Tag: Timeline

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Blog #3 contextual research

Blog #3

The chronology of events is very important if you wish to see the cause and effects of each event, which Grafton emphasizes in this writing.“By comparing individual histories to one another and the uniform progress of the years, the reader could see the hand of providence at work” (Grafton, 15). Through chronology, we are able to view changes that have happened over the years, and why it is that they changed. There are an endless number of ways to create timelines, and each of them reveals different information about a sequence of events, and they can incorporate images and other media.

Along with chronology, timelines show geography which tells viewers where the event happened, along what time it happened. “Timelines are relatively new sources of information, only formed as they are today in the middle of the 18th century”(Grafton, 19). Timelines are relatively new, so different ideas and methods of making timelines are always being created. In this case, creating a timeline of events to view Elizabeth Grundy’s life helps to view her life as a whole, and gain a better and more full understanding of what it was like to be her. Grafton would agree that graphic visualization is one of the most helpful tools, if not the most helpful when it comes to organizing information into a concise set of data. “Graphic representation is among our most important tools for organizing information” (Grafton, 10).

Here is a specific event from the life of Elizabeth Grundy that my group and I incorporated into our timeline. This was when Grundy was in her 50’s, five years after she had moved to Dukinfield. She started up a girls school, with eleven girls all belonging to families of the Brethren church.

This photo shows a few of the most common illnesses in the 1700’s. We chose this because in her memoir, Grundy talks about the death of multiple family members which led us to believe there was a problem with sickness at this time.

 

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Blog #3 contextual research

Paige Whitney’s Blog 3

When examining history, timelines are very important because they allow people to see major changes over an extended period of time in chronological order. Timelines are arranged in an organized way that make it easy and efficient to work with when looking back through history. The small passages about a specific date or time period are very informational. With the advancing technology, timelines now offer pictures and other forms of media to help the viewer imagine the time and place of the event.

Hailey and I formed a timeline of Harriett Lees’s life and included three major dates: her birth, marriage, and death. We gathered more relevant information to Harriett Lees’s life in attempt to make comparisons and connections. When we furthered our research on her hometown, Leominster, we found a lot of interesting and relevant information. This is an example of the geographic mode of representation.

Other major occurrences we came across when researching were the Industrial Revolution, Leamington spa, and lung sickness, also known as tuberculosis. Hailey and I used chronological mode of representation when analyzing our timeline. For example, the timeline allowed us to make the connection and understand Harriett Lees suffering and death from tuberculosis. When deepening our research on the Leamington Spa, we learned that they were seen as healthy places where sick people would go to receive spa waters, doctors, and other medicinal purposes. Again, this allowed us to find a connection between civilians in Great Britain at the time and Harriett Lees.

Tuberculosis was a serious sickness in the nineteenth century and affected many young people.
Photo of the Leamington Spa that is shown in our timeline.

I have learned so much by reading Grafton’s introduction about timelines and going through the process of making one. The use of a timeline has taught me how to make connections between events during a time period in history. It has also allowed me a greater understanding of Harriett Lees’s life.

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Blog #3 contextual research

Blog #3

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.

The above image shows how the line is represented in a spatially.

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).

In this image you can see how the dates are stacked based on their chronology.

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.

 

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Blog #3 contextual research

Blog #3: Timelines

I believe that chronology of events is extremely important because it allows us to see cause and effect. We would not be able to know and understand the outcome of any given event if we were not given the timing. There would be know way to learn from past mistakes or make changes in the future if  we were not given the chronology of events. As mentioned in Grafton’s introduction, timelines allow us to compare “individual histories to one another and the uniform progress of the years” in a manner where we can see the connections and development (Grafton 15). Chronology allows us to see patterns and identify relationships between different events which is vital in both learning and decision making. We can represent history both with chronology and geography which is what is encompassed in the timeline that Paige and I created. Even though “historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored” in the past and it may seem simple at first, a timeline can tell us an abundant amount about the past because it utilizes both chronology and geography which are essential in representing history (Grafton 10).

In order to create a timeline of Harriet Lees’ life,  Paige and I extracted key dates out of her memoir and placed them onto the timeline. We then had to do research to get a better context as to what was going on in Leominster, where she lived, and the surrounding areas during the time she was alive. By looking at where she lived and important events happening there during the early nineteenth century, we were utilizing the geographic mode of representation. We then found that the Industrial Revolution, Bath Houses, and the tuberculosis outbreak were big events going on during the time period in which Harriet Lees was alive. After putting those events into the timeline,  we immediately saw the correlation because we were able to use the chronological mode of representation. We saw how the events going on in Great Britain at the time intertwined with the struggles that Harriet Lees faced throughout her life. We would never have been able to draw these connections and conclusions without plotting this information on a timeline.

For example, we knew that Harriet Lees suffered from lung inflammation and was constantly ill, but we did not realize that her illness was a part of the larger tuberculosis outbreak that was going on in Great Britain.

I am now able to have a better understanding of the complex relationship between ideas and modes of representation because I was able to visually see the cause and effect of events by each event’s location on the timeline and I could visually understand what the context of each event was from the pictures with the assistance of a short description. Putting this timeline together made me realize that a line, not just chronology can tell a story. The pictures and descriptions made what was just chronology come to life. The timeline we made models after chronographics which Grafton discussed in his introduction. However, I feel the layout of our timeline addresses the problem that chronographics had in the seventeenth century, “how to simplify, how to create a visual scheme to clearly communicate the uniformity, directionality, and irreversibility of historical time” (Grafton 19). Our timeline includes the visualizations; however, it does not lose site of the sequence of events.

 

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