The objective of this assignment was to create a populated digital timeline utilizing the website timeline.js. The aim of this timeline was to tell the story, life and work of Nano Nagle. This project was in conjunction with Nano Nagle Place.
Nano Nagle Place is an unexpected oasis in the centre of bustling Cork City, a place that celebrates Nano Nagle’s vision of empowerment through education, community inclusion and spiritual engagement for a contemporary world. The complex houses a museum, heritage rooms, gardens, the wonderful Good Day Deli, both a design and gift shop, and a Cork focused book shop in the museum. The beautifully regenerated convent buildings are home to several educational charities. Whether you’re a local or a visitor, come and discover Cork at Nano Nagle Place.
– Nano Nagle Place Website Homepage
In the Nano Nagle Place populated timeline project, I was team lead for my group. This was the second of two projects in the “Curation and Dissemination in the Digital Age” module. The first was to construct a Nano Nagle-based digital story. We chose to use Instagram as our platform to tell the life story of Nano in an engaging and and interactive way. You can visit my blog post about the project here, and the Instagram account here.
As team lead, it was my role to arrange the group’s thoughts and concepts generated through online meetings, and organize them into a logical and interesting story that could be integrated into the timeline format. We utilized Google Jamboard quite frequently for this project to share ideas and develop aspects of the project that were not informative enough.
The first step in this organizing process was to explore a variety of *sources available to us, including Nano Nagle Place, in order to map out Nano Nagle‘s life in chronological order. This was important to do as our first step as it would ensure that we wouldn’t forget or mix up any of the events that we needed to include.
The preliminary headlines that I wanted our timeline to follow were:
- Early Life.
- Life in France.
- Family Loss.
- Second Journey to France.
- First School.
- Schools Continued.
- Return to Paris.
- The Ursuline Sisters.
- Demand for Education.
- Building A Convent.
- Institute of the Charitable Instruction.
- Mother Mary of St John.
- The First Vows.
- The Convent Completed.
- Nano Nagle Passes Away.
By categorizing Nano Nagle’s life and work in these sub headers it would ensure that when it came time to feed the information into the Excel Spreadsheet that we had a guide to follow. Following outlining the sub-headers for the timeline we sectioned them off and filled in the information for each one from our research.
Once we had the information and the sub-headers situated in the one document it was time to log onto timeline.js. Personally this was my first time using the website and also first time using Excel. At first I did find it challenging but after a few googled questions and some online tutorials things started to fall into place.
I assigned each member of the group a time period in Nano Nagle’s life. This made sure that we spread out the workload evenly among us so that no one would feel under pressure or burdened by a large amount of tasks to get done. We began to implement our research and information into the Excel Spreadsheet provided by timeline.js.
Once all the information had been filled in, it was time to try and find fitting media for the slides. This meant going back to our assigned time period and finding images that fit the content of the slide. This task was challenging to do as there are not an abundance of images and visual material from Nano Nagle and her work. I would definitely like to review this section of the project in the future and develop the media aspect further.
Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the assignment and the role of team lead. The group was very interested and motivated to deliver a strong and engaging assignment both in the timeline and the digital story and were a treat to work with. If I were to approach this project again in the future, the one thing that I would like to improve on as I mentioned briefly above would be the use of more media and visual elements. I struggled to use the background feature of the excel sheet as I was unfamiliar with the software but I believe with more time I would be able to use this tool.
Prior to this assignment, I had never been exposed to the story of Nano Nagle’s life. Through creating this timeline and the digital story I am glad to have learned about her work and her legacy. I am also grateful that I learned more about my city’s educational background in the process!
You can visit our online timeline here – Timeline of Nano Nagle’s Life
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