When events are placed in chronological order it presents a visual of the order in which the events took place. This is important because when readers are presented with new and important information containing multiple dates, it’s hard to mentally sort out that information. As Grafton points out, creating a chronological order for events represents history in a way that is contextual, visual, and memorable. In my opinion, a line is capable of telling both a story and chronology of events that took place.
Through the Timeline.js project, I was able to understand how particular events in time influenced the decisions of the people from the memoirs and how it affected their lives. Because our memoir had so many components, we created our timeline by stacking the data. As a result, a line was created through space by the website. Grafton wrote about how W.J.T. Mitchell said, “The fact is that spatial form is the perceptual basis of our notion of time, that we literally cannot ‘tell time’ without the mediation of space” (13). As a group, a few of the dates that we had overlapped each other. If this information wasn’t stacked and written out chronologically, it would’ve been difficult to understand. Grafton made this point evident in his introduction by saying, “by comparing individual histories to one another and the uniform progress of the years, the reader could see the hand of providence at work” (15).
For myself, the most difficult part of this project was finding contextual events that correlated with my memoir. Once we each found dates that we felt suited this project, the timeline created a chronological story that was easily and better understood. Though it was difficult, our information allowed our group to explore the relationship between ideas and modes of representation. Overall, the information that we found added to the development of our timeline and furthered our understandings of the Bethlehem memoirs.
Olivia Smith is a student at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. She was born and raised in Manasquan, New Jersey. She is currently apart of the Bucknell Women’s Rowing Team and plans to major in Psychology and Creative Writing.