Phil 1.31.20

7:00 – 4:00 PhD

  • Dissertation. Here’s how to do a timeline (support.office.com/en-us/article/create-a-timeline). Nope – this is horrible
  • Let’s try Python. Woohoo! It’s overkill, but looks great: Timeline
  • Here’s the code: 
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from datetime import datetime


names = ['Le Bon', 'Arendt', 'Martindale', 'Moscovici & Doise', 'Grunbaum',
         'Kauffman', 'Card & Pirolli', 'Bacharach', 'Olfati-Saber', 'Munson & Resnick', 'Stephens',
         'Galotti', 'Bastos']

dates = ['1895', '1951', '1991', '1994', '1998', '1993', '1999', '2006', '2007', '2010', '2011', '2017', '2019']

namedates = []
for i in range(len(names)):
    namedates.append("{} ({})".format(names[i], dates[i]))


# Convert date strings (e.g. 2014-10-18) to datetime
dates = [datetime.strptime(d, "%Y") for d in dates]

# Choose some nice levels
levels = np.tile([-5, 5, -4, 4, -3, 3, -2, 2, -1, 1],
                 int(np.ceil(len(dates)/6)))[:len(dates)]

# Create figure and plot a stem plot with the date
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8.8, 4), constrained_layout=True)
ax.set(title="Literature")

markerline, stemline, baseline = ax.stem(dates, levels,
                                         linefmt="C3-", basefmt="k-",
                                         use_line_collection=True)

plt.setp(markerline, mec="k", mfc="w", zorder=3)

# Shift the markers to the baseline by replacing the y-data by zeros.
markerline.set_ydata(np.zeros(len(dates)))

# annotate lines
vert = np.array(['top', 'bottom'])[(levels > 0).astype(int)]
for d, l, r, va in zip(dates, levels, namedates, vert):
    ax.annotate(r, xy=(d, l), xytext=(-3, np.sign(l)*3),
                textcoords="offset points", va=va, ha="right")

# remove y axis and spines
ax.get_yaxis().set_visible(False)
for spine in ["left", "top", "right"]:
    ax.spines[spine].set_visible(False)

ax.margins(y=0.1)
plt.subplots_adjust(left=0.1, right= 0.9)
plt.show()
  • PhD Day