Poster presented at Digital Humanities 2014, in Lausanne, Switzerland (with Sara Sikes, of the Massachusetts Historical Society's Adams Papers).

1. Adams Family Legacy
Visualizing the World of an American Presidential Family
Caitlin Christian-Lamb
Associate Archivist, Davidson College
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.
Sara Sikes
Digital Projects Editor, e Adams Papers
Introduction
Spanning 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.
Conclusions
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 .
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 emBoston 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.
Methods
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.