The Timeline Beta Blog

Take a look at this picture of the wall:

Now, besides shivering at the institutional lighting (the picture was taken at night,) notice the cluster of events at the left. Events taped up above the actual line precede 1847, our start point. On the far right, you can see a few lonely posts that come after 1872, which is when this line stops.

Why is this interesting? Well, this picture was taken at the end of the third week of the semester, which is to say two weeks into using the timeline. What are we reading at this point? Well, we’ve read some chunks of Les Misérables (published in 1862), and we’re partway through Madame Bovary (published in 1857). We’re in a course about the literature of the Second Empire in France. What you’re seeing on the wall is a mere pittance of posts about the time period when these novels were published and read, and a great flurry of posts about the time period in which they are set. The students are principally interested in researching the details of Jean Valjean and Emma’s lives, not the details of Victor and Gustave’s lives. Except, um, Jean Valjean and Emma are fictional.

I don’t see this as a problem. I certainly haven’t done anything to discourage it. However, it does bring up a feature we’ve been tossing around, which is how to represent different categories of knowledge. On the simplest level, that could mean using blue dots for literary events and green dots for scientific events and so forth. This has great potential to be unmanageable, especially since once multiple courses are using the timeline, those colors could be assigned to mean different things in different courses. Here, blue means literature, but over in the science building, blue could mean reptilian. You see the problem.

But looking at this wall, I see the clear need for at least two categories. One category to represent the history of the world in which we live – and another category to represent the real historical context of fictional characters. When Emma was born, for example. Except that she wasn’t. We’ve a post up there (my own, even!) that tells when Jean Valjean got out of prison. It’s an interesting puzzle, because Hugo situates it very specifically relative to the final days of the Empire, but at the same time - it never happened.

Finally, it’s a note to anyone who is trying to decide how many sheets of foam core to hang on the wall. The timeline on our wall covers the 2nd Empire (1852-1870). We’ve spent most of our time recently in the 1830s… with Emma.