TimeToast Tutorial

TimeToast is a web-based timeline maker that allows users to create simple timelines that are easy to embed into other DH projects. This resource is excellent for sharing historical information and its low learning curve makes it highly useful for someone who wants to create a decent timeline quickly. This can be used for teachers making lesson plans, students creating presentations for historical events, and for displaying important information such as life cycles, project timelines/progress reports, and organizational reasons. There are multiple payment options, that improve the already great capabilities of this site with add-ons like collaboration, comment moderation, and freedom to create numerous timeline drafts at once. This powerful tool is helpful for creating timelines that, as we have seen in class, can be a useful way of sharing information of humanities research. With timelines, you can display changes over time, draw clear connections between important events. Timelines also make for great interactive displays and boast many creative designs that present information in an engaging way.

Making a timeline with TimeToast:

• Step 1) Go to TimeToast and press “make your first timeline” to get started!

• Step 2) Choose a payment plan and create an account (There is a free option!)

• Step 3) Click “Add timeline”

Unfortunately, with the public access, there is very limited collaboration, and you can’t collaborate with team members or create groups to work with.

• Step 4) Once you click add timeline, you’ll have to enter all the information such as the title, whether or not to publish right away, who can edit, and, similarly to WordPress, any categories to put the post in and a background photo.
• Note: It must be public to be shared at all

• Step 5) From here you can add events or add timespans through the two buttons on the screen. Let’s say we want to make a timeline following the lifecycle of a frog. You would title the first event “eggs laid” and the description could be something along the lines of “After a frog lays her frogspawn in a body of water, where her babies will develop for anywhere between a few days to several weeks”. You can even add links in the event descriptions!

Remember: When adding events, the year and title are both necessary and you cannot add an event without that information!

Here what your timeline could look like after adding a few more events:

• Step 6) Now that you have your timeline, you can view it by clicking the Dashboard button in the menu on the left, and clicking on your published timeline.

Step 7) Now you have your own scrubbable timeline! You can used the scrubber at the bottom to zoom in/out on your events and add tags at the bottom to make your timeline easier to find!

Have fun making your own timelines, I hope this was helpful!

Further Resources:

• Here is a link to a TimeToast tutorial video from 2020. Though it may be a little outdated, it can still be very helpful when getting started!
• This simple blog is also very helpful and goes through what TimeToast is and where it can be useful! Even going so far as to offer resources particularly geared toward teachers, it truly shares the most important details about the product itself.