The Art of the Timeline

Somewhere in a file box in a storage unit in Texas lies the master timeline for my dissertation and book manuscript. I wish I had a picture to post on the blog (because it is awesome), but these pens will have to do.

My dissertation/book looked at an American mission in Jamaica from the 1830s through the 1860s. I had a lot of people and a lot of events to track, and I also wanted to keep the local concerns of the mission in the same frame with bigger historical events in the United States, Jamaica, and Britain.

To construct the timeline, I made a vertical line across four sheets of taped-together printer paper. (I can’t remember why I didn’t go and buy a big sheet of art paper which would have made much more sense . . . ). I used different colored pens for each main missionary. I marked their arrival and departure, and I drew a colored line parallel to the timeline for the time each person was on the island. I could easily see when someone was there or when they were back in the United States — for a year or permanently. I also could easily see who overlapped.

Next, I marked the major events within the mission — the personal and public traumas and successes of the mission. All of this “history of ordinary people” is tracked alongside larger events within the abolitionist movement, American history, Jamaican history, and British colonialism, marked with a separate color scheme. My timeline became a visual representation of “ordinary” history blended with the major events of British emancipation, the American Civil War, and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. Just as personal and public history had been woven together in the missionaries’ letters, the supposedly small events of the mission (a land purchase by freedpeople, an excommunication, the birth or death of a child) stood alongside the world-changing events that may or may not have directly affected the men and women up in the Jamaican mountains.

In a way, the timeline is the visual equivalent of my book. I suspect that if a person who had some familiarity to the history of the Jamaica Mission looked at it for long enough, the book’s arguments would be visible. Taped to the wall of my office, it became functional art that I consulted on a daily basis.

But — and this is really important — the timeline wasn’t really for others, it was for me. I think this points to an critical distinction between the kinds of visual work (often in the form of digital humanities) that we consume and have students consume and that which we create ourselves. If I had happened to find this exact timeline in a textbook or online, it wouldn’t have helped me very much. The timeline mattered because I made it myself: I had to make all of the different drafts (spacing is hard), I had to decide what to include and what to leave out. These decisions and the process of putting it together is why it became so dear and so useful.

The timeline took me a long time to make, but it was completely worth it. For one, by the time it was finished, I had a much better sense of the big picture of the mission. It’s often a difficult stage in research when you have to move from the minutiae of hundreds of documents to try and grasp the larger sweep of your time period. The timeline helped me to see everything at once (much like how Scrivener or the Navigation Pane in Word allows you to visualize all of your chapters and sections of chapters).

The visual aspect of the timeline also proved a collegial companion to my chronologically arranged notecard box. When I was revising my dissertation, I would often become immersed in one section of the text for several weeks. Then, when I would need go back to an earlier time — say, the 1840s — I could quickly walk over to the timeline and familiarize myself with who was in Jamaica at that time and what major issues were in play. Just like flipping through the notecards from the missionary letters and newspaper articles in the 1840s section, the timeline would remind me where I was and what I was doing.

The other thing that I really liked about the timeline, and why I’m about to embark on another one for my new research, is that it made writing more fun. In case you can’t tell, I was incredibly proud of my timeline — I would nerdily show it to people when they came over to my house (which is why I’m surprised I didn’t take a picture of it!). It was art! It showed others that I was actually doing something with my time! In contrast, during the early stages of writing, nothing seems very pretty or artistic: there are half-finished paragraphs with bracketed notes –[More here.] or [Fix.], partial footnotes, and arguments are not always evident. To paraphrase sacramental theology: the timeline served as an outward sign of an invisible dissertation.

One of the advantages of digital humanities is that tools now exist for scholars to create visual representations of scholarly argument. I’m not very well-informed in what all is out there, and I’d be curious to know what artistic and visually helpful versions of digital archives and digital scholarship exist. The example that leaps to my mind is the Valley of the Shadow Civil War history project. Looking at and interpreting other people’s timelines, maps (of geography and ideas), diagrams, and word clouds can be useful, but I would argue that researchers gain much more when they create these projects themselves. While never a complete substitute for written work (at least in my opinion), creating visual representations of research can shake you out of a rut and give you a new tool to think about old material in different ways.

If you’ve used visually oriented techniques to think through your research or you know of innovative digital humanities things along these lines, please share!

What I Used to Do, Part I

Or, how exactly am I supposed to keep track of this
massive pile of papers?

In graduate school, my first major research projects involved hundreds of pages printed from microfilm. One paper on antebellum southern children’s literature (my first published article!) essentially involved me printing out the entire run of the magazine (about 8 years) from microfilm. For another paper, I printed out twenty years worth of speeches and articles from the WCTU’s annual meeting minutes.

Since my research as an undergraduate had not involved anything on this scale, my plan was pretty basic: keep the papers in stacks and mark important pages with Post-its. I’m fairly sure that there may have even been colored Post-its involved, so, you know, it was very sophisticated.

At some point soon after this semester, one of the most memorable and valuable moments of my academic career occurred. A professor took me into her office to show me her filing system. She had a couple of boxes filled with notecards, and each notecard referenced a printed-out document (a letter, a newspaper article) filed neatly away in color-coded file folders. The cards were arranged chronologically, and the documents were arranged by person (if they were letters) or by the newspaper (if they were articles), etc. Her system was and is fairly standard: she could move by year (what happened in April 1878?) but she could also read through a person’s papers or the editorials of a particular newspaper.

It all seems obvious now, but at the time, this was a revelation. Stacks that had colonized my living room, be gone!

For my dissertation, my research involved a large collection of letters covering around 40 years and written by 30 or so people. While I had other documents as well, this was the bulk of my research. To organize it, I assigned each letter-writer a folder  in which I filed his or her letters in chronological order. I also wrote a notecard for each letter – noting the date, the correspondents, and the topics of discussion – and I filed these cards chronologically. The act of making this filing system enriched my understanding of the evidence, and when it came time to revise — individual chapters and the entire manuscript — the system was invaluable.

But for various reasons, this amazing system doesn’t always work, and I find that this is the case for my current research.

• What if you don’t print out your documents because they’re saved as PDFs?
• How do you file or write one notecard for a 90-page pamphlet or 400-page book?

Computer programs like Zotero, Endnote, (see a Prof Hacker comparison of the two) and others try to replicate this system for a digital age, but while I want these research databases to work for me, and I’ve tried using them, I find that they don’t. I’ll explain why I think this is the case in the next post:

Part II: How I acquired all of those papers in the first place.