“The planting dataset with the spiral is a good example ofa timeline that is functional and visually appealing”
More circular or spiral timelines do make sense for displaying data that is connected to events that repeat in cycles. I do wonder how effective at seeing change over time clear the shape would be though, as, with the spiral, so much information could potentially overlap and become difficult to follow.
Unfortunately, we soon found out that these colorfuldesigns would introduce additional variables into the experiment,such as a color palette, or the orientation of the text, that couldinfluence our results
There is so much to think about. Trying to isolate a specific trait in research seems to be a good way of finding out how many influences there are on the human experience of the simplest things.
This type of spiral visualization is widely used inschoolbooks to represent how long and complex thehistory of life on earth has been before humankind. Here,the spiral is used to convey the sense that the more we goback in time, the more our knowledge becomes sparse
here is a cool video which addresses how timeline shapes impact task completion time, correctness, and user preference. https://youtu.be/MeIM6gKS6fY?si=kSkyYFN6Hwe96mQH
Within this study, we did not find that dataset choice affects thereadability of the timeline. Therefore, we recommend designersto be flexible with their choice of timeline shape to maximizereadability or improve engagement. However, if the dataset iscomplex, even for mixed data,we recommend using a lineartimeline.
How does the complexity of a dataset influence the decision to use linear timelines over other shapes, and what specific characteristics of a dataset classify it as 'complex'? furthermore, could there be alternative strategies or visual aids that could make non-linear timelines more accessible for complex datasets? food for thought.
This gave us a notion of how theparticipants felt about certain shapes to an extent that they caredenough to express it in an optional feedback section. In this casetoo the majority of the comments were in favor of the horizontal andvertical lines.
It seems that some users found spiral timelines both functional and visually appealing, while others found them confusing and hard to use. This perhaps raises some questions about the user interface and design elements that can make non-linear timelines more user-friendly. With that being said, what specific features of the spiral design contribute to its perceived difficulty, and how could these be mitigated?
Here is a summary of our findings about timing. A “<” signmeans that the timing on the first shape is, overall, lessthan the second one, while a “=” sign means that there isno timing difference between the two shapes.Here is a chart of all of the p-values for the timing resultingfrom the experiment.
It seems that the paper suggests non-recurrent, recurrent, and mixed datasets might be best represented by line, circle, and spiral shapes. However, we should consider some of the cultural and cognitive differences in perceiving time and space where these shapes may not resonate well with other groups and cultures. With that being said, are there any alternative shapes that are equally or more effective in conveying temporal data? How might these shapes impact the user's ability to interpret and interact with the data?
In the Red Cross timeline, for example, the color-coded labels are the far view -- they tell you some bit of info even if you spend three seconds with the timeline. On the other hand, the embedded notes and links to the actual documents are the near view -- they tell you much more if you are invested and want to dig in.
I like this a lot. Being able to layer information allows you to provide details without overwhelming the viewer. Layering information can also help people to navigate and find the information they need by narrowing the search down, instead of having to sift through a large, unwieldy written document.
But to represent the idea of governments introducing more regulation and proceeding with caution, we went with a gradient from green to yellow. Along the way I learned about two color-related tools: ColorBrewer, which generates easy-to-distinguish colors for maps (or timelines for that matter), and Color Oracle, which changes your screen to mimic how a color-blind person would view it. The timeline itself is a simple HTML table, with a little gradient image on top I made in Photoshop. Apparently you can do the same thing in CSS, but it's not supported in all versions of IE. Shucks.
I appreciate all of the tool options. I am curious to find out what I might be able to use in my own project. I love that there are tools that help to design for accessibility.
Another aspect of how these timelines work involves the "near" and the "far." We think of our visualizations and news apps as having a near view and having a far view. In my head I think of these as the "at-a-glance" and the "up-close-and-personal" view, but in any case, the former gives you the overall picture, and the latter gives you the details.
The concept of designing timelines with both an "at-a-glance" and a "detailed" seems to be important for user engagement. How can digital humanities developers balance these two aspects to cater to both casual browsers and serious researchers?
I learned how to set up the CSV file and make the timeline from these instructions, which were surprisingly simple. I also learned about DocumentCloud's "Embed a Note" feature, which let us stick an image of a portion of the document right into its TimelineSetter entry.
The integration of DocumentCloud with TimelineSetter is reminiscent of digital humanities tools like Omeka which was used extensively at the start of the semester. It seems to be an effective tool in addressing content management system specifically designed for digital collections and exhibitions.
the facts of chronology had significant implications outside of theacademic study of history.
Understanding Chronology is complex. I think Chronology has been used for many purposes, including dating important periods of history. This, in turn, all creates who and what we are today. By going through chronology, we understand the important dates in time dating back to many many centuries.
Historians will probablyappreciate this aspect of the book fairly easily. We all use simple line diagramsin our classrooms—what we usually call “timelines”—to great effec
I giggled reading this statement as this was probably one of the first diagrams I learned in early years. the "timeline". Timelines are a great visual and graphic representation because you can simplify them or change them to however you like.
graphic representation is among our mostimportant tools for organizing information.¹ Yet, little has been written abouthistorical charts and diagrams.
I would definitely say it's one of the most important tools for organizing information, today. I think there has been a ton of advancement in technology to get to this point so why has little been written about historical charts and diagrams? I wonder what tools can be used to create historical documents relating back to the development of graphic reprentation.
such as a color palette
Glad to see this brought up- instead of using the spiral vs circle vs straight ended up using the colours to see if events repeated or not, and when.
Here is an example of how a spiral timeline, with a mixeddataset (a schedule)
I guess I should’ve scrolled a bit further to see this new and improved spiral graph! Without the odours it forces me to look at the dots, and where the wake-up time is everyday vs other times in the day. I wish this example was shown earlier!
One could intuitively guess that the best timeline for a non-recurrentdataset could be a line, for a recurrent one could be a circle, while,perhaps, a spiral could do a good job representing a mixed dataset.
No matter how much I try ad wrap my head around this- I can’t seem to grasp why a spiral would be preferred over a line, especially since it seems the dots must be colour coded regardless, and to me the colours of the dots in these examples is what I’ve used to interpret the timelines in the examples. Can’t find anything else about it online either!
a circle,
How do you use a circle to represent a chronological timeline? Unless the events are repeating multiple times in the same order.
Avoid spiral timelines when the task requires fast lookup.
This makes sense since, when I picture using spiral timelines, they are more complicated to read. The linear and circular timelines are much more straightforward. It would be interesting to extend on this experiment where they presented all three timelines with the same things on each one (instead of different things on each timeline) and asked them to find a certain year or event. You see which timeline is the easiest to work with but noting the actual time difference it takes to use between each of them would be useful to know. This would be cool to know since we are aware that some are more difficult to interpret and work with but we do not know how much more difficult it is relative to the exact time it takes to use each timeline.
Some timelines work better than others in specific cases, while in some other cases, the choice of shape doesn’t make any difference.
I did not expect these to be the results of the experiment. I really did think that there would be a clear, specific shape that was more impactful for recurrent vs. non-recurrent vs. mixed datasets.
When we create a timeline, we can use many different shapes to convey different meanings, or just to apply our creativity: it can be just a line, or it can be a circle, a spiral, or any other shape. How does the shape of a timeline affect how well people can read it? In recent research, we investigate how different timeline shapes, intended to convey the shape of the underlying data, affect how easily a user can interpret a timeline.
This clearly seen in the figures of the Cartographies of Time (https://engl201.opened.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/57/2022/10/cartographies-of-time-chapter1.pdf) It is more closely seen in the Figure done by Charles Joseph for Napoleon's March for Russia. Basically showing that the path they had taken was not completely straight and was also able to show that Nightingale had more deaths related to infection and disease than The British in battle.
Unique shapes can also be seen in http://histography.io/
At this point we had a series of documents, organized by time, and a clear indication of the total fine on each event entry. But there was still no way for a reader to see the penalty amounts at a glance without clicking on each "card" in the timeline. So we color-coded the entries based on fine amount: green for fines less than a million dollars, and yellow for more than a million. TimelineSetter makes that easy -- we just needed to put two labels into the "series" column in the CSV file.
Digital humanities give us many new, creative ways to relay information; in this example, they use colour to indicate severity of the fine, letting readers gain a better understanding of the timeline with a quick glance.
which in retrospect seemed obvious (it was the whole narrative of the story).
Sometimes coming up with ways to present your data and get your point across in the right way to the audience is very difficult. It may seem obvious once you have come up with the idea, but actually getting there is a lot more difficult than it sounds. The way that they decided to present their events by government attitude is a really good idea and gets their point across very well. It is a good example of the thought process to coming up with a good timeline. The first idea you come up with may not be your best, but the trick is to keep trying to come up with ideas until you find one that clicks and you know it is the best way to represent your ideas.
We wanted to present the history of these fines, emphasizing how often -- and how much -- the Red Cross has had to pay for unsafe blood handling. We also wanted a way to make the documents themselves public, so anyone could dive into the details.
This is another example of a meaningful timeline. It would not be "mere sequences" as discussed in ch 1. of Cartographies of Time, but used as a method to help emphasize a point. Timelines should not be the main objective, they are a tool to help you show or emphasize your main objective.
Embedding the document images into TimelineSetter was easy, but getting them to fit into their allotted space underneath the horizontal bar was much trickier. The document notes were about 700px wide, and ProPublica's pages are 960px wide, so there wasn't enough room for TimelineSetter to place each card. We ended up setting the width on each note to 440px, which shrunk the image but left the words legible. The LA Times addressed the same problem by having each event automatically scroll to fit.
This is very interesting as they chose to shrink the image to a point where it was just barely legible instead of embedding a link or html of the image as then it would have kept its originally dimension and had the option to blow the image up too. Their solution was still very good as they still made sure it was legible and not a useless image being added to their TImelineSetter as then there would have been no point to providing it if no one could understand it.
This does make sense as most timelines tend to be horizontal and fitting in horizontally to a website is usually less easy than vertically as pages tend to extend down easier (ie: mouse scroll wheel goes up down and not side to side).
I finally ended up putting each date and subhead into its own div, and giving it a padding-left of 330px
It's funny how often, when peaking behind the curtains of a project or research, the experts in their field may not be experts in presenting their field and can end up doing these sort of hack jobs to get the result that they want. Not a bad thing, if anything I think it's a little funny to see these sort of programs being altered by someone who can't (or doesn't want to) go in and change the program at it's coding level. It's certainly inspiring to someone like me who lacks technological/ coding skills and knowledge.
which changes your screen to mimic how a color-blind person would view it
This is a really cool (and important) tool. The topic of how to make presentations accessible had come up in a lecture I attended before and while they brought up that certain colour schemes can be hard to read for colour-blind people they kind of just brought it up without offering a concrete solution like this.
The timeline offered a new way of visualizing history. And it fundamentallychanged the way that history was spoken of as well.
This is a great example of how meaning can be added to timelines. Good timelines should aim to provide perspectives and different ways of visualizing things. It is not enough to just list dates and events. It is most impactful when timelines incorporate a middle ground between fact and interpretation to allow the audience to take away something they had not considered in the past.
The events must be...revealed aspossessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as meresequence.”⁴
This is something that I had not really considered. Whenever I was making a timeline, I usually just listed out things that happened in the order they happened, however, I see how much more substantial timelines can be if they have meaning. Instead of just listing facts, express a story of events. I was looking at examples of how to make meaningful timelines but most of the search had results like the one I linked. This one specifically says, "it's as simple as showing a sequence of events," which leads me to believe that a large proportion of the population is missing the part that makes timelines meaningful.
This is no small matter: graphic representation is among our mostimportant tools for organizing information.¹ Yet, little has been written abouthistorical charts and diagrams.
This is very surprising as I would have thought that most of the information available today would have already been created into chart sand diagrams. Either with the use of AI or hard manual, brute force work by multiple people/organizations.
It may be more surprising to me as when I grew up I would be shown multiple graphs, diagrams and charts about the topics I would be taught in school. From World wars to everyday issues such as crime rates and so on.
Understanding these charts and diagrams has almost become a second nature and being able to interpret what is being said through said images really save time from having to read the whole document at times!
The Long Now Foundation, comparative time scales of the concept of the longnow, 1999In Cartographies of Time, we offer a short account of how modern forms ofchronological representation emerged and how they embedded themselves in themodern imagination. In doing so, we hope to shed some light on Western viewsof history, to clarify the complex relationship between ideas and modes ofrepresentation, and to offer an introductory grammar of the graphics of historicalrepresentation.
This is a lot like the Temporal data visualization method that is now used with computers and software. As seen in this link: https://youtu.be/v6LeL9anrzg?t=845 Where timeframe comes into play of how data looks and is preceived by us. Although time is something that was made by us humans the imagination it takes to really understand the depths of Spatial and Temporal means are endless. Time can even be perceived differently by person, as a 5 years may seem small to someone who is in their 80's than a child around 15. Especially for me personally as aging my first 18 years felt like an eternity but the last 3 have flown by without a trace. This is why I definitely now believe that time frame is a crucial point to be considered when logging data and trying to interpret the said data.
709. Hard winter. Duke Gottfried died.710. Hard year and deficient in crops.711.712. Flood everywhere.713.714. Pippin, mayor of the palace die
Across these 25 years there are 1300 weeks. 9125 days. Approximately 219,125 minutes. We all know much history happened in this period of time, yet all that exists in this historical account is 60 words. Digital humanities has not only expanded our access to history, but also its scope, covering every small detail, compared to a paragraph's worth of words to describe a 25 year span. I really do appreciate the humourous contrast between year 710 and 712 however.
comparative time scales of the concept of the longnow
Interesting to see these time scales laid out in these seemingly concrete ways. In between the now and nowadays timelines I think a lot of people have their own personal way of time. ex. "little while ago" for some might mean 3-4 weeks, for others, 6 months and maybe up to a year or two ago.
The fact is that spatial form is the perceptual basis of our notion oftime, that we literally cannot ‘tell time’ without the mediation of space
Ah yes, space-time. It is considered that one is useless without the other. If my friend were to make a meeting time but not give me a place (space) to meet how could i meet them and vice versa, with only a place and no time there is still no concrete way of meeting other than by luck. It's interesting to me that this question then comes up when this article is discussing the presentation of timelines