Introduction

Journalists get to work on complex stories that sometimes can not be written in a simple, precise and easily understandable manner if only text is used. Understanding these complex stories can represent a challenge for the audience, which is why journalists use more than one digital storytelling tools to tell the story. In that way the reader is not overwhelmed and his attention is kept.

When a complex story includes chronological data that span through a long period of time and includes numerous events, the best way to interpret it is through an interactive timeline. There are a number of online tools that exist out there which can help you with preparing timelines, but Timemapper Js and Timeline Js are open source tools that are easiest to use and give professional look to your data.

Timeline.Js was created by the Northwestern University’s Knight Lab, led by associate professor Zach Wise, former award winning multimedia producer at the NY Times. So far it was used by many news organizations to visualise stories.

Timemapper was built by Open Knowledge Foundation Labs and it further extends the functionality of TimelineJs with the option to add geographical data that can be displayed on a map. This makes it a mapping tool as well. Also, it allows users to create an account or sign in with their existing twitter account. This provides a stable URL and lists all Timelines, Timemaps or Maps created by single account.

The online tool is free to use and can give very important context to the story by linking it to different times and spaces, showing the relations between events that might seem unrelated and helps the narrative of the story.

Besides journalism, Timemapper can be used as a teaching or training tool for various audiences. It can very successfully present historical data connected to different locations. It can also be used by civil society representatives, especially in collaborative projects that include several countries, environmental projects, as a way to present internal reports etc.

Timemapper can be used to produce three kinds of projects: Timelines (very similar to the ones produced with TimelineJs), Timemaps (that include a map along the Timeline) and just a Map.

More details, as well as the open source code, can be found on the GitHub page.

Modules Objectives

• Learn the basics of Timemapper as a storytelling tool

Prerequisites

• A Google account to use Google spreadsheets
• A Twitter to account to login and save your timemap