I have worked with TimelineJS and StoryMap before for other classes as well as for my job. For Professor Moon’s Immigrant Alexandria course I created both a Story Map as well as a Google Map as a part of a group project.
This is an example of a Timeline JS I made for practice when I first learned how to use the tool.
Here is an example of a Story Map I made for the seminar with Professor Moon. I also have made quiet a few Google maps for other projects.
Since I had already played around with Story Map and Google maps for previous projects I tested out CartoDB. I used the data set from the site that gave an introduction to the program. I did not include a link for the map I made using the Dutch art research, because it was the sample practice tool and not something I independently created. Getting around the learning curve for the site, I think it is awesome how it takes data sets and makes them look so professional and easily interactive. When I had seen the maps by the Digital Scholarship Lab in our earlier class exploration I was so impressed with the interactive maps they had created. Knowing now that they used CartoDB, a tool accessible for me to use in future projects.
As cool and interesting as the CartoDB maps were I felt that they probably would not work well for my groups site. We are not really dealing with datasets and our primary goal is digitization of the diaries, so collecting datasets possibly goes off course from our goal.
There is the potential that my group would use one of the mapping tools to represent the information from the diaries. This will be more clear once we go through the collection in the digitizing phase, and have a better understanding if we have solid information for a map. It is also possible that we could make a timeline, however I am unsure if that will flow with the way we decide to set up our site.
