A Carnegie Hall timeline of lectures, meetings, and rallies on the topic of women's suffrage, 1908–1919.
Women's Suffrage Events at Carnegie Hall
Create a timeline of Carnegie Hall events related to the cause of women's suffrage.
We used TimelineJS, a free, open-source tool that allows anyone to build an attractive timeline using only a Google spreadsheet. From a button on the homepage labeled "Make a Timeline", TimelineJS provides a link to the spreadsheet template, and the rest is as simple as filling in the necessary data for each timeline entry. We used the columns for Year, Month, Day, Headline, Text, Media, Media Credit, Media Caption, and Media Thumbnail. The date columns are self-explanatory. Headline is a title for each Carnegie Hall event, which includes an HTML anchor link to the corresponding event entry on our Performance History Search. Text is a longer description for each event, which may include things like quotations, or in some cases a link to a newspaper article about the event from the Library of Congress' Chronicling America website. Media, Media Credit, and Caption are used for the large images accompanying each timeline entry in the top frame. In most cases, we used public domain images from Wikimedia Commons, since links to images need to resolve directly to an image file. Media Thumbnail corresponds to the small image that appears on the small "flag" for each event on the scrolling timeline along the bottom of the frame. Background color for the top frame is set using hex codes in the Background column of the spreadsheet.
Once you have completed filling in the Google spreadsheet, you paste the URL for the sheet into a field on the TimelineJS site, which then generates both a share link and an embed link (which we've used here). Fonts and other display parameters (width, height, zoom, etc.) are all customizable as URL parameters which can be passed within the embed code.
what we learned
TimelineJS is a great, out-of-the-box, easy to use tool for creating visually attractive timelines requiring almost no coding or developer experience.
further investigation
Since our RDF event data does not include a queryable statement for the subject of women's suffrage, this experiment needed to be 100% hand-curated, with all elements of the spreadsheet compiled manually. We'd like to experiment with timelines organized along other themes or subjects for which we could create a SPARQL query (e.g., for specific performers, or some musical genres, such as rock music), which would allow scripting of at least some of the spreadsheet data. While in most cases elements such as event descriptions and image links would still need to be assembled manually, this would speed the process somewhat and make it easier to create more timelines with slightly less effort.