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This guide walks helps you through making a dynamic timeline in Mandala Visuals. We'll show you how to set up your spreadsheet, then use that data in Visuals. Then, you'll use customization settings to make your timeline look the way you want. The final timeline will look something like this: |
To create a create a collaborative, student-crowdsourced timeline in Mandala Visuals. 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.  Image Added
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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
1. Create a Google 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. |
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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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To finish, make sure that "Minimum zoom of timeline" and "Maximum zoom of timeline" are considerably smaller and larger, respectively, than the initial zoom value. This lets your students scroll in and out.
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To finish making your timeline, give the visualization record a title in the "Title" field at the top of the page, then choose Public under the "Visibility" options at the bottom of the page. Making the timeline public lets you add it to UVaCollab in step 8.
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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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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| 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, |
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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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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.
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