I really enjoyed working with Timeline JS this week. I had never used it before, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had wanted a timeline for our website, but I imagined it would be something pretty simple and just words. However, after seeing how to work with Timeline JS, I am excited to be able to include such an interesting and multifaceted feature on our website. I sometimes feel like this class is introducing me to so many different types of technology that I didn’t even know existed. I like to consider myself somewhat technologically savvy, but not when it comes to this class. I was very confused with how Timeline worked at first, and I imagine this is what older people feel like when it comes to email or smartphones. The one thing I do wish is that we could’ve tried working with Timeline earlier in the semester like we did for StoryMap JS.

When first exploring the Timeline website, I found some really cool examples of other timelines, including one tracing the trial of a famous criminal, which was very compelling.

I was wishing I had more things to make into Timelines or that more of my classes would include Timeline in our assignments.

When Sean and I were trying to figure out the dates to include in the Timeline we knew the obvious ones to put in but were less sure about other peripheral dates. I think it can be hard to take our project that has so many different avenues and condense it down a Timeline immediately; we had to almost take a step back and think which dates were important and what they added to or showed about our case. Besides the dates of the challenge of the book, I thought it would be important to include the notoriety the book received. I included an award Rainbow Boys had gotten and the date it became a bestseller to demonstrate how popular the book was. If the American Library Association considered it to be an outstanding YA novel, then it calls into question why community members feel it’s not appropriate for young adults. Similarly, I wanted to highlight the journal article Sean and I discovered that calls Rainbow Boys‘ content out from a left perspective because it is too stereotypical. I think it’s important that our timeline try to demonstrate all areas of our project.

I’m very happy with our Timeline for Rainbow Boys, and I’m looking forward to putting it into our website. I tried to figure it how to do it after class today, but I was not sure how to embed it to get it the show up as a timeline and not just the text, which kept happening. I know it’ll be easy to do once I actually look up directions on how to do it, I just thought I could try to MacGyver it myself.