Building a Biographical Timeline

Contents: Summary | Tools | Expected Lifespan | Source Repositories | Steps | Publishing

Summary

This example focuses on developing a timeline looking at biographical development within their historical context.

Here, our goal is to compose a tight timeline using Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s life to sweep through the radical geo-political changes in 19th-century, coastal California’s history. Vallejo, born in 18– and dying in 1890, lived through those major changes. Positioned among political elites from childhood, he served under the different state governments. Even at the end of his life, his socio-economic decline reflected changes in ethno-national access to wealth and power.

Tools

For this project, I used the following, specific tools (i.e., machines and programs). Each are listed generally, noting what type of machine or program, before naming the specifics used in this sample.

Hardware

Software

Expected Lifespan

Two to five years.

This project involves two types of interactive components. The first is the javascript behind KnightLab Timeline JS, which can fail as programming updates. The second are the links bringing in the images. Digital archives and other repositories update their links and change their websites, often leading to failed retrieval.

Source Repositories

For this project, I used a series of online historical collections focused on the United States, Mexico, and California to find visual elements.

Steps

This section provides a narrative description of the steps taken to complete the process. Each step includes a general statement of the goal and then provides a short description of how the project lead implemented the step.

The first important step is to determine the goal and the scope. For many projects, there is too much information otherwise.

Preparation Work

For this collaborative project, we wanted to create a timeline looking at Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s life, connecting it to broader, political strokes of California history. Vallejo lived between 1807 and 1890, a span which included four state governments over California and significantly shifting borders.

For that purpose, we decided to aim for 10-20 slides across those different periods of CA, 19-century political history:

For each major section, we wanted one to three slides drawing on maps, personal photos, or relevant ephemera with text telling the reader the main takeaway.

Source Acquisition

Once the planning is established (with the assumption that things might change), we set out to find and select sources. We assumed we needed:

For the imagery and the maps, we looked at a series of enormous repositories of material that cover the United States (DPLA and LOC), which also offer a significant amount of Open Access (OA) material. After doing the exploration through the larger database, we checked through some of the location specific databases, looking at location specific collections.

Once we chose our sources, we needed to decide whether we wanted to host them in our own repository or call on them from another site. Hosting means we need to have a space to host and requires more effort on our part. Because this team has a Github repository, we choose to use that. Hosting ourselves means our project will load faster and we rely on our own efforts to keep images active.

Relying on groups like the Library of Congress to host is less work for us as we don’t have to download, save, name, and host the files. But! That would mean our project required other websites to remain precisely as they were when we built our timeline. Different groups rename and move files constantly, meaning we would expect our timeline to start to break within a year or two.

In short, hosting the material behind your timeline is more stable, but also requires more work.

Compilation

Once we had a range of materials to choose between, we used Google Docs to compile our narrative.

Our writing needed to reflect our main point: Vallejo’s life and career reflect the geo-political changes within the territory that becomes the U.S. state of California.

With that aim in mind for each slide, we also need to remember that writing for an online audience should focus on clarity.

Once the writing is complete, the different components need to be assembled in a copy of Knightlab JS’s timeline template.

Within the template and background javascript, you can make significant alterations to the design. We like to keep things simple with white backgrounds and clear, black text. But, you can change it.

What we do like to do for this style of timeline is include a set of “eras” in order to compare specific moments in Mariano Vallejo’s life against Californian geopolitics.

Toward that end, we started with putting in a series of “eras” based on the timeline above with beginning and end dates, titles, and flagging “eras.”

Once those were finished, we turned toward our content slides. These needed:

When you’re ready, follow KnightLab’s guidance on publishing your dataset in Google.

Publishing

Once the material is compiled, go back to KnightLab JS’s Timeline page to run your data set through their script.

screenshot

Here, you can alter some of the project’s appearance.

You can also preview the project and check your slides to make sure they appear as you intended.

Once we were ready, we copied our embed code with its iframe script into our website.

Knightlab JS Timelines can be shared directly, but will not be discoverable through Google or other browsers unless they’re hosted somewhere else.

Because of the moving parts involved in self-hosting images, website maintenance, we estimate the longevity of this project to be two-to-five years.

We hope you enjoy!