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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 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
- Create a new visualization
Invite student contributions in class - Add the visualization to UVaCollab
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In this guide, Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.
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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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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.
3. Format your spreadsheet
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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. Use the DD/MM/Year format for the dates. |
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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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| Click Click  > My Content > My Visualizations. You'll see a list of all your visualizations. Click on your timeline to open it. |
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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.
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