I wanted to create a basic political timeline for my Politics of South Asia class extending from 1947 to 2007. SIMILIE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) is a free open source program created at MIT, which can be used for this purpose. A tutorial is available for those who have basic knowledge of XML and Javascript.

The site creates two timelines, one divided by months, and the other in years. More detailed sub-divisions of time can be created if necessary. However, I am mainly interested in listing major events.

Once the basic script is dropped into an HTML template, the only thing that needs to be done is to add data to the XML file. Keep in mind that the XML file name has to be changed from "example1.xml" to your xml file (in my case, "southasia.xml"). The code should look like this:

tl = Timeline.create(document.getElementById("my-timeline"), bandInfos);
Timeline.loadXML("soasiatimeline.xml", function(xml, url) { eventSource.loadXML(xml, url); });
}
I should also note that I tweaked the veritical length to better fit into my HTML. The width of the timeline is contained by the "div" tags.

It is possible to distinguish between singular events and durable actions. Clicking on each item in the timeline will open up a tag cloud which can be loaded with data, links, small images, etc.

I am hoping to link some of the entries to specific historical documents, photos, video files, and texts. I also still need to figure out if it is possible to have different colors for different country timelines, since I will need to combine political events from all of the major countries.

At the moment I have only added major events from India, but I will add more details as I have time...

Labels: teaching, web technology