). The items would not appear on the timeline when formatted
with anything except the year first. If the dates were linked by a hyphen, the
events did not appear. When the year was listed first and no hyphens were used,
then the dates appeared. However, it was plain that the month and date
information did not change the placement of the events (this was easier to see
when I changed the value of intervalUnit: Timeline.DateTime.Value to represent
days and months). Is it possible to use exact dates when exporting from Google
Spreadsheets?
2. I was unable to reduce the number of bands from three to two--despite my
attempts to replace the sections of the script with the examples found on the
Timeline tutorial (which produces a 2-band timeline). Where can I control this?
How could I add a fourth band?
3. I hoped that I would be able to change the colors of various events by
including a {type} field. This doesn't appear to have worked. Is there a way to
do this?
4. Can I display the filters on the top of the page, like other Exhibits? Can I
display more information in the pop-up bubble than simply that which comes in
the "description" field?
5. When including images within the descriptions, is there an easy way to
resize the images (apart from downloading the image, resizing it myself, and
saving it to my own directory)? In other words, can Exhibit resize on the fly?
6. What determines the height, level, or y-axis of individual events? In other
words, why do I have WWI, In Our Time, To Have and Have Not, and Nobel Prize in
Literature showing up on one line rather than using the full range of the
timeline? David's timeline with art seems to use more of the timeline, so can I
control this?
There's a start. I realize that the answer to some of these questions might be
to implement the project more fully within Exhibit rather than in this
half-Exhibit, half-Timeline solution (or at least, that's what I'm
understanding it to be). I also realize that I may be asking very simple or
very difficult questions.
I appreciate the help thus far and any continued input.
Thanks,
Brian
--------------------------------
Brian Croxall
English Department
Emory University
302-N Callaway
Atlanta, Georgia 30322
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
404.630.5271
General List <[email protected]> writes:
>Dear Jon, David Karger, David Huynh, et al.,
>
>Thank you very much for your comments. I'm excited to see that others are
>interested in using Timeline in the same way that I am. David Karger, I've
>looked some at Exhibit previous to your comment, but I've gone back now and am
>seeing how I could use it to implement the Timeline in a way that I want. I at
>first was resistant to using it as it just has more information and options
>than I am really interested in using in the class, but more options is not
>necessarily a bad thing.
>
>To answer some of David Huynh's questions to help us focus on specifics: I'm
>not using Timeline in my classes, but I anticipate using it in classes that
>range from 15-30 students. I have two different visions for using Timeline:
>
>
>1. Survey courses. The first is within I have toyed with the idea of having
>groups work on their own timelines, but what I think is more likely is that I
>will ask students to work on a common timeline throughout the semester. For
>example, I could assign one student in a survey course to map the output of a
>novelist we are reading. Another student would get another novelist. Another
>student would get political events for a particular region/nation for a
>decade. Another student gets the next decade. Still other students get to work
>on the histories of technology, visual arts, etc. So the students would be
>working on one timeline (perhaps with multiple bands?). They would perhaps be
>working at the same time, but they would not necessarily be editing one
>another's data. (Of course, I would like to have the students have the ability
>to edit one another's in case they get something wrong. Or perhaps this needs
>to be linked out to further discussion via MediaWiki. I think I need to do
>some searching around here to find out how I integrate this into my
>Timeline/Exhibit.)
>
>2. For individual texts. Many novels I teach--and almost all of the hypertext
>fiction--use very convoluted chronologies that can be difficult for students
>to follow. Think of something like Slaughterhouse-Five. Here I could see my
>assigning students to track individual chapters of the novel, but I think it
>is more likely that the class would collectively build a timeline. I would
>want the students to have the opportunity to edit one another's work or at
>least be able to link from the Timeline to a wiki/discussion board environment
>where we could have a conversation about what choices are being made in the
>timeline.
>
>I appreciate the example of the Timeline created within Google Documents,
>David. I will have to experiment with this to see if I can do it myself. I
>assume that, as with other Exhibits, I could make as many fields in the
>spreadsheet as I like for the data?
>
>Here's what I would like to know (at this point):
>
>1. How do I include wiki functionality within a Timeline/Exhibit?
>2. How could I use several Google spreadsheets with one Timeline?
>If these topics have been answered elsewhere, please feel free to nudge me in
>a direction and I will look for myself.
>
>I appreciate all the comments thus far.
>Brian
>--------------------------------
>Brian Croxall
>English Department
>Emory University
>302-N Callaway
>Atlanta, Georgia 30322
>[ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>404.630.5271
>
>General List <[ mailto:[email protected] [EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>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
>]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
>]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
>]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
>> [ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> [ mailto:[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 ]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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