The personal activity timeline has become a pervasive representation of personal identity in the life and work context. For example, people use Instagram to share life moments and LinkedIn to share their work achievements. At the same time, timeline events are created and shared with others as a representation of the evolving self, which has to fit in those systems. In this work, we study the case of the academic curriculum vitae (CV), because it is usually required to be public and thus it is visible in personal and organizational repositories. Moreover, the academic CV has a long history, which enables the study of temporal patterns across cultures and times. We demonstrate that the academic CV is shaped by implicit assumptions about what is valuable and it is crafted by contemporary tools. We suggest that the value system that underlies the creation and sharing of timeline events, also shapes the goals and the means that a person employs in everyday life. Since contemporary timelines emphasize the comparative and quantitative aspect of personal contributions, we suggest that further work should consider the collaborative and qualitative aspects.

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Chorianopoulos, K. 2020. My timeline is bigger than yours. Unpublished draft, 5.   BibTeX