Time Graphics is a (mostly) free platform on the internet that can be used to create time lines. It has a lot of cool features that are helpful when working on it. For instance, you can easily save your time lines and export them for offline viewing with Google Drive, Dropbox, or even download them. It is also very well integrated with other google services, like YouTube and google maps, which makes it easy to insert multimedia content in the time line if you want to use images to go through a particular history; and also with google calendar, which is helpful if you want to use the time line as a planer.
The site is also good for working in groups as it allows you to create public time lines, private, or to share them with a selected group of people. If the time line is public, the creator still needs to approve changes before they are visible in the time line. Here is an example of a public time line on video games:
In this tutorial I will go through the most basic tools on how to create a time line. First, you must go to Time Graphics and hit that create button; and that will take you to a screen like this one.
You may click and drag to move through time, and there will be a line over your mouse showing the month and year you are in (in the image above, I am on October of 2009), and it even shows you how long ago that was!
Since this is a time line, we will want to begin by addign events. To add an event simply left-click over the date where you want to add an event and the following wheel should appear, displaying all the options.
Here click the one to the right of the top icon (the virus icon), and that is the event option, and a menu will pop to the left of your screen, this is shown bellow.
Here, you can modify the event that you just created. To create your event you must add a name to it, this will be the one that will be displayed the time line. Then, you can add a description of the event, that the user will be able to read if they click on the event. You may also change the date in the “Date(from)” part, and you can make it as accurate as you can/want. Since we are only adding an event here, you should leave the “end” part of the date alone, this will be for time periods. You can also add tags to the events so that the user can filter events and find the relevant ones, and change the color of the event (in the general color) and the text color of the event. Refer to the video game history time line above to see refined events.
If you want to add an image or a video then you can hit the camera or video icon on top of everything and add them there. A cool thing about this platform is that you can include as many as you want.
A very cool way to represent information. The gaming timeline was especially interesting and I imagine that your use of this software for your project will be very useful
Very helpful. I’ll probably be referencing this tutorial later today for our project .
Alistair- what do you mean by this? Could you talk a little bit more about what you’ll be doing later today?
It seems like this comment might be referencing some conversation you had previously with the author of this post (Alejandro)… am I correct? If so, could you let everybody in on the secret? We want to know.
Also, this just occurred to me… are you working with Alejandro on your final project?
Thanks,
Henry
I’ll answer this myself since I know the answer, haha. Alistair, Alejandro, MJ, Mikai and I are all working on the tunnel timeline project, which involves Time Graphics. As such, this is particularly relevant to us.
Alejandro! Time Graphics! What do you mean when you say that Time Graphics is a “mostly free” platform? Is there a premium option that costs money? The visual display is pretty awesome- are there options to customize the graphic display?
It was really smart to color code some of the steps in the beginning. It helped me find the steps easily while also what you were referring to on Time Graphics. I think you should have continued to do that for the rest of the tutorial.