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This guide helps you create a collaborative, student-crowdsourced timeline in Mandala Visuals. Image RemovedImage AddedJohn Alexander used this timeline for his course "Documenting UVa's Futures." This course, inspired by the ouster and reinstatement of UVa President Teresa Sullivan, documented the event using oral histories. Since many students were not in Charlottesville for the ouster, John Alexander helped them make a collaborative timeline of the proceedings in class, which included links to primary sources. This helped them understand the flow of information surrounding the ouster. Afterward, he shared the timeline with his students, so that they could reference it throughout the semester. To make a crowdsourced timeline: - Create a Google Spreadsheet
Enter your data - Format your spreadsheet
- Create a collection
- Create a new visualization
Invite student contributions in class - Add the visualization to UVaCollab
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Here, we're making a simple spreadsheet.
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| Enter all labels you need on the top row of the spreadsheet. These are: - title
- description
- startdate
- link
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The Timeline reference guide has specific data types for each column. Luckily, our example is easy: every column should be in the "plain text" data type.
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| To set the data type, select your column. Click Format from the menu, then Number. Choose Plain Text. Do this for each column. |
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Go to Visuals at https://visuals.shanti.virginia.edu.
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| Click on the Main Menu icon ( ) in the top right corner. Then, Log in via Netbadge. |
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Enter your Netbadge credentials to finish logging in. Now we'll make your visualization. To start, you need to create a collection to house it in.
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| Click > Collections > Add New Collection. |
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| Enter a title. You can also add a description if you like. |
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| Set "Group Visibility" to Public - Accessible To All Site Users. This will let you add the visualization in the collection as a UVaCollab resource later. Then, Save the collection. |
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With your collection open:
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| From your collection's page, click Add Shivanode. |
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You'll see the visualization editor and a preview of your timeline. Now we need to add your spreadsheet to the editor.
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| Find the "Source of events" field and click on the triangle Google Drive icon next to it. |
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Since your students fill in the events, you won't see any information on the timeline. You might also notice that the range of times in the window doesn't suit your needs. You want the timeline to show all your student's events at first view.
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| First, set "Center date of timeline." In our case, we checked UVA Magazine's timeline of the ouster and realized that events happened in a window between June 8, 2012 and June 29, 2012. Therefore, we centered the timeline on June 18, 2012. Since according to the visualization index you use a DD/MM/Year format for "Center date of timeline," we entered 18/06/2012. |
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We can adjust this scope using "Initial zoom of timeline." Since the value of this field is tricky to determine, we'll create two reference events for the "beginning" and "end" points of our timeline, then adjust the value of "Initial zoom."
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First, go back to the spreadsheet. We're going to create two events – one with a start date of June 8, 2012 and one with a start date of June 29, 2012. We'll call the first event "start" and the second event "end." Don't worry about names too much – these are temporary reference points, and we'll delete them at the end. |
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Now go back to the visualizations editor. Adjust the "Initial zoom of timeline" by small increments, increasing the value to zoom out, decreasing the value to zoom in, until you can see the "start" and "end" events at the opposite ends of the timeline.
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| Here are the values we ended up with. Notice we also had to adjust "Center date of timeline" by a few days. |
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Notice the text "start" and "end" are a bit large. Remember, you're going to have to have students recording many events on this timeline. To set the size of the font, we're going to make a column called "importance."
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Enter "importance" in the first row of column E, then give all rows in the column a value of 20. |
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| Now "hide" the column to prevent your students from worrying about this value. Visuals can still read data in hidden columns. To hide column E, select the entire column, then right click on it and choose Hide from the menu. |
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| This is the hidden column. To unhide this data, click on the two arrows (< >) between columns D and F. |
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| When you go back to your visualization, you'll see "start" and "end" are now smaller. |
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The timeline still isn't very informative, however – how will viewers understand the significance of events? Let's make the visualization show a description of the event, which your students enter in column B of your spreadsheet.
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To do this, change Show the description from false to true. Now when a viewer clicks on an event, a description will pop up. In the example, we've also entered the "Title of timeline." |
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Share the timeline spreadsheet with your students. To do this, you should use the URL of the spreadsheet at Share > Copy Link in Google Sheets. If you've followed the spreadsheet setup process correctly, all your students need is the URL of the document to edit it.
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| In class, you can ask each of your students to add their event in a new row of the spreadsheet, like so. |
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Open your class site in UVaCollab.
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| Go to Resources in the sidebar. |
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| Find the folder where you want to add the timeline. Next to the folder's name, click Actions, then Create HTML Page. An editing tool will open. |
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Now you need to fetch your timeline from Visuals. To do this, open the visualization, then click the Share icon ().
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| From the window that opens, click iFrame. This tab contains HTML code that will let you embed your timeline directly into the new UVaCollab HTML page. Copy the code and return to UVaCollab. |
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To insert the code into the page, you need to switch the UVaCollab editor mode to edit HTML.
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To do so, click Sources in the editor toolbar. |
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| Paste the iFrame code into the editor, then Continue. |
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