I have two characters who live together during a time in my novel. I have set their relationship to sambo, it is swedish for living together. Can you limit that relationship between to dates on the timeline?
Best wishes
Marcus Nordlund
When I have those type of relations in my research, i.e. seamen’s service time on a ship, I create an Event for that and add them to that Event.
I will create an Event for the voyage, add a child item called “Crew List” or “Manifest …” that has constraints from the “main event”.
The main event (voyage) also has child events (I call them sub-events) for First Port of Call and Last Port of Call (start and end of the voyage) that control the main event.
I also add a Service Record item for those seamen I make more research on, where I link to any of the Crew List items where they are mentioned.
So for your case, I would have created an Event “Lived together”, and just linked both people to that Event.
If you want to, you can create that as a Parent Event and add child items for each of the two people and link them to those items.
For my projects I had to add a few extra items to get things as I needed them because there is no feature for multiple “Parents” of an item, so I had to be a little creative to be able to add multiple items as a “child” to multiple events, when I wanted those to be visible in the timeline instead of just “hidden relations”.
Same occur as a problem if you want to group items in the sidebar that you want to add as child of another Event in the timeline…
I think I understood your idea Jaran - however I can´t help but wonder what the use of relationships is then? In Lord of the Rings Frodo didnt know of many of the characters he meets beforehand, but if one were to put that book into Aeon Timeline without the ability to limit relationships such as friends, enemies and more. If I understand the limitations within the software correctly and had Gandalf be friends with Saruaman - they would be friends from the day they were born and they couldnt become enemies as it happens in the books.
If it is like that it oughta limit the use of setting up relationships for many (most?) fiction writers.
/Marcus Nordlund
I think pretty much for history, or anything involving people at all.
In which case, relationships are presumably for something else: for instance marriage, parent, child etc. Those are relatively rigid. But it doesn’t allow for the nuances which affect them often in everyday life.
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I totally support @Jaran approach, but I would like to add another suggestion to solve the OP question.
Some kind of relationships, if they are so important to end up in the timeline with start and end date, might deserve a dedicated entity type. You could create a new entity type called “Sambo”, and create an entity of that type called “Character A and Character B”. Then, set up a relationship from this entity to both characters (A and B), set start and end date of the time spent togheter, and you are done.
This way you can avoid events pollution and have a dedicated category for important relationships between characters.
It’s not a perfect solution, but might work in some cases.
Cheers,
Matt
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You need to look at relations in AT3 as relations between items, or between items and Events.
So if you think about a friendship as an Event, the friendship is for a period, i.e. from they was 15 to the age of 305, then another Event happened and they become unfriendly, i.e. at age 305 (this will most likely be a milestone i.e. start and end at the same time, but could also be an Event i.e. a fight.
Then you have a new event for the time they was enemies, ie. from age 305 to present (book time).
You then add an relation between those events and the two people, so each person has a relation to each other through the Events or Items.
This is actually how it is done in most genealogy software to, you add a “marriage” event or a “family” that links people together, or you create an Event and add links to that Event from different people with an Role, i.e. friends, witnesses, etc.
Another example:
If you want to add parents to a person, you can add a direct relation between the parents and the child, but most likely your will create a lifespan Event for each person, add the vital records as child events to that, i.e. the birth of a child, then add the parents as mother and father maybe you use “Biological Mother” and “Biological Father” for that, because the child also has a step parent that occur later in hers/his life, you can then easy add a new Event for when the step parent occurred in the persons life…
This way you can build a whole life based on single events with milestones and periods for each person, and tie different people together in different time periods by using Events.
You can also create different Event Types, i.e. Personal Events, Place Events, Religious Events etc. if you would like to be able to filter or sort on different types of Events.
Same as we use Document Types, Record Types etc. to narrow down i.e. sources.
It is easier to understand this approach if you think about a whole life as a serie of different types of Events.
Back to your original example:
It might be that they got to know each other some years before they moved in together, you can add the first time they met as a milestone, then they was friends for maybe a year or two, that is maybe a “Getting to know each other” Event.
Then they evolved to a relationship (a new Event)
Then they moved in together (another new Event)
etc. etc.
You add the two people to each of those Events with a Relation, you can create custom relations for each, or you may have one relation called “Family Relations” or something similar, the important thing is that it is a relation that are descriptive and that you know what is…
So it is the different Events that limit the different relations in time… some Events will most likely overlap others…
i.e. friendship will most likely overlap with the time they lived together AND the time the was in a relationship, if they got children, that would be a Milestone for each person, and maybe you creates a “Family Event” where you link all of those other Events together…
Then you maybe add a “First School Day Event” for the child, maybe you want to create a special relation type for that for the parents called “Proud Parents” and a Personal Relation for the child called “Primary Participant” or just plain out “First School Day”, or a more common relation called “Education”…
Think about the Timeline as a Timeline for Events, an Event can also be when a document was written, or when a Newspaper was Published, it all depend on what you would like to occur on your timeline…
So for me, in my project, I want some of the documents to be displayed on the timeline, so I create an timeline item type called “Crew list or Manifest” that I add as a Sub-Event to the Voyage Event, I also create an Timeline Item Type called “Seaman Service Record” and an Timeline Item Type called “Seaman Signed on to ship”, I also have a few other related Item Types regarding the end of Service, depending on the reason for the end of service.
Then I link this Timeline items together and have a relation to the seaman of interest to them.
That way I can set dates on the document and see it, I can set a service record period that span multiple voyages, either with the same ship or with other ships, depend on what information I find…
I can also link/relate multiple seamen to different “roles” on the ship. I also have an Item called “Shipmates” where I can link different seamen together, that can be a Timeline Item that span over i.e. 4-5 voyages, I can add an item “Friends” if I see that they become that etc. etc.
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Its closing in on midnight where I live so I am to tired to try and understand that now - however I am most grateful how you guys take the time to explain it to me.
Thanks alot and I´ll read this again, slowly - tomorrow with a cup of coffee - to try and get my head around it all.
Best wishes
Marcus