The Unbearable Uselessness of Timelines

Timelines or chronologies are textbook staples. No major publishing house produces an American history survey text bereft of a timeline or some similar date/event display. And no publishing house can resist bemoaning how there are never enough pages for all the material that the authors wish to include.

Here's an idea: get rid of the timelines. Timelines take up valuable textbook real estate—usually one-half to a full page. Not only are timelines a waste of time (in more ways than one), but they are also a waste of space. They also violate practically every visual display princple, particularly Edward Tufte’s guidelines. What is the evidence that the timeline presents? Only that in any particular year there was a particular event or events. What is this evidence of? Time marching on? One damn thing after another? Where are the comparisons? Where is the multivariate data? What about the integration of words, numbers, and images? Does a timeline thoroughly describe the source of the evidence? And finally, what is the quality or relevance of timeline evidence?

A timeline is simply a list of years and events without any discernible relationship. What is more, nobody uses them. Can you imagine an instructor announcing, “OK, let's open our books to the timeline.” (Well, maybe some do, but I hope not.) The review questions, recommended reading, and web references fall into the same category. Here are textbook elements that are crying out to be put online. Would not web references be happier on—uh—the Web? And wouldn't a nice printable PDF be a more congenial format for the review questions? Do not, however, make an interactive timeline unless you've got a relationship(s) figured out. Do not.

And here's the payoff, textbook publishers: moving these things to Web on average frees up 30 pages of texbook space in a combined brief edition. That's 30 pages for more text, maps, images and, perhaps, additional coverage of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Imagine what might happen to a full edition.

Comments

[Jennifer M.]

As a librarian who organizes information and a social historian who likes to understand information within context, I disagree that timelines are useless. A timeline, used as a backdrop for key events, helps 'visualize' an issue within a larger context.

[Mike Cosgrave]

We've used chronologies as a student exercise in survey courses, but in setting it I take time in class to look at some chronologies from books and the web and explain to the students that a simple list of dates will not get a good grade. We usually set comparative chronologies, for example the reigns of Frederick and of Maria Theresa and Catherine the Great, and expect students to present the material in some way that shows comparisons between the three. In other words, the chronology does include a question, and it requires students to think about which 'battles and dates' to include based on their significance with respect to the question at hand.

I have some samples of the student work in my office 'someplace' but I don't think I have yet scanned them for my teaching portfolio

[kellyinkansas]

Interesting food for thought, Paula. The next edition of Berkin's Making America is going to have the US events juxtaposed with world events to help provide a global context. But you have me thinking about we could do with it online.

[manan ahmed]

Totally Agree. I hate the teleology asserted in a timeline. 'This' may have come before 'that'. But is 'this' really all we need to note for 'that'? or vice versa?

"moving these things to Web on average frees up 30 pages of texbook space"

I would imagine that the web allows us better ways to construct an "eventline" - something along the lines of kinship charts that anthropologists use; except in our version, not all events are related to each other, directly.