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This guide helps you create a collaborative, student-crowdsourced timeline in Mandala Visuals. John Alexander used this timeline for his course the course he co-taught with Walt Heinecke "Documenting UVA's Future." 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 during 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: |
In this guide, Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.
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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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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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You'll see a list of your Google Drive accounts. If prompted, log in to the account that holds your data spreadsheet. Google will ask if you give Shanti permission to see your files: click Allow. You may not have to do the last two stepsteps: you might see your Google Drive files directly.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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