Timeline is a new free, open-source online timeline tool that aims at innovating storytelling on the web.

Created by Zach Wise, a multimedia journalist and journalism professor, Timeline was developed in partnership with the Knight News Innovation Lab at Northwestern University, where Wise teaches.

Released at the end of March 2012, the interactive tool allows users to generate timelines on the web by curating content from Twitter,YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google Maps and SoundCloud. It announced on 22 May via Twitter that the next release of ‪the tool‬ will support Instagram and Storify as data sources. More media sources are expected to be added in the future.

“The tools that already exist on the web are almost all either hard on the eyes or hard to use,” said Wise. “Timeline is an open-source, JavaScript and HTML/HTML5 based tool that creates elegant timelines.”

Wise’s tool renders the timeline entirely in the browser, using JavaScript and CSS. It can pull content from a JSON feed or from content stored in a Google spreadsheet. The open-source code is available on GitHub.

“Whilst a Timeline can be created by one user editing the JSON code, there is also an option to build a Timeline using a Google Doc spreadsheet,” notes the Event Amplifier blog in its review of the tool. “This means that one could choose to create collaboratively by sharing the spreadsheet, which could prove very useful indeed – particularly at large-scale events where there are multiple event amplifiers/journalists covering the proceedings.”

Examples of Timelines are featured on the Timeline website, such as:

- Le Monde: Chronology of the french presidential race

- A History of Nato

- Revolutionary User Interfaces

Links:

Website: Timeline

Twitter: Timeline on Twitter

 

Published: May 25, 2012