Making a timeline to represent the Bethlehem memoirs has been an extremely challenging, yet rewarding experience. As Anthony Grafton writes, “We get them, our students get them, [timelines] translate wonderfully from weighty analytic history books to thrilling narrative ones” (10). Grafton’s point is exactly right, by creating the timelines, we have been able to represent our complicated memoirs in a single story that flows across time, rather than just a chronology.
When my group and I first began our timeline, the complex relationship between ideas and modes of representation overwhelmed us. We all had an idea of when each of our Moravians lived, but information beyond that was not immediately available. Because of this, we had to dig beyond just a simple Google search and dive into complex databases and other academic platforms, such as Old Maps Online. Although searching through the databases was more difficult than simply searching on Google, the resulting information I uncovered was spectacular and certainly added to the strength of our timeline. Specifically, I was able to find more specific details about the Fulneck Moravian Settlement in which Joseph Lingard lived. I even discovered some pictures of buildings that were built in the settlement!
However, a problem we ran into as a group was how to mesh our separate memoirs into a cohesive timeline. Grafton speaks to this issue when he writes, “the key problem in chronographics, it turned out, was not how to design more complex visual schemes…but, rather, how to simplify, how to create a visual scheme to clearly communicate the uniformity, directionality, and irreversibility of historical time” (19). As a group, and with the help of Professor Faull, we decided that it would be best to stack our timelines on top of one another, a decision that led to even more interesting findings. By stacking our timelines the two modes of representation have clarified historical events because we were able to physically see when the lives of our Moravians overlapped in place and time.
All in all, I feel that creating this stacked timeline was important for my group because it allowed us to further interact with our memoirs and see that our Moravians lived in the same places and at the same time. This timeline will not only help our group understand the lives of our Moravians, but also will help others. After all, “graphic representation is among our more important tools for organizing information” (10).
Samantha is currently a sophomore Markets, Innovation, and Design major in the Freeman College of Management at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. At Bucknell, Samantha works as a Student Development Officer for the Student Calling Program and is a member of Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society, Women in Finance, and is treasurer for the Chi Mu Chapter of Chi Omega Sorority. She graduated from the Morristown-Beard School in Morristown, New Jersey in June 2017. Samantha resides in Harding, New Jersey and during the summer, Samantha works at Basking Ridge Country Club.
3 replies on “Blog #3”
After reading Samantha’s blog post, I was very interested in how her group designed their time line. For her group, they had multiple memoirs which definitely made it more complicated constructing a timeline. My group only had one memoir (Samuel Tippet) so this differed when constructing a timeline. I find it intriguing how after her group created their timeline they could see more insight on Moravian lives and how their memoirs intertwined. A new fact that Samantha points out from Grafton’s article was that a key problem within developing timelines. The key problem is how to make a simplified visual version of events over time.
After reading Samantha’s post, I thought it was interesting hearing how her group dealt with the challenge of working with multiple memoirs. My group and I had a hard enough time dealing with one; I cannot imagine having several. One of the similarities between our groups was the difficulty in finding additional information about our Moravian writers. We too had to go beyond the simple web searchers and instead search for events that happened in the same area at the same time in hopes of finding connections to our Moravian writer.
I was very impressed by Sam’s response to this. She was in my group for these memoirs, and I’m glad she was because her insightfulness with regards to how our stories were related was crucial to our success. With TimeLine JS, we were able to see just how our stories stacked up, and that makes this experience so rewarding. Way to go Sam, you wrote a great blog post, and interpreted these readings very well!