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

 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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With your collection open: 

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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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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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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.

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 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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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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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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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.

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