Timeline Tutorial: Introduction. All Things Google: Google Maps Labs. At the recent THATCamp Southeast, I had a chance to teach a hands-on session for building interactive, geospatial timelines.
The timelines are powered by some very amazing code that originated at MIT’s SIMILE Project that has since become an open-source “spin-off” know as SIMILE Widgets. What’s great about these timelines is that they are lightweight and the data that powers them can live in a Google Docs spreadsheet. That means that you can have multiple people contributing information to a dynamic visualization. This is exactly what I’ve done in a number of classes, and the results are pretty amazing. (I like these timelines well enough to have written a step-by-step tutorial, in case you’d like to build your own.) Google Earth Design. View NSIDC Data on Virtual Globes: Google Earth. Site Index.