Timeline software
June 9, 2020 1:14 PM Subscribe
I am looking for software which will take strings of text or images with an associated date or time and place them proportionally on a timeline. At one scale, that would mean placing things by year on a timeline of decades; on another, placing things by day over a span of several years; and on another, placing things by minute or second within a shorter span.
It's crucial that the timeline be proportional, so if there are entries for 1920, 1921, and 1960 it will put the right chronological amount of space between them. It's also crucial that the placement be automatic, and not based on me calculating how long the line segments should be to draw them manually.
There have been questions about this before (1, 2, 3, 4) but my timelines are for information and publication purposes, not project planning. I looked at the TimeMap software recommended in 2006, but it seems to be web-based (not something I can run on my own machine) and produces output which to me is really ugly.
It's crucial that the timeline be proportional, so if there are entries for 1920, 1921, and 1960 it will put the right chronological amount of space between them. It's also crucial that the placement be automatic, and not based on me calculating how long the line segments should be to draw them manually.
There have been questions about this before (1, 2, 3, 4) but my timelines are for information and publication purposes, not project planning. I looked at the TimeMap software recommended in 2006, but it seems to be web-based (not something I can run on my own machine) and produces output which to me is really ugly.
Any plotting package can handle time as an axis like this (they differ in how they need you to represent the dates going in). For instance, matplotlib, which is a library to use in the free language Python. The images can certainly be publication quality, but there aren't as many defaults to make it pretty as in desktop-type software.
It will automatically make the distance between dots proportional to the time between events. You will need to decide how to deal with dense minute-scale sections interleaved with years-apart sections, if you need them all in one plot. (Inset plots? Extra labels connected with long lines? Just one REALLY LONG plot that's dense in parts?)
If you haven't ever written code before, but this seems useful, at least read the sample code I linked. It's meant to be something you can replace piece by piece to turn it into a plot of your data your way.
posted by clew at 2:54 PM on June 9, 2020
It will automatically make the distance between dots proportional to the time between events. You will need to decide how to deal with dense minute-scale sections interleaved with years-apart sections, if you need them all in one plot. (Inset plots? Extra labels connected with long lines? Just one REALLY LONG plot that's dense in parts?)
If you haven't ever written code before, but this seems useful, at least read the sample code I linked. It's meant to be something you can replace piece by piece to turn it into a plot of your data your way.
posted by clew at 2:54 PM on June 9, 2020
Response by poster: I should have been more specific about the look I ideally want.
This example is pretty close, though I'm not sure how well it would handle images or longer blocks of text. I would also like items to be placeable within years and not just assigned to the entire year when they happened. I emailed the book author to ask what software they or the publisher used, but did not hear back.
I want something clean which will print and look good in black and white.
Multi-year and second-to-second timelines won't be in the same figure, I just want to be able to do both.
Python is a bit too roll-it-yourself to be ideal for me. The same goes for the various LaTeX plugins I have looked up, some of which require you to literally specify the length of every line segment in the image. I want something where I can add a new item and have it placed in the timeline without having to manually redo everything else.
posted by sindark at 5:11 PM on June 9, 2020
This example is pretty close, though I'm not sure how well it would handle images or longer blocks of text. I would also like items to be placeable within years and not just assigned to the entire year when they happened. I emailed the book author to ask what software they or the publisher used, but did not hear back.
I want something clean which will print and look good in black and white.
Multi-year and second-to-second timelines won't be in the same figure, I just want to be able to do both.
Python is a bit too roll-it-yourself to be ideal for me. The same goes for the various LaTeX plugins I have looked up, some of which require you to literally specify the length of every line segment in the image. I want something where I can add a new item and have it placed in the timeline without having to manually redo everything else.
posted by sindark at 5:11 PM on June 9, 2020
MS Visio does timelines like you want but it is not cheap. It's sort of easy to use though, and not web-based.
posted by fiercekitten at 10:11 PM on June 9, 2020
posted by fiercekitten at 10:11 PM on June 9, 2020
An Excel chart could do this. There are lots of display options for chats, but it requires patience
posted by theora55 at 6:03 AM on June 10, 2020
posted by theora55 at 6:03 AM on June 10, 2020
Response by poster: I was able to find out how The Economist makes their attractive timelines... manually in Illustrator.
I guess that means I should suck it up and make mine manually, though I hope someone will eventually make a more convenient tool.
posted by sindark at 10:34 AM on July 23, 2020
I guess that means I should suck it up and make mine manually, though I hope someone will eventually make a more convenient tool.
posted by sindark at 10:34 AM on July 23, 2020
This thread is closed to new comments.
(As an aside, personally, when I was looking for a solution for writing purposes I went with hacking together a Notion database, but sadly it does not make for a good timeline view. I'm hoping that in the future when they finally implement a gantt view, it will approximate that kind of view.)
posted by past unusual at 2:43 PM on June 9, 2020