historical timeline modelling

Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 7, 2011 at 04:53 PM

I’d appreciate some suggestions for software to do following. I’ve conducted several years’ worth of research, where I collected different types of data about different events over time. Now, I’d like to summarise all the data associated with specific events and lay them out along a timeline, also for presentation purposes, to communicate what specific data I have about particular events.

One way to do this is to create a long, long table, where the row is the event, and the column is the type of data collected (or the other way round). Excel or Word could do this. However, the table visually is not the most successful for presentation purposes, as one event might just have one type of data (perhaps in cell 5), while other events may have 9 events.

Ideally, I’d like to present it almost as a 2-D tree that would have some branches or nodes that are thicker, while others are thinner. Any fancy solutions out there for something like this?

I was wondering if Treesheets could be an alternative to Word/Excel? Or some mindmapping software? I do like Cmap Tools but I’m not sure it can really handle a massive tree (4 years of data, of about 50-70 events, possible up to 1 to 20 different types of data / event ). Thanks!