Building a Community Timeline
Students research the background of a community organization and then use their findings to identify community milestones and create a visualization of the community’s work in a timeline. They collaborate with community stakeholders and members as appropriate and possible.
Keywords: narrative, history, infographic, informational report, photo essay
by Cymru dros Heddwch | Wales for Peace on Flickr,
used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license
Overview
Students review a community group’s accomplishments as well as the levels of need that exist and then create community timelines. The timelines can include past events as well as upcoming accomplishments. Alternately, students can identify upcoming milestones and create timelines or visual schedules for planned campaigns or specific periods of time (e.g., for the next year).
Timelines can be designed for print or digital publication in a variety of technical documents. Recommendation reports, proposals, progress reports, status reports, completion reports, and white papers all frequently include timelines. The timeline projects can also be designed for stand-alone use, including as images or infographics to be shared on social media.
Connection to Tech Comm
Timelines are used in technical communication to show past events or to forecast tasks to be completed in the future. Because they visualize events or tasks on a continuum, timelines help the audience understand details quickly and recognize relationships among milestones or scheduled achievements—all by shaping information into a story.
Stories often appear in tech comm because they humanize data, making information accessible for readers. In their Introduction to the Special Issue: “The Work of Storytelling in Technical Communication,” Vealey and Gerding (2021) explain, “Stories and storytelling are, and always have been, at the heart of technical communication (TC). With its emphasis on characters, settings, descriptive language, metaphor, and narrative structure, stories are arguably one of the most effective ways of communicating complex technical and scientific information” (p. 1). As writers create community timelines for this assignment, they are using the same story-building skills they can use in proposals, reports, and even instructions.
Rhetorical xxx for Community Timeline Projects
- persuasion as a goal
- empathy
Timeline Layout & Media Options
Whether part of a community action project or a workplace document, timelines can be designed so that they can be published or shared in many ways, as outlined in the table below:
| Layout & Media Options | Examples |
|---|---|
| Page or spread in printable document |
|
| Interactive webpage element | |
| Static webpage element | |
| Image or series of photos | |
| Infographic | |
| Video |
The layout and media options shown in the table above overlap. Customarily, for example, an infographic is an image; however, it is a specific kind of image with its own genre expectations so it is listed as a separate layout option. Likewise, an infographic could be published on a webpage as a static element. All of the media listed in the table can be shared on social media as photos, videos, or text posts.
Design Principles & Timelines
- Contrast
- Repetition
- Alignment
- Proximity
Components of a Timeline
They can appear in of the following forms:
- Tick marks on a horizontal or vertical line
- Gantt charts, particularly in proposals and progress/status reports
- Flowcharts with a single path or multiple paths for concurrent events or tasks
- Presentations or photo essays with an image and explanatory text on each slide or page
- Tables with cells for date and event or task
- shared as a reel on Instagram or a story on Facebook
- community handbook or report
- on social media
The proposed schedule in a proposal
Technical writers can use timelines anytime they want to show a schedule or process that takes place over time.
Schedule. Most proposals contain a section that shows not only the projected completion date but also key milestones for the project. If you are doing a large project spreading over many months, the timeline would also show dates on which you would deliver progress reports. If you cannot cite specific dates, cite amounts of time for each phase of the project.
above from https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/technicalwriting/chapter/3-4-common-sections-in-proposals/
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/technicalwriting/?s=timeline
https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/do/search/?q=timeline&start=0&context=16209852&facet=
https://pressbooks.library.tamu.edu/howdyorhello/?s=timeline
Project Activities
Preparation
etc.
Assignment Details
- Research background on the community.
- Identify the key milestones and moments that highlight the community’s progress.
- Decide on the best way to share the details on the timeline, working within the community’s needs and expectations.
- Create a storyboard or outline of your timeline, including details on the assets required (e.g., photos, illustrations, explanatory text).
- Title
- Explanatory or introductory text
- Symbol Key (if relevant)
- Timeline entries
- References/Sources (if relevant)
- Acknowledgements
- Copyright and/or Creative Commons information
- Link to more information (or similar reference)
- Connection to cause, request for volunteers, etc.
- Address ethical considerations for the timeline.
- Review your plan for intercultural considerations and make adjustments as necessary. (left to right?)
- Review the storyboard or outline with community stakeholders (or your instructor), asking for input and approval of the plan.
- Make revisions to your plan, based on the input you’ve received.
- Collect the assets for your timeline, following the general guidelines for publication-ready text and other resources. [THIS NEEDS A LINK TO SUCH GUIDELINES]
- Compare your timeline to the details in the project writer’s checklist or criteria or self-check.
- asdf
- asdf
Social movements can benefit from a timeline that shows the growth and work of the movement. Ask writers to review the accomplishments the action group has reached and the levels of need that exist. The timeline can include past events as well as upcoming milestones.
Three Ways To Use Storytelling In Your Technical Communications from Forbes
look for counterstories and antenarratives (see TC nov 2021)
Resources
Digital Resources for Making a Timeline
- Create a timeline for a webpage with Knight Lab’s TimelineJS or the Express Online Timeline Maker.
- Use a series of photos to create a Reel on Instagram.
- Design an infographic timeline, which can be printed or displayed online, with a tool like Canva’s Free Online Timeline Maker.
Assessment and Reflection
stuff
Extensions and Related Resources
stuff
Saved Stuff
https://community.articulate.com/articles/interactive-timeline-examples (Backup)
Read More
Timeline Examples
- Habitat for Humanity Milestones by the decades (Backup Link)
- McKenzie River Trust Celebrates 30 Years (Backup Link)
- Revolutionary User Interfaces (Backup Link)
- Our Work: Growing with Youth over Time from the DREAM 2016 Annual Report, pages 8–9 (Backup Link)
- “Only on Public Radio,” from the 2019 NPR Annual Report, pp. 11–12 (Backup Link)
- Women Pre-World War One: Women’s Role in Peace (Backup Link)
- SiteName (FROM)
Timeline How-To’s & Tools
- Create Active Learning with Timelines (Quality Matters)
- Build projects to build your media literacy!
- Best 16 Interactive Timeline Makers: Free & Paid Software
- ---
- ---
- ---
- How To Create A Simple, Effective Project Timeline In Six Steps, from Forbes (Backup Link)
- Create an Effective Project Timeline in 5 Simple Steps from The Ascent by The Motley Fool (Backup Link)
- teamwork.com (FROM)
- techtarget.com (FROM)
- Create a timeline in PowerPoint for the web, from Microsoft (Backup Link)
- Create a timeline in Excel for Microsoft 365, Word for Microsoft 365, Outlook for Microsoft 365, from Microsoft (Backup Link)
- Make a Timeline, from Knight Lab’s TimelineJS (Backup Link)
- Create & edit a timeline view for Google Sheets, from Google (Backup Link)
- resourcename, from somewhere (Backup Link)
- resourcename, from somewhere (Backup Link)
References
Dush, L. (2022). Drawing Into Being: Charter Graphics and Their Functions. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 36(2), 165–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/10506519211064615
Herrstrom, D. S. (1984). Technical Writing as Mapping Description onto Diagram: The Graphic Paradigms of Explanation. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 14(3), 223–240. https://doi.org/10.2190/8EAN-J605-QL07-PECH
Passera, S. (2018). Flowcharts, Swimlanes, and Timelines: Alternatives to Prose in Communicating Legal-Bureaucratic Instructions to Civil Servants. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 32(2), 229–272. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651917746459
Phillips, S. (2019). Teaching Public, Scientific Controversy: Genetically Modified Mosquitoes in the Technical Writing Classroom. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 49(1), 51–69. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0047281617744507
Vealey, K. P., & Gerding, J. M. (2021). Introduction to the Special Issue: “The Work of Storytelling in Technical Communication.” Technical Communication, 68(4), 1–6. https://www.stc.org/techcomm/2021/10/27/introduction-to-the-special-issue-the-work-of-storytelling-in-technical-communication/
Welhausen, C. A. (2015). Visualizing a Non-Pandemic: Considerations for Communicating Public Health Risks in Intercultural Contexts. Technical Communication, 62(4), 244–257. https://www.stc.org/techcomm/2015/12/10/visualizing-a-non-pandemic-considerations-for-communicating-public-health-risks-in-intercultural-contexts/
Williams, M. F. (2012). Reimagining NASA: A Cultural and Visual Analysis of the U.S. Space Program. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(3), 368–389. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651912439698
Wisniewski, E. C. (2018). Novice Engineers and Project Management Communication in the Workplace. Technical Communication, 65(2), 153–168. https://www.stc.org/techcomm/2018/05/02/novice-engineers-and-project-management-communication-in-the-workplace/