Ordering of timeline is wrong

[Eugene Yang]

Hi There,

Am encountering this very bug on Chrome. 

I've got a timeline with start date by years only. See attached google doc image.

The order in the timeline though doesn't follow the sequence in the google doc when in Chrome. This only occurs when i have more than 46 items in the google doc. If less the sequence shows up correctly.

Anybody encounters a similar issue?

Thanks 

[Zach Wise]

It puts them on the timeline according to date, not according to the spreadsheet order. It visualizes events according to time.

[Eugene Yang]

Thanks Zach.

In that case, how does it visualize events with the same date? i.e. three items with the exact same year.

[Zach Wise]

It doesn't distinguish. There is a javascript array that is sorted by date.

[Eugene Yang]

i realise this happens only when i've got a few events happening within the same year. 

1 solution would be to make bring it down to day or month specific to order correctly but if we're not able to specify it down to that level, is there a way we can ensure the ordering is correct for events within the same year?

[Zach Wise]

It sorts all the way down to milliseconds, if that's what you're asking. 

[Eugene Yang]

Thanks so much for the feedback so far.

i was actually referring to how we can sort the order of items within a year, without having to add the detailed month, day or time to it. 

i.e start year is going to be "1995" for 5 consecutive rows and i need it to be shown in the same order as the rows.

[Erin H]

Did you ever figure this out? I'm having the same problem for one year of my timeline and only when it displays in Chrome. All the events are randomized for one year, but appear exactly as entered in Firefox and IE.

[Joe Germuska]

Erin:

Is your timeline (and the data that drives it) somewhere on the web where we can look at it?

Thanks

  Joe

[Erin H]

Sure -- the timeline is posted at www.mrs.org/timeline. The data is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqDhW4benSa0dHBCeVExY3RMMzY4bHo1NVBpam5qYWc&usp=sharing. 

The ordering is off for 2008 and (I just noticed) also for 2012. 

[Joe Germuska]

I see: the problem is simply that Timeline is not really designed to handle so many events with the same date.

If you use tags, you can force Timeline to use six rows instead of three to display events, but Timeline is constrained about how many rows it can use to automatically lay out all the dates. And in any case, if you have more than six events on the same "date", Timeline is going to end up having some of them overlap each other. 

May I suggest that not only for technical reasons, but also for clarity and better storytelling (which is really Timeline's mission), that you consider consolidating events into fewer slides? There's no reason you can't have one slide that talks about all, or at least several of the things that happened in single year. For example, in 2010, you could probably combine the two slides about new events and the two slides about new publications into one for each of those topics. 

If you can't consolidate, then you probably need to figure out months of those years to use as anchors, instead of ascribing so many events to the entire year.

I hope this helps.

--

Joe Germuska • joege...@northwestern.edu • @JoeGermuska
Chief Nerd, Knight Lab • http://KnightLab.Northwestern.edu • @KnightLab

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[Erin H]

Thank you!