@Eric: If I understand your questions about the backend, it was actually a very simple process. The data is all managed in a Google Docs spreadsheet. The students got very specific instructions for entering in the data that they had found, and it more or less ran itself. While some didn’t always get the data in the right way at first, it was very easy to find the errors and teach them how to correct their mistakes.

The advantage for this approach is that GooDocs makes it very easy to add as many users as you want to a particular spreadsheet, leading to collaboration that isn’t possible in any of the other tools that I have looked at thus far. New updates to GooDocs mean that you can also open up a spreadsheet to anyone with the URL (they don’t even have to log in), so you could use a very open approach to crowdsourcing the material.

Of course, giving students access to the spreadsheet means that they can break portions of the data–or worse, the header that makes everything run. But I’ve found that it’s not too difficult to find the problems. And I think it is very valuable to give students experience in working with a database–albeit a very simple one. If Manovich et al. are right about the importance of the database as a form for new media, then it behooves us to give our students in the humanities a chance to work with the form.

Another approach to populating the data, however, is to use a Form to populate your GooDocs spreadsheet with data. This puts a wall between the students and the actual data structure, which might lead to less breakages. You can see an example of such a timeline (proof of concept only) at bit.ly/15tfbO. The form is at bit.ly/YDaBa. And I have blogged about it at bit.ly/5mGNw.

@Frédéric: I’m glad that my tutorial was useful. And I think that you’re right about the usefulness of timelines (or visualization) in general for scholars is that it helps us present our material to a wider audience. In order to read my dissertation, for example, you need a fair amount of fairly specialized knowledge. The language that I’ve used is therefore a barrier to disseminating information. If we make things more visual using timelines or maps, suddenly the information can be apprehended in an easier way. People, in other words, tend to know how to read a map or a timeline. Of course, not all arguments can be reduced to such visuals, but trying to incorporate them and to think about *presentation* as part of our scholarship (form + content) is a way to help people see the continued relevance of humanities scholarship.

@Amanda and (@Jeffrey): You’re right about the difficulty of the tools. It’s important that we DHers who want to help other “traditional” faculty get involved need to make sure that the tools are easy to use and that there is good documentation. But part of diminishing returns is also thinking about at which point it is no longer all that interesting to see yet another timeline assignment. Or another Prezi. When does the tool lose its “gee whiz?!” factor, and is this normalization of the tool/approach helpful for research and teaching or is it detrimental?

thanks to your tutorial, I could make this: www.clavert.net/public/uem-timeline.html quite easily (in French)

There’s a use of timeline/visualization which is interesting: historians can use them to adress other citizens and visually explain what he/she’s doing and why. We could discuss that too.

Frédéric

I’d love to see an interface where the crowd can easily and directly populate (and subsequently edit) the fields that lead to the XML that gets used in a timeline like the one from Simile.

I’ve done some noodling with Simile and, like Jeff’s students, have found it to be pretty easy to use. But I look forward to seeing what else is out there for other similar projects we’re contemplating.

I’ve had a number of students use Simile to create timelines for various projects and found it to be fairly flexible. Some students were more willing to play around with it to figure out what they could do with it. [See, for example, www.projects.umwhistory.org/alumni/timeline.html ]

I really like the idea of these as “gateway” tools. These might appeal to a faculty member in history who doesn’t see the value in Twitter, blogs, or other new media tools.

Sounds like a good session.