Methods

Timelines in Digital Humanities Projects

Timelines as a Tool for Historical Analysis and Presentation

No historical analysis is complete without periodization. Periodization is how you ground your historical narrative in time. Every history course you’ve taken has a periodization. Examples include World History 1500-present, US History since 1877 etc. These rely on broad periodization to frame the content. In your project, you will decide on the periodization. What key events mark the beginning of your analysis? What moments or events mark the end?

Completing a timeline of significant events in your case study not only helps you ground the audience in time, it is a tool to help yourself frame the periodization as you conduct your analysis. Adding important local, regional, national, and transnational markers help you contextualize the events in your case study for the audience as well. In some cases you may even use these tools to reveal previously neglected relationships between events and their timing.

In your lab, we will use TimelineJS to create a timeline of events. You may use events from your case study or, alternatively, you can use events from the Arab Spring to practice creating a timeline.

Learning Outcomes

Each student will learn:

  • to create a timeline from a .csv file using digital tools, in this case TimelineJS
  • to organize data in a .csv file for use with the tool
  • to recognize and construct useful periodization for historical narratives
  • how timelines reflect and foster the contextualization step of historical thinking

Building a Timeline

We will build our timeline in TimelineJS (https://timeline.knightlab.com/)

  1. Go to https://timeline.knightlab.com/
  2. Click on “Make a Timeline.” Follow the Knightlab instructions to download the spreadsheet template
  3. Create your timeline using events and sources from your project.
  4. When you reach step 4 in the timeline instructions go to Pressbooks.
  5. Log in to Pressbooks and create a chapter in your exhibit. Call it something appropriate with timeline in the title. Click “Create”
  6.  Once you are in the chapter click on the “text” tab
  7. Copy the html from the “embed” section.
  8. Paste it into chapter while you are in the text tab.
  9. Click save.
  10. Switch to the “Visual” tab.
  11. Preview your chapter to make sure the timeline renders correctly
  12. Great work! Submit the URL to your instructor.

 

License

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Politics of Protest and Gender by Shelley Rose, Ph.D. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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