Digital Scholarship, Timelines, and Timemaps

05 Aug 2021

Here are activities we will do today to learn about digital scholarship.

Activity 1: History of IU Residence Halls

Most of you will be living in an IU residence hall in Fall 2021. A lot of them are named after people.

Today we'll each do some tiny research projects about these people and the residence halls named after them.

Step 1

Pick a residence hall from this list. It doesn't have to be the one you'll live in:

  • Collins
  • Eigenmann
  • Teter
  • Wright
  • Briscoe
  • Foster
  • McNutt
  • Read
  • Wells
  • Willkie

Step 2

See which of these questions you can answer in 10 minutes of searching:

  • Who is this residence hall's namesake?
  • When was the residence hall dedicated?
  • What are their birth and death dates?
  • Where were they born?

Step 3

Can you find four significant events in this person's/dorm's history and the location where they occurred?

Activity 2: Timeline JS

TimelineJS is a free, web-based timeline tool that uses data in Google Sheets to build interactive timelines.

First, we'll look at my example timeline to see what it can do.

Next, we'll follow my instructions to build our own timelines.

Activity 3: TimeMapper

Similar to Timeline JS, TimeMapper uses Google Sheets to publish interactive time maps, which situate individual events on a map.

To get started, let's look at my example.

Here's my spreadsheet data behind it.

Here's the spreadsheet template.

My example map uses a map I published to my account and embedded on this site. You can get a free account by logging in with your Twitter account. You can also publish anonymously, as long as your Google Sheet is published to the web.

Here's the same map as above, published anonymously.

Activity 4: Retrospective and Project Planning

Now we will reflect on what we've done today and review the effort we spent building these miniature research projects.

Consider these activities:

  • Selecting a topic
  • Researching events and locations
  • Finding images
  • Adding your data to Google Spreadsheets
  • Making design decisions
  • Troubleshooting problems

I'd like you to rank each of these activities in two ways:

  1. Order of difficulty: easiest to most difficult
  2. Time spent: least time to most time