Presenting Research with Timelines in Arthur Knight's Williamsburg Documentary Project Seminar

In a Nutshell

In this 400-level research seminar, students work on real-world documentary projects, interviewing members of the community and analyzing primary and secondary source documents. Each student develops their own individual research project within a particular historical location — in this current project, they researched within the Triangle area of Williamsburg . When taken as a whole, the projects help tell a richer story than individual projects might have done. Students collaborate to develop a multimedia web-accessible timeline incorporating videos, maps, photos, audio, and more to merge their individual, smaller stories into a broader, more complex exploration of this area.

Course Description

The Williamsburg Documentary Project (WDP) is a research seminar that invites students to develop research projects examining Williamsburg’s recent history. The eight students involved in the Spring 2017 class worked in groups on larger topics and individually on their final research papers. The entire class worked collaboratively on a web-based timeline used for a final class presentation. Historically, the course adopts a theme as a lens through which to investigate changes in the social, economic, and political lives of Williamsburg residents. In the Spring of 2017, the theme was a specific location: the Triangle block and nearby areas. While the course materials and methodologies were intended for advanced students in a seminar-style course, many of the concepts and tools could easily be applied to a wider audience.

Course and Assignment Objectives

One of the main objectives of the course is to get students to refine their ability to ask good questions and refine those questions. Once students have asked those questions, they set out to do authentic, or genuine research, instead of the synthetic research that is often asked in more introductory courses.

Genuine research differs from synthetic research in two important ways:

Students are left to their own devices to decide what sources they will explore in attempting to answer the questions they’ve asked.
Genuine research, especially research done over the course of a single semester, is set up to fail. However, this failure is of a very specific nature that reaps rewards for the researcher. For example, “What sources or information did I lack that I’d need to answer this question?” Understanding such an important question is critical in genuine research.

The timeline, which the students worked on individually and then organized as a group, helped the students understand the shortcomings of their genuine research while still allowing them to tell their story in a compelling way for an audience of laypeople.

Assignments

Timeline Assignment: The timeline assignment in Prof. Knight’s course uses Timeline JS and Google Sheets. Both are free. Data, such as images, text, and video, are entered into a Google Sheet and those data sources are automatically translated into components of a timeline. Using Google Sheets also allows students to collaborate on the same timeline in real time. There are very few customizations available in Timeline JS, allowing students to focus on the message and not the bells and whistles.

The few customizations Timeline JS currently offers are:

Language (choose from almost any World language to display your text)
Fonts (choose from 19 different font combinations)
Default start slide (choose which slide viewers see when they first open the timeline)
Start at the end (allows you to run a timeline presentation backwards in time)
Deep linking to internal slides from within each slide.

This assignment asked students to identify five or six discrete events from their research and oral interviews to add to the group timeline. The collaboration on a single timeline helped to develop the knowledge base created by individual student research into a more complete picture. The final presentation used this timeline as the main access point for an audience comprised of interviewees, faculty and staff who assisted in the project, and other interested parties. See some examples of Timeline JS or start creating your own timeline at http://timeline.knightlab.com

Lessons Learned

Things that worked well:

Easy access: The timeline is web based and is therefore easily shareable online, not just with the people that students talked to for their project, but the general public
Easy editing: The Google Sheet is very easy to edit, and well-suited to collaboration among students.
Easy modeling: Professor Knight provided students with a model of a timeline for extra guidance. Beyond giving them an idea of the kind of information that they could include, it also provided an example of the finer points of using TimeLine JS, such as the number of words that could fit and the best formatting.
Easy presentation platform: Public presentation is made much easier with the timeline as a visual enhancement. Audiences find this sort of visual representation both intuitive and engaging.

Things to think about improving for next time:

More practice needed: Exploring the capabilities of TimeLine JS is important to creating a good product. Layering timelines through linking could provide additional data or specific context about a specific point in time, based on student research.
Increased scaffolding of assignments: More time could be left for introductory material to build up to using TimeLine JS.
Improve the conscious consumption of other exemplary timeline projects for analysis before students start on their own timelines. This will allow students to better understand how to build an effective timeline with an audience of laypeople in mind.

Try it Yourself / Tools Used

View

Arthur Knight’s Students’ Triangle Project Timeline
TimeLine JS offers many examples of timelines to give you and your students ideas for your own projects. Visit their sample pages here: https://timeline.knightlab.com/#examples

Learn

Knightlab offers help on creating your own timeline projects here: https://timeline.knightlab.com/#help

Create

Creating a timeline in Timeline JS is as simple as creating and sharing a spreadsheet in Google Sheets. The template for creating your own timeline is available here: https://timeline.knightlab.com/#make
Here’s another fun template we made in house that highlights all of Earth’s geological eras: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kqM5NmD-bf8M0eCnEuvGKskAkJA6Tn-QN7x75kU-30k/edit?usp=sharing

The best part of creating a timeline is sharing it with the world. Timeline JS makes it easy to share your timelines either with weblinks or embedded directly into your website. Here’s the example of Earth’s geological eras mentioned above as an embedded timeline:

Shared Resources

Below are resources developed by Professor Knight for his research seminar. If these are useful to you, he would be glad to hear how you’re using them or incorporating them into your own teaching.

AMST410SyllabusSpring2017.pdf

AMST 410 Syllabus

Student Project Sample

About Arthur Knight

Arthur Knight is Associate Chair and Professor of English and American Studies. At William & Mary since 1993, much of Prof. Knight's teaching and research focuses on African Americans and film, literature, and, music reception studies. His interdisciplinary background affords him the opportunity to incorporate American Studies, English, Film Studies & Media Studies in his teaching. The Williamsburg Documentary Project, started in 2005, is a collective research lab focusing on questions of American social, cultural, and political history through the case of Williamsburg, VA.

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