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historical timeline modelling
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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.
Posted by Zman
Mar 8, 2011 at 05:10 PM
Here’s something with a different flavor - but interesting given your question.
Recorded Future
https://www.recordedfuture.com/how-media-analytics-works.html
Zman
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 8, 2011 at 06:18 PM
Jack Crawford wrote:
>There are a lot of mindmappers out there, including heavy hitters like
>MindManager and iMindMap.
>
>Alex, what makes MindView stand out for
>you?
Jack,
True; all mindmapping applications I’ve tried have their own particular strengths:
- Mind Manager is close to an industry standard so benefits from several plug-ins; interestingly, the Gannt chart plug-in has now been integrated into the main program.
- Mind Genius can create expandable/collapsible excel spreadsheets which are very useful for financial overviews.
- Concept Mindmap can read OPML directly and is very flexible design-wise (thanks to its integration with Concept Draw).
- Xmind is cross-platform, and Linux is fast becoming a very productive OS for me.
- FreeMind (and now its spin-off Freeplane) is, well, free, cross-platform and can exchange maps in Mind Manager format…
... etc
- Re Mindview, 2-3 things mainly make it stand out for me:
(a) it’s much more business looking* than most of the others,
(b) it can export AND re-import from MS Office applications;
(c) most importantly, the ease with which one can attach numerical values to branches and perform aggregate calculations is brilliant. With most other programs I need to create my project plan as a mind map, and organise my resources in Excel. Why? Because not all resources can be expressed as person-days as most mind mappers would have one believe.
In fact, prior to MindView I used a now redundant program called B-liner (http://www.varatek.com/) as a hierarchical spreadsheet. I guess my mind simply can’t think in tables…
*Here’s a similar statement from another contributor in this forum in the past:
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/5490
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 8, 2011 at 06:23 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>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.
My own idea of the perfect depiction of time is a spiral, but I have yet to find a PIM that can display this easily.
Re the vertical approach, here’s a minimalistic depiction that I find very effective: http://37signals.com/about
You should be able to do something like this quite easily with Excel or Smart Draw (if you want to make it look better)
Posted by Gorski
Mar 9, 2011 at 12:40 PM
One more thing to throw in the mix—TimeFlow:
https://github.com/FlowingMedia/TimeFlow/wiki/