Timelines

Only a few, easy-to-use plugins exist for showing timelines. One fine plugin that permits both vertical horizontal orientation of a timeline can be found here. It can be customized in terms of its look and feel, but it’s not especially interactive.

I prefer the option seen below, which was developed and nurtured at Northwestern University’s Knight Lab . One (in my opinion, small) trade-off we encounter with this solution is that the way one interacts with it (zooming, scrolling, clicking on items, etc.) may not be especially intuitive to all users. Thus, if deployed, we would need include a sentence or two nearby the interface itself about the timeline widget’s features and how to perform various functions within it. One of the great things about this timeline wizard is that its contents are driven by a Google-hosted spreadsheet document, so it’s quite simple to modify its contents.

One last thing: under certain circumstances, it might seem at first as if the timeline widget wastes a fair amount vertical space, but that’s only happens if a modestly sized entry is the first one seen. In this example, check out the “Willmore City” entry (1882) to see why the timeline widget reserves the amount of vertical space it does. With this timeline, we can set the which entry is the default one; thus, I have set  our namesake entry (1909) to load up the first time a visitor sees the page.

Note that we can set the height of the timeline; nothing requires its depth to be 650 pixels, as is the case of this example setting. Realize that in the actual East 7th Street History Project website we’ll be using a much wider column as seen here, at least on normally sized browser windows that are running on normally sized laptop or desktop computers. Thus, more timeline items will display within the timeline widget itself than appear in this example use of the widget. See other examples here. Also know that the fonts used in the detail panel that is positioned atop  the timeline portion of the widget can be customized.