Timeline Research Process

In constructing and/or viewing digital visualizations of context, I find that I am able to learn more through researching contextual moments and individuals. For example, in researching for my group’s timeline, I gained insight about historical moments that impacted the women’s rights movement during the time Herland was published. Through this I could better understand how Gilman formulated this ideal society to complement the one she was living in.

My research process for this timeline was relatively simple. The main source I used to gather information was Google. In the beginning, I searched “women’s suffrage movement” and found a few websites that had created timelines to highlight key moments leading up to the ratification of the 19th amendment. I wanted to make sure that the information was accurate so I looked at multiple timelines to see what events repeated and what events were only in one timeline. From there I found key information about my three events. However I also wanted to look up Gilman’s personal life to relate between the events of her time, the story of Herland, and her own personal life. So I looked up “Charlotte Perkins Gilman” and started with biography.com.

I read through their information but there weren’t many details so I went to her page on wikipedia. I read the information and looked at the footnotes to see that a lot of the information came from her autobiography.

After this I went to Google Images and searched the terms “NAWSA” and “NAOWS.” From there I found a picture of the headquarters of the NAWSA to use in my timeline and an image of a pamphlet distributed by the NAOWS. The internet played a significant role in my research. Otherwise I would not have had any of this information. I could have gone to a library and done research, however even librarians would use the internet to search for information in the library database about my research.

In researching, using the internet over going to the library is much more expansive. There is information about pretty much anything and everything. However, trying to sift through all of this information can be time consuming. Therefore, key terms are necessary. I am still getting used to creating key terms that help in narrowing my research, but using these can limit the results one gets.

Another struggle that I had was having so much information that it was too much for this project. Between information about the events I chose and information about Gilman’s life, seeing it all in the timeline made it look cluttered. I am used to writing research papers or literature reviews that often need a lot of research, but this is much more minimal. After class discussion and seeing other timelines I had a better idea of how to improve my own events within this timeline format. I think that with this less words are better and visual images and videos are important.

I did a visual project last semester in one of my classes and dealt with similar problems of having too many words and not enough images. I think it’s just a result of usually writing papers, but both projects have been learning experiences for me.