Adams Family Legacy

Visualizing the World of an American Presidential Family

While an earlier version of the timeline was displayed only as a static table, this newly created Adams Timeline (www.masshist.org/adams/timeline) visualizes temporal information and allows for the analysis of the intersection and overlapping of interrelated events.

Caitlin Christian-Lamb Associate Archivist, Davidson College

Sara SikesDigital Projects Editor, � e Adams Papers

IntroductionSpanning the years 1735 to 1889, the Adams Timeline is a searchable collection of key events and happenings in the lives of 2nd U.S. President John Adams, First Lady Abigail Adams and three succeeding generations of their immediate family. Members of the Adams family were deeply involved a tumultuous era of American history and were keen observers of national and domestic politics, as well as day-to-day activities on their beloved family farm. � e collection of Adams Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society is the most comprehensive and historically complete family collection held by any American cultural institution, forming the basis of numerous digital and analog resources. � e creation of the Adams Timeline achieves the dual results of an interactive presentation of historical data and ful� llment of a need in the research community to readily access biographical info and collection highlights.

Research Portal

Residing on the website of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the timeline acts as a portal for locating di� erent types of Adams family information held by the Society. � is was an initially unforeseen bene� t of creating the timeline, but the addition of hyperlinks to transcriptions and images of original documents allowed for ready access to related materials, including collections of letters and transcriptions, images of diary entries and annotated documents from our Adams Papers Digital Edition.

A well-designed data visualization allows users to quickly spot patterns, trends, clusters, gaps and outliers and ful� lls Maureen Stone’s de� nition of information visualization, as “the creation of graphical representations of data that harness the pattern-recognition skills of the human visual system.”1 � e Adams timeline now allows for users to readily make connections through time, understand relations between events and within context and quickly scan a dataset in ways that were not possible within a static table. It also provides a new access point to the vast body of historical material housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society. We envision the timeline as a � rst step in building additional web tools, such as a map of Adams family residences or a visualization of the correspondence nework of a family deeply connected to early American history.

1 Maureen Stone, “Information Visualization: Challenge for the Humanities,” Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship, 145:43–56 (March 2009). Available at www.clir.org/pubs/resources/promoting-digital-scholarship-ii-clir-neh/stone11_11.pdf .

Conclusions

<event start=“Oct 25 1764 00:00:00 GMT-0500” title=“JA and AA Marry”> <span class=“displayDate”>25 October 1764</span> <img class=“illustration” src=“IMAGE_FOLDER/abigailsmall.jpg” alt=“Portrait of Abigail Adams” title=“Painted circa 1766 by Benjamin Blyth.” /> <img class=“illustration” src=“IMAGE_FOLDER/johnsmall.jpg” alt=“Portrait of John Adams” title=“Painted circa 1766 by Benjamin Blyth.” /> <p> <person c� d=“adams-john1735”>John Adams</person> and <person c� d=“adams-abigail1744”>Abigail Smith</person> marry in Weymouth, Mass. </p> <p> Object of the Month, March 2008: <a href=“/objects/2008march.cfm” target=”_blank” title=“Click to open in a new browser window.” > Blyth Portraits. </a> </p></event> <event start=“Aug 01 1765 00:00:00 GMT-0500” end=“Mon Oct 31 1765 00:00:00 GMT-0500” durationEvent=“true” title=“JA Publishes Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law”> <span class=“displayDate”>August&#8211;October 1765</span> <p> <person c� d=“adams-john1735”>John Adams</person> publishes “Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law” in the <em>Boston Gazette.</em> </p></event>

XML Source File

Designed to handle speci� c dates, time spans, events, images and links, the timeline is rendered from data in an underlying XML � le. Each individual is also encoded with a unique identi� er, allowing for � ltering of events relevant to a key person and the creation of a focused timeline for an individual rather than the whole family.

� is timeline was built as a customized adaptation of the SIMILE timeline module (http://simile-widgets.org/timeline/), part of a suite of open-source data visualiza-tion widgets originally developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is hosted by an HMTL document on the Massachusetts Historical Society website, which includes scripts from the SIMILE project to power to the timeline view.

� e Adams Timeline is the product of a collaborative e� ort between several sta� members at the Massachusetts Historical Society, past and present: Sara Sikes (Associate Editor of Digital Projects), who served as the project manager, as well as research support and quality control; Caitlin Christian-Lamb (formerly a Re-search Associate), who acted as the primary XML encoder, researcher and � rst line of testing and quality control; and Travis Lilleberg (formerly Assistant Web Developer), who worked on the overall design and coded XSLT for the timeline. � e three core project members were greatly aided by the cumulative knowledge of several editors of the Adams Papers Editorial Project, who provided addition-al research, proofreading and revisions throughout the development process. � e Society’s Web Development Group, especially Bill Beck (Web Developer), also o� ered feedback on the format and functionality of the timeline and facilitated its seamless integration in the institution’s redesigned website.

Methods