University of Hertfordshire

This paper discusses the use of autonomous, asynchronous, timelines to analyse personal and organisational experiences of COVID-19 using an online platform, LucidSpark. We evaluate the benefits and limitations of this approach and highlight findings in three areas: aesthetics, the balance of personal and organisational information, and the identification of key events. We argue that timelines provide fascinating data about participants’ personal and professional experiences of COVID-19. Then, we discuss the limitations of the data, and suggest how the method may be refined and used in combination with other approaches. By themselves, timelines provide limited data about how events relate to each other. Instead, timelines serve as useful pre-interview activities that should be combined with additional methods.