By what means do you usually present information and facts? Through PowerPoint maybe? Too mainstream…
Have you ever heard of Timeline JS? It makes the perfect substitute. It’s a Google spreadsheet that presents events in chronological events and presents information in a way that makes it visually rich through an interactive timeline. Created by the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, the tool can be used in many disciplines and is particularly useful for digital humanities projects.
To have an idea here’s a picture that shows the spreadsheet you need to work on to create Timeline JS:
Template: Scheetshot of TimelineJS Google Spreadsheet (default view)
It might look complicated, but believe us it’s not at all. Timeline JS is very user-friendly. The templates are ready; therefore, all that you have to do is insert the texts in one column as shown in the table above, and it will appear on the timeline in a structured and organized design, easy for the reader to swipe through from slide to slide across the timeline.
One thing that makes Timeline JS really unique is its chronological narration. Dates are inserted in columns specifying the date, the month, and the time then presented digitally in a very sophisticated way. Also, it allows you to include different types of media to convey your message like Pictures, SoundCloud, Twitter, Youtube, Gifs, Google Map, and many more just by inserting their link on the spreadsheet. Other unique features include changing the background of the slide using some codes and adding as many slides as you need. Among its qualities are the sole requirement of a Google account to use it and its easily shareable and embeddable format.
Things to keep in mind: Only two fields in the spreadsheet are ultimately required: Start Date and Headline. In addition, it is very useful to use the Media and Text Fields. Be sure to use the Media Credit field if you’re not using your own material. The Media Thumbnail field is less useful. It is very important not to delete or amend the first row of the spreadsheet. The fields must stay in the same order for TimelineJS to process the data.
via Digital Humanities at Washington and Lee University
Despite its advantages, TimelineJS has some disadvantages. The tool is only accessible with connectivity to the internet – which presented a bit of challenge, especially when living in our area of the world. Also, some may argue that the page format is very static and fixed. One of the more confusing aspects of TimelineJS is understanding how the seven fields in the provided spreadsheet map to what is displayed on the timeline. It displays the images and the texts in a designated area that cannot be changed, so it’s a problem as we couldn’t customize the area or the size of our media inserted. Finally, the last disadvantage of TimelineJS is that it may require some trial and error. As beginners, we had to try all the different settings and incorporations of multimedia (such as soundcloud, gifs, images, maps,…) to become familiar with the template and layout of this tool. It might seem challenging, but talking from experience, once you get the gist of it, it becomes very structured and easy to navigate.
At the beginning of our Digital Humanities course, as a team, we believed we would be delivering our final project on conventional tools such as PowerPoint. However, when TimelineJS was introduced to us, we were fascinated by the “newness” of it. No other course we had taken allowed us to use and test such a tool. We thought it would serve our vision to clearly present our analysis within different timetables. Also, the fact that we are able to incorporate different media in our timeline guided us into achieving our goals of making our presentation tell its own story by quickly and easily interacting with readers.
While we were still learning about this tool, the offered media we applied served a whole lot in grabbing our attention and keeping us interested in reading more about the topics presented. The most important thing that distinguishes TimelineJS from Powerpoint in our opinion, and from the experience we gained from both, is that the content in TimelineJS is viewed without any interruptions – to open a certain link or access a hyperlink – that are more likely to occur on Powerpoint. Links are there as an added source in case the reader would like to read or do extra research on the side.
Our team’s main focus was to chronologically showcase the evolution of the villains’ appearance and behavior throughout time. So we will be using it to storytell the information we gather about our books/texts in a visually rich, entertaining and engaging manner. Our project on “Heroes vs Monsters: Finding a hero in every villain” contains images, videos, GIFs, maps from Google My Maps and soundcloud clips based on books/texts we are analysing.
Screenshot of our TimelineJS Spreadsheet file
TimelineJS aims to present a story about events in current or recent history. Of course, the purpose of any timeline is to visually convey information; TimelineJS does that through merging the timeline feature with the options of media, audio, video, and attractively formatted text. This tool helped us expand the scope of our tasks through those unique attributes. For instance, we will be using Google My Maps to highlight major points like the proximities between the events in Batman (comic written in the 1950s-1960s) and those in The Joker (published in 2019) where the same characters are portrayed in different ways to deliver differing messages. Our readers will be able to see the map we will create through the media field. Also, in the theme we chose for our project feelings and emotions play a big role in delivering information. For instance, when a character is associated with ultimate strength and/or revenge, the colors we would be able to incorporate in the background of our slide will help in delivering our message in a more interactively visual way.
Screenshot of our TimelineJS
In conclusion, TimelineJS helps us convey our ideas clearer by displaying information and events in a visually rich and interactive way that grabs the audience’s attention. Using this tool will definitely enhance our topic’s presentation and make it much more interesting.
One tip we would like to give you is: before diving into the spreadsheet you may want to prepare a storyboard for your timeline. While you can do this on the spreadsheet, doing so earlier on paper can help organize your thoughts and the story you’re telling through the data without the distraction of the spreadsheet and the software. Then, when you have all your data organized, you can see how it fits together through the TimelineJS Spreadsheet more easily.
We are sure that by now you became interested in using it to create your own timeline. Click here http://timeline.knightlab.com/#make to create yours now.
This blog was written by Alexia Al Alam, Ghida Allam, and Joseph Abboud.
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