I’ve been working on reconciling a dataset of botanists’ names, which unlike the other datasets I’ve worked with, includes a lot of birth and death dates. I decided to try putting it in Timeline JS, mostly to see if I could figure out how to use it. I ended up using Open Refine to split columns and transform numbers into dates, and then regular old Excel to get rid of empty rows (here’s the Google Sheet I ended up with). I didn’t go through and add media or links to the timeline, so it’s pretty boring, and I haven’t poked around to see why “January” is above each name. It is interesting to see who is contemporaneous, though, and I’m pleased I was able to make this (mostly) work.