TimeMapper Assignment

Overview

This assignment is about investigating a series of events to show and explore how they are connected in chronological time and geographical space. You will curate data about a series of at least ten related events on a topic of your choice, with information describing the events, images and/or multimedia and links to share details for further reading. For your events to function in a visual timeline and map, you will need to include accurate and carefully formatted dates and geographic coordinates. Work with Google Sheets and the TimeMapper visualization software.

What you need to begin

• A Google account to work with Google Sheets
• My instructions and class Google Sheet template to prepare a Google Sheet file and publish a TimeMap

Suggested Topics

Your task is to curate a selection of at least ten related events on a topic of your interest relating to the founding of universities, or to some form of arts or technology, that involves events happening in multiple locations that would be interesting to plot in time and space. Here are some suggested topics for your TimeMap:

• Origins of a school or other interesting institution
  • Identify specific events to consolidate in one TimeMapper from the Land-grab universities reading.
  • Founding of Penn State or Behrend college
• Origins and development of Artificial Intelligence
• Origins of computers
• Origins / transformation of one or two social media platform
• History of telephones to mobile phones
• Origins of the worldwide web
• History of a musical instrument (analog or digital or both)
• History of a technology or equipment used in a sport (e.g. history of skis)
• History of a kind of software (examples: word processing, image manipulation, sound mixing, game engine)
• A series of recent connected events about arts/technology (e.g. rise of nonfungible tokens)

Building a good TimeMap requires patient curation of information and careful writing in the Google Sheets template, as well as careful testing and reviewing of the visualization in TimeMapper on the web. This is a challenge involving mindful curation of data and responsible media production.

Assignment requirements

Once you have properly connected your Google Sheet to the TimeMapper, you are ready to develop your entries. Keep my template entries in place until you are able to successfully publish your own entries. Once those appear on the web view of your TimeMapper, you should delete my sample entries and continue developing your own. Do not leave blank lines in your Google Sheet as that will result in entries not displaying. Be watchful for problems with sequencing events on the TimeMapper view and see if you need to modify your approach to formatting the dates. Copy and paste my formula for plotting geographic data and pinning markers to the map. We will work together over the course of this assignment to troubleshoot display issues for images, sequencing, and mapping.

Supply at least five entries on your TimeMapper to complete this assignment. Your entries must:

• Tell a connected story over time. That means your entries need to be related to one another on a specific topic that you identify as the title of your TimeMapper. (You do not need to enter them in chronological order on your Google Sheet, since the TimeMapper will organize the events according to the date information you provide. But your dates do need to be accurate and formatted correctly in order to display proportionally in series.)
• Represent accurate information in your own words about each event in the description pane
• Contain images and/or multimedia (each event needs to be illustrated in some way).
  • For images to display, you must provide a web address that points directly to an image file displayed on the public web. Example: https://behrendblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/dedication-in-1948.jpg
  • Suggestion: Use the Google Image Search at https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=EN to locate images directly, and copy the link directly to the image. Make sure the filename ends with a file extension of .jpg, .png, or .gif.
  • If your image is served over Wikipedia or Wikimedia, isolating an image file in their viewer is tricky. Right-click on an image there, and try to open a link to it directly. An address to an image file must begin with http:// or https://. Here is an example of an Wikipedia Commons image file with an absolute web address that would work on a TimeMapper: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/D%C3%BClmen%2C_Wildpark_--_2015_--_8894-8.jpg/1000px-D%C3%BClmen%2C_Wildpark_--_2015_--_8894-8.jpg
• Images and any multimedia you use must be linked and captioned, making good use of the appropriate columns curating this information in your Google Sheet.
• A link for reading more about an event should help lead readers of your Timemap to your source of information for each event.
• Your total TimeMapper should draw its information from multiple different sources, at least three or four for your series of at least 10 distinct events.

You will have to do a fair amount of troubleshooting to display images and captions and links as you wish on your TimeMapper. Reach out to me for help, and make me a co-editor on your Google Sheet in case you want my help to correct something that is not working properly.

Submitting the TimeMap

Post a web link or embed code for your TimeMap on one of the websites you have developed for this class, and submit a website link featuring your Timemap on Canvas to complete this assignment.

Happy TimeMapping! I hope you will produce a curated web exhibit that you are proud to share for this assignment.