Life timeline

[Ed Heil]

Looking for advice on how to raise my game on one of my first tiddlywikis ever.

It's a timeline of life events, so I can go back and answer my questions like "what grade was I in when that happened?  When did I move there?  When did I meet them?".

It started out as just a textual list, with some links.  Then I learned about tagging and stuff, and I ended up making a tiddler for each year and tagging the events to that tiddler (so I can rearrange them in the correct order thanks to the magic of list fields).

I have not done anything more than "attaching events to a given year tiddler" as far as assigning dates.  I'd like to actually put dates in a field, but I often don't have real date data, like I know something happened in "1980" or "late 1980" or "fall 1980" or "september 1980" or something like that.

Any suggestions on handling that sort of thing?

The technique I have, of just assigning things to years and arranging them manually in order, actually works fine.  It doesn't allow me to do things like use the timeline visualization plugin, which would be pretty neat, but that's not the most important thing.

I guess I'm just wondering whether anybody has best practices or hints on handling dates of widely varying precision.

I haven't touched this TW in a while so it's kind of fun looking at how I used to do things just a few months ago, and what I've learned since then!  (E.g. i used to make heavy use of WikiWords but that passed by the wayside....)

[Mat]

Sorting:

Say you give each new weird date a "mydate" tag

If you then click that tag, and drag'n drop rearrange the order of those titles. This creates a list field in the mydate tiddler with all the titles tagged with "mydate" and the order becomes as you arrange it when drag'n dropping around in the tag.

You can then do 

{{{ "get all my events" +[sortby{mydate!!list}] }}}

<:-)

[TW Tones]

Ed,

I have a long term goal to do this, and building that reference needs "Fuzzy dates" and yes making a timeline important.

In someways its too large a subject, but I will be happy to contribute to focused aspects to do this. 

It would also help researchers, historians and biographers.

Regards

Tony

[Ed Heil]

Yeah, it is potentially a big issue, and I'm successfully avoiding it  now by just attaching events to a year tag. :)

I suppose you could make fuzzy dates tiddlers of their own, and give them fields which describe. the space they cover.  How?  A central point and a halo of fuzziness? A start and end date which implies "the actual is sometime in here"?

Sometimes you'd want to know about the date as if it were a point (perhaps at the center of the range), but sometimes you'd want to know about the date as if it were a span, maybe depending on how you wanted to visualize it?

[TW Tones]

Ed,

Yes fuzzy dates are as much to deal with fuzzy human memory. There is no reason why we cant add things with more or less detail, as long as the way we interrogate the information is meaningful, other fuzzy aspects is you may not remember someones engagement date, but you may know it was before their marriage in the same year (or mealy before) for which you do have a date. Being able to record this fact before all details are available, and may never be available, is critical to tolerating missing information and allowing us to be fuzzy.

As I have said elsewhere being able to avoid loosing information, or encoding what information we have so far, is essential to extending the capabilities of ones wiki. For example if you remember the engagement was of importance, and you remember something about it, you want to record it and all you know about the date is "it was before the wedding" obvious I know, you should be able to capture the information, not represent it as a false date.

The fact is if you capture fuzzy information, it can facilitate the discovery of the real information, perhaps you remember it was just before your birthday, so now you can refine it more, and then looking in your diary just before your birthday you get the exact date.

I think the method is to find away to capture what you know in a frame work where you can interrogate it further. I would have milestone, events and periods, and an event has only one tiddler, and multiple levels of detail, eg: a year and month tag but no date, then when you find the real date you can remove the year and month tags because this information is in the date. Even your college years could be a single tiddler, with a date range, and this can become something you use for a fuzzy date. I Met him in college but don't recall when the date for the person tiddler is met in college date range, until something helps you realise it was in year two.

I imagine a hierarchy of decades and years within, and months within and days of month or days of weeks within them, and you get as precise, but only as precise as you can. The date hierarchy never changes so its stable, the more detail you have the path back to the root can be found.

I think the TOCP plugin is good for this.

Regards

Tony