Introduction
With the development of biotechnology and medical research, people can live longer with higher quality. The development of anatomy has made a great contribution to it. Anatomy is beneficial to understand our body structure and take proper treatments when necessary, more importantly, some diseases might be eliminated by advanced research in anatomy. In this project, I would like to display a timeline with milestone events or key characters to inform users of how anatomy was developed.
Tools
I used Google Spreadsheet(https://www.google.com/sheets/about/) to collect the raw data of the timeline, and Knightlab TimelineJS(https://timeline.knightlab.com) to build up this interactive timeline with text and media.
Method
After doing research on the history of human anatomy, I collected milestone events and key characters based on the contributions to the overall development.
Data was collected by year, event/people, description and media into Google Spreadsheet. Then the spreadsheet was published to the web and generated by the TimelineJS program by using its URL. I also made some small modifications to make the timeline look better, such as changing the height and zoom level.
Results
https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1bdMqXENescQuTdsZgL9F3lrvGiQrF2SDd-vDnTXTNE0&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=8&height=650
Reflections
First of all, if I can do this project over again, I will start working after I have a solid idea of my topic. In the first draft, I made my topic the history of DNA visualization. I collected data on the events, input them into the spreadsheet, but then found out that this topic might not include 5-10 events. Therefore, I decided to come up with another idea and redo my work, which was really time-consuming. What I can take away from it is that I need a solid plan and research first to back up my project.
After I put all the data into the spreadsheet and tried to preview, I got an error from the program. The format of the year is incorrect because I included “BCE”, which was not number. Then I tried to fix this problem by using “-” instead of “BCE”, and the timeline interpreted it as “BCE” intelligently. I think it is a good way to inform users where the problem is(1600 BCE) and how might they solve the problem(date must be numbers).
