In many Digital Humanities (DH) projects, timelines may be treated as neutral containers for historical information. Timelines were originally designed to support students in their knowledge of history in the Western tradition by Joseph Priestley (1765). Yet scholars such as Johanna Drucker (2020) and feminist data theorists have argued that visual schemas are interpretive and value-laden.

For the project Alice Thornton’s Books (https://thornton.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/), a four-year project funded by the AHRC (UK) and led by historians at the University of Edinburgh, in collaboration with us at King’s Digital Lab (KDL), King’s College London, we sought to examine our assumptions around timelines. Our goal was to create a human-centred, emotionally resonant visualisation of the dramatic seventeenth-century life of Alice Thornton (1626-1707), whose annotated autobiographical writings (https://github.com/kingsdigitallab/alice-thornton) document her life’s rites of passage, political upheaval, historical events, and all the textures of lived experience. We hoped to design ‘a different kind of timeline’, one that foregrounds the humanity of its subject and approaches the necessary reductions of visualisation with care and intentionality.

Our approach emerged through a collaboration between a Research Software Engineer (RSE) and a Research Software UI/UX Designer at KDL. Despite research into the value of designers in DH (Radzikowska / Ruecker 2022), this way of working is anecdotally uncommon in many DH and RSE environments. This pairing allowed us to integrate design thinking directly into the software development process, building on best practices in user-centred design. Our workflow aligned with the Double Diamond framework (https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-resources/framework-for-innovation/): iterative discovery of requirements, exploratory concept generation, prototyping, and continuous review.

Early stages involved a shared Miro board (https://miro.com) synthesising project partner expectations, visual references, and examples of timelines that informed our thinking. Drawing on inspiration from Data Feminism (D’Ignazio / Klein 2020), we foregrounded the tension between representing a life as data and honouring its embodied, emotional reality. The designer produced rapid, low-fidelity sketches and prototypes in Illustrator (https://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator), exploring alternatives to conventional linear forms, favouring curved, organic shapes that could signal the rhythms and ruptures of Thornton’s life.

Design thinking was complemented by data exploration from the software engineering side. Working in Jupyter notebooks (https://jupyter.org/), we analysed the TEI-XML encoded events, rendered in Julian dates with varying degrees of precision, to understand the patterns that might inform the visual grammar. Patterns included the illnesses that appeared throughout Thornton’s life; political turbulence that erupted in the 1640s; her pregnancies that occurred in the following decade; and her writing diminishing after widowhood. These shaped the narrative logic of the visualisation and helped us understand what the design needed to convey. We shared exploratory notebooks and prototypes with project partners as part of an iterative feedback process, ensuring that methodological choices remained transparent and grounded.

Our implementation choices were guided by KDL’s commitments to sustainability and accessibility. Rather than rely solely on complex JavaScript visualisation libraries, we adopted a hybrid approach: using D3.js only for data binding and generation of semantic HTML tables, while styling and interactions were crafted through CSS. This aimed at long-term maintainability, screen-reader compatibility, and full designer control over visual form. The resulting visualisation combines curves with interactive elements that reveal detailed events, while preserving an accessible table-based fallback for non-visual users. In doing so, our work contributes to ongoing conversations about inclusive design in DH and the need for visualisations that serve users with diverse abilities.

The collaborative process itself was iterative and tightly interwoven. The designer prototyped structural concepts in CodePen (https://codepen.io/) using placeholder data; the RSE transformed the project’s mixed-source JSON data into a structure the designer could manipulate in GitHub Codespaces (https://github.com/features/codespaces); and together we refined interactions, layout, and accessibility features. Communication flowed continuously through Slack, in-person meetings, and bi-weekly online meetings with academic partners. Each iteration revealed new design possibilities or technical constraints, refining our shared sense of what a ‘human-centred’ timeline could be.

Our poster reflects on this joint process and the resulting visualisation. It offers a case study for how design thinking and cross-role collaboration can produce DH outputs that try to challenge assumptions in data visualisation and foreground the humanity of historical subjects. This addresses diversity by integrating a wider range of expertise in the DH process and because the content we aimed to visualise is from an underrepresented category of writer in the modern period. In addition, we encouraged engagement by advancing accessible and sustainable visualisation practice. The poster will be of interest to DH researchers, RSEs, designers, and those exploring human-centred alternatives to traditional visualisation forms.