I'm working on a timeline to show when events that have been discussed in class occurred in relation to each other. The main questions are probably what information to include and how it should be presented. My first instinct was to try to use a spreadsheet to display the information, with events categorized in columns, as such:

year	England/Britain	President	U.S.
1603	James I
1606			Formation of Massachusetts Bay Colony
1607			Formation of Virginia Colony
1609			Formation of New Netherland
1620			Formation of Plymouth Colony
1625	Charles I

etc. However, it was pointed out that this would probably be an inefficient way to display information. I've been looking at other ways in which information is presented. One possibility I considered for a while was an Ishikawa diagram:

I thought it might be possible to modify the design, so as to have one main line of events and various other timelines leading into the main line. Without a specific final event for the timeline in mind, though, it seemed difficult to say that there could be a "main" timeline; I was also starting to think that the various offshoots would make this version of the timeline as confusing as the spreadsheet would be.

I've also been looking at Minard's Carte Figurative, which tracks the location and declining size of Napoleon's army during his Russian campaign, as well as the falling temperatures.

This made me think that there could perhaps be a locational element to a timeline, perhaps as relates to western expansion. I'm not sure how to incorporate that yet, though.

At the moment, I'm thinking that a timeline that mimics a sideways bar graph might be a good option. The possible advantage of this is that it would a good format for showing events that take place over an extended period of time. I think, if this format is used, events would still need to be categorized in some way, so as to avoid creating too many rows and making the timeline too physically broad to be of much use; I'm not sure of another way to try to resolve this concern.

-- KeikoHayakawa - 06 Nov 2009

This is my timeline as it currently stands:

• timeline_4.pdf

I am working on pulling more events from my class notes (including events after 1800 which I'd like to include, of which there are many), but wanted to make sure that this particular format was working. I'm not sure I've thought the color scheme through sufficiently; for the most part, I tried to stay within the same color families for similar kinds of events (e.g. the formation of settlements, the ratification of legal documents), but I don't know if this is working to tie events together or if it is just confusing. I am also not sure about the vertical lines; I wanted to try to help particular events stand out that way, and also to help make clear what happened before and after those particular events. I also am pretty sure I need to change the size of the timeline, but am not sure how to do this. I can reduce the height of the document, but in terms of length I'm not sure that a timeline that effectively requires you to scroll through it is particularly useful.

Part of the idea for this particular setup comes from the attached table, which I found in Edward Tufte's Italic text_Envisioning Information_Italic text.

• Wagner_Operas.pdf

I thought the way in which the lines made a clear visual representation of how long certain things took was particularly effective in this chart. There are other tables from that book that were also helpful, which I'm hoping to upload later (I had a few resolution/size issues that I think can be resolved pretty easily).

-- KeikoHayakawa - 28 Nov 2009