Sunday, February 17, 2008

How to Make Time Lines Useful?

The basic notion of a time line is simple: arrange possible events in their possible chronological order. But it is often hard to construct time lines that are useful. Time lines can generate noise rather than enlightenment.







2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that SIMILE Timeline (http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/), with its scrolling X-axis, could be tweaked in some way to work with legal cases. The time lines look great too but unfortunately the creation process is not very user friendly.

Unknown said...

teajay, I agree: SIMILE is very nice. (The ability to bring up the source of the event is a nice touch. The ability to create independent time streams is nice. The ability to post events that overlap is very nice.) But, as you say, lawyers -- and I include myself -- would need a dummy-proof way of adding events to the time line.