The above timeline represents the 26 magazines and anthologies that currently make up the MJP’s collection of digitized periodicals. (We’ve not included on the timeline any of the 24 single issues that make up the MJP’s 1910 Collection.) This timeline offers a convenient way to see when an MJP journal began and ended, and where, in time, it overlaps with other journals in our collection. You can also use the timeline to access the MJP’s collections of these journals.
The software we’ve used to produce this timeline comes from Simile Widgets. People interested in creating their own timelines using this open-source software can find instructions here. The MJP timeline consists of just two files: a JSON data file that feeds info about the journals into an html file that displays the timeline.
How the Timeline Works
The timeline is set so it will automatically take you to 1910. You can then scroll backwards or forwards to view MJP journals that were published before or after that date. The timeline will scroll (in both directions) to infinity, though the MJP journals range only from 1896 to 1922.
There are two ways to scroll through the timeline: you can use the bottom bar, which is measured by yearly intervals, to speed through the chart, or use the top bar, measured by monthly intervals, to move more gradually.
The bottom bar offers a broad overview of the information that appears magnified in the top bar. In the middle of the bottom bar, a highlighted span of years relates the two bars by representing (in small) the information that is currently visible in the top bar.
IMPORTANT FEATURE: In the top bar, you can access information about each journal if you click on the name of the journal or on the timeline tape for it. When the pop-up window appears, you can then link to the MJP’s collection page for the journal by clicking on the journal’s name at the top. (For journals represented by individual nodes, clicking on the journal name in the pop-up window will take you instead to the contents page for that individual issue.) In this way, the timeline offers an alternative to the MJP’s Journals Page for accessing its collection of digitized journals.
Reading the Timeline
On either bar, the date is indicated by the vertical grey line that appears immediately to the left of the name of the month or the number of the year.
The start and end dates for each timeline tape correspond to the dates when the first and last issues of that MJP journal were published. This means that the length of the tape, which connects the two dates, will appear to be one issue shorter than the actual number of issues published: e.g., the tape for The Blue Review, which represents three issues beginning on May 1913 and ending on July 1913, stretches across the months of May and June.
Editorial Decisions
In this visualization of the MJP journals, we use a continuous timeline tape to represent each journal whose issues appeared on a weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly basis over a mostly uninterrupted stretch of time. For journals that did not last long enough to produce a continuous publication record (e.g., Blast, Tyro) or for which the interval between issues was longer than a month (e.g., Coterie or Wheels, which was published annually), we’ve used discrete nodes to represent each of the magazine’s issues, instead of a tape, as the nodes offer a more precise view of the journal’s publication history. For those journals whose publication record is a mix of these two patterns (e.g., Rhythm, whose first four issues are quarterlies and last ten are monthlies), we’ve decided a use a single tape to represent the entire run, while alerting users to the change in periodicity in the pop-up window about the journal.
Because this timeline requires that we assign a day and month to the publication dates of each journal, we have chosen the first of the month as the default date of publication for any journal that lists only the month and year of its appearance. And for The Tyro and Wheels—the two MJP journals that list only the year of their publication—we have assigned “January 1” as the default publication date for the first, and assigned “December 1” as the publication date of the second when a more precise date could not be located inside the magazine.
The assignment of a color to a journal is arbitrary except for those journals that were published by the same editor or continued a previous publication under a different name—in which case we have given the same color to the related journals: Rhythm and The Blue Review; The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist; Blast and The Tyro.