How to personalize a timeline with R?

Question

I want to plot a timeline with R where the periods are easily identifiable, in which I could personalize the visualization of:

• periods
• colors of periods 'boxes'
• lines (color, position)
• position of the text and fit it into the 'boxes'
• axis (size, color, chose the ones to put emphasis)
• dates with the events
• etc

I use timeline library, however I couldn't find how to personalized it. Any suggestions or other libraries?

The output looks like this:

My R code is this:

require(timeline)
f <- "~/Documents/periods.csv"
crono <- read.delim(f, header=TRUE)
f <- "~/Documents/events.csv"
events <- read.delim(f, header=TRUE)
draw <- function() {
   timeline(crono, events,
     text.size = 8,
     text.color = "black",
     num.label.steps = 2,
     event.label.method = 1,
     event.text.size = 7,
     event.label = '',
     event.line = TRUE,
     event.above = FALSE)
     }

png("~/Documents/Timeline.png", width = 1200, 
      height = 800, units = "px", bg = "transparent", res = NA)
draw()
dev.off()

Here there is my data. Series of periods of time:

Name                        Group   Start_year  End_year
First long period            long         1800      1899
Second period               short         1870      1910
Another long period          long         1900      1990
More events on period time  short         1965      1985

and some events during the same time:

Event                   year
Person 1 was born       1870
Person 1 first novel    1895
Build the new building  1905
Death person 1          1930
renovation building     1950
collection              1970

Answer 1

Using package vistime, you could personalize colors of the boxes (if you add "color" column in your data frame or tell vistime with col.colors ='yourColourColumnName', you can add tooltips and distribute into groups (col.groups =).

You can produce plotly-Timelines, highcharter-Timelines or ggplot2-Timelines, all of them are personalizable.

install.packages("vistime")
library(vistime)
crono <- read.csv(text="Name,Group,start_year,end_year
                            First long period,long,1800-01-01,1899-12-31
                            Second period,short,1870-01-01,1910-12-31
                            Another long period,long,1900-01-01,1990-12-31  
                            More events on period time,short,1965-01-01,1985-12-31")
events <- read.csv(text="Name,start_year
                            Person 1 was born,1870-01-01
                            Person 1 first novel,1895-01-01
                            Build the new building,1905-01-01
                            Death person 1,1930-01-01
                            renovation building,1950-01-01
                            collection,1970-01-01")
events$end_year <- NA
events$Group <- "Events"

# or gg_vistime, or hc_vistime
vistime(rbind(crono, events), 
        col.start  = "start_year", 
        col.end = "end_year", 
        col.event = "Name", 
        col.group = "Group")

More info about personalization: https://shosaco.github.io/vistime/

Answer 2

Plotting and personalizing using timeline is easy because the timeline library is built using ggplot2 mechanics. So, if for instance you wanted to make your timeline have the Economist theme, you could do the following (using the code you provided):

library(ggthemes)
library(ggplot2)
p <- timeline(crono, events,
 text.size = 8,
 text.color = "black",
 num.label.steps = 2,
 event.label.method = 1,
 event.text.size = 7,
 event.label = '',
 event.line = TRUE,
 event.above = FALSE)

p + + theme_wsj() + scale_colour_wsj("colors6", "")

All other ggplot2 codes should work as well.