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This guide helps you create a collaborative, student-crowdsourced timeline in Mandala Visuals. Image RemovedImage Added John Alexander used this timeline for his course the course he co-taught with Walt Heinecke "Documenting UVaUVA's FuturesFuture." This course, inspired by the ouster and reinstatement of UVa 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  Log in to Visuals Connect your Google Drive to Visuals  Create a new visualization Invite student contributions in class Add the visualization to UVaCollab

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1. Create a Google Spreadsheet

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Log in with your Netbadge credentials. You'll see the University of Virginia Google Drive page (or the standard Google Drive page if you entered a non-UVa UVA address).

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The default setting restricts sharing to UVA viewers. We need to make a few more changes so anyone with a link can access your data. If you're not using a UVA standard "@gmail.com" Google Drive Accountaccount, simply change Anyone at with the link can view to can edit. Then you can skip ahead to the next section. If you're using a UVA-affiliated account, continue reading. 

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Here, we're making a simple spreadsheet. 

You'll leave the rows themselves blank. In class, each student will add a row to the spreadsheet, creating a single event. Before they can do that, however, you should make sure rows are formatted correctly. 

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3. Format your spreadsheet

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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4. Log in to Visuals

Go to Visuals at https://visuals.shanti.virginia.edu. 

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 Enter your Netbadge credentials to finish logging in. Now we'll make your visualization.

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5. Create your timeline 

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Make sure to log in before making your timeline. Then: 

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Column width 50%  Image Added Column width 50%     Click  Image Added> Collections > Create. A list of visualization types will open.

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Column width 50% Column         Choose Relationships, then Create under "Timeline."

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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Column width 50% Image RemovedImage Added  Column width 50%       Find the "Source of events" field and click on the triangle Google Drive icon next to it.

You'll see a list of your Google Drive accounts. Log If prompted, log in to the account that holds your data spreadsheet. Google  Google will ask if you give Shanti permission to see your files: click click Allow.  You may not have to do the last two steps: you might see your Google Drive files directly.

You'll see a Google Drive window in Visuals with a list of your files.  

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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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Column width 50%  Image RemovedImage Added Column width 50%     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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Column width 50% Image RemovedImage Added  Column 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.  Use the DD/MM/Year format for the dates.

 

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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Column width 50%  Image RemovedImage Added Column width 50%         Here are the values we ended up with. Notice we also had to adjust "Center date of timeline" by a few days.

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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Column width 50% Image RemovedImage Added Column       Enter "importance" in the first row of column E, then give all rows in the column a value of 20.

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Column width 50%   Image RemovedImage Added Column width 50%         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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Column width 50%  Image RemovedImage Added Column width 50%         This is the hidden column. To unhide this data, click on the two arrows (< >) between columns D and F.

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Column width 50%  Image RemovedImage Added Column width 50%       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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Column width 50% Image RemovedImage Added Column       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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Switch the status of the timeline from Draft to Published at the top of the page. Then, Save your visualization. You're all ready for your class to create a collaborative timeline together. 

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 6. Invite student contributions in class

For the class, you should have a way to project your visualization. Once you've set up the projector, you can open your visualization by logging into Visuals, then: 

Before the class, ask your students to bring:

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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. 

You'll see the timeline grow gradually, giving your students a sense of how information flows through time. 

You can make this timeline available to your students after class in UVaCollab. 

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7. Add the timeline to UVaCollab

Open Now, we'll add the timeline your students created together to UVaCollab. This lets them reference the data throughout the semester. To begin, open your class site in UVaCollab.

Now you need to fetch your timeline from Visuals. To do this, open the visualization, then click the Share icon ().

To insert the code into the page, you need to switch the UVaCollab editor mode to edit HTML.

You'll see a form with metadata fields, where you can add a title and restrict access to your HTML page. Fill out the fields as needed, then Finish. The new page will appear under the Resources. If you click on the site, you'll see the interactive timeline your students created collaboratively. 

This code also lets you add the visualization to a WordPress course site. Follow the Add an iFrame guide for help. 

Now you're finished with your project. To learn more about making visualizations, you can use this Visuals in Mandala guide. 

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