historical timeline modelling

Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 8, 2011 at 04:36 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Dr Andrus,
> >I’m very interested in the solution you come up with. When you’ve got it
>worked out, will you share it with us, with perhaps a screen shot or two? Thank
>you.
> >Steve

Steve, it’ll take me a few weeks before a get to this, but I’ll try to remember to post it here (though there is an additional step involved, where I need to duplicate the output and anonymise it for public consumption, so software that can make such duplication easy will be the winner).

What is interesting with most of the timelining software is that time is always conceived of as linear, represented by the horizontal axis. However, for my current purposes a vertical line makes more sense, where I would have the first event on top, and then scroll downwards. For some purposes reverse chronological order could also work, starting with latest first, then scroll down.

While it’s not my case, I could even imagine a cyclical or circular timeline, namely where events recur, and so Jan 2010 and Jan 2011 would be displayed side-by-side, for instance.

Let me outline my process, in case anyone is interested:

1. Create a database with all events in rows in chronological order, with associated data in columns. This step is done. I have this in a colour-coded Excel spreadsheet with 162 rows and 18 columns.

2. Represent the above data visually more intuitively (as some kind of a table, tree or timeline), so it can be more easily seen how many different types of data are associated with each historical event. This is an interim step for my own analysis, not for communicating with other people. Although if it turns out easily digestible and reproducible, it could be used to communicate.

3. Anonymise and output the above analysis results for purposes of communicating with others, as a pretty timeline, tree, table etc., possibly to fit a PowerPoint slide or A4 document, or be able to break it down into a series of slides or A4 pages.