I’m currently writing an article on digital currencies for a future, small-run magazine edited by Crazy Little Things. To complement the article, and to try to learn some new data-journalism skills I decided to do also a timeline of the most relevant digital currencies for the past 20+ years. This is the result:

How it’s done

I used Inkscape to draw the SVG file: timeline, bars and text, and create the layout. Then I added basic interactivity by hand using a text-editor. The content is based on my own research for the article. I plan to include in further releases a csv with the source data used in the timeline so it’s easier for others to replicate it using other tools.

Regarding interactivity, right now you can uncover some contextual information hovering your mouse over certain years, and click on the names of the digital currencies to go to their website or get more information. I plan to add more contextual information on the currencies, explaining the type of currency and the reason it dissapeared, if needed.

Improve it

The project (just an SVG file) is hosted on Github. You can download it, fork it, open a new issue, send ideas or suggestions. The project is under a NC-BY-SA Creative Commons licence. This is my first time using Git and Github for a project like this, and I’ll share my experience in a separate post. I can tell you now that I’ll definitely keep using it.

I’m also open to criticism on the timeline content: Did I miss a critical digital currency project? Should I remove something from the timeline? Is any of the data wrong? I’m all ears.