Introduction
I visualized the history of Cartography since 1870 using TimelineJS. Cartographical data is one of early topics of visualization. TimelineJS is an open-source tool that allows users create interactive timelines. For this assignment, I followed basic guidelines of TimelineJS, filling data into pre-defined the Google Spreadsheet template. Original resources are from “Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization” by Michael Friendly and Daniel Denis.
Process
- Open the Google Spreadsheet template.
- In the resource website, I picked only cartography history data from the milestone. Details and images are shown by clicking each event on the milestone graph.
- Fill out required fields. The first slide is a title page, which doesn’t require timeframe data.
- Copy the url of the spreadsheet, and paste to generate the timeline.
Result
Click here to see the result.
Discussion of future directions
TimelineJS is a great tool to show small number of data points, especially datapoint that occur in a sequential order. One downside of TimelineJS is that users only can include only one link of media, regardless of types.