Identities timeline

I've spent a couple of days trying out the Simile project's Timeline JavaScript widget.  This was partly inspired by looking at the Zoomii interface and being impressed with what can be done with JavaScript.  The Timeline widget ingests a data file representing events and displays them on a time line which can be scrolled through horizontally.  My first timeline is still a bit rough, but since I'm not sure how much further we will take it, I thought it was worth sharing.

The timeline shows the top 1,000 people in WorldCat Identities (by number of library holdings) plotted according to the first date that Identities has associated with each name.  Sometimes that is a birth date, other times just the first publication date associated with them.  It always seems to be the case that whenever you display information in a new way, anomalies in the data that were hidden now become apparent.  I've noticed a few in the timeline, but will resist the urge to point them out here.  Incorporating more of the information from the Virtual International Authority File would help, since it has more complete date information.

Simile Timeline is quite flexible.  I was able to add a condensed scrollable view at the bottom of the page, as well as expand 1770-1980 to display by year while the rest of the timeline is by decade.  I started out trying to use the code in the subversion repository, but since all the documentation is for older code, ended up using the older JavaScript code hosted at MIT.

Scaling this up to handling more than a thousand Identities looks difficult.  Even at this size the scrolling is uneven on many workstations, and more names make the problem worse.  My original hope was to have tens of thousands of names, but that doesn't seem practical right now.

--Th