Historical template: places, sources

Q & A
#1

More as an experiment than as a serious piece of work, I’m trying to create a timeline of the life of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Timeline 3 on MacOS. I’ve chosen the historical template, but I’m unclear about how best to deal with places in this model. Winckelmann’s biographers tend to divide his life up into periods based on where he was living/working at the time: Seehausen, Nöthnitz/Dresden, Rome/Italy and so forth. My first impulse was to make these phases visible as places on the timeline, but it doesn’t seem as though this is the intended use of places in the software; instead, my current understanding is that places are meant to be attributes of events, rather than ways to organise a biography. Is best practice then to make an event called “Nöthnitz” and give it a duration of 1748–1754? That seems oddly redundant if I also have a place called “Nöthnitz”, so perhaps the “places-as-phases”-idea isn’t especially good and I should ditch it? Grateful for any thoughts on this anyone would like to share.

A second question about the historical template: there are two categories of entities called “Source” and “Sources”, one with a purple icon of a book and one with a yellow one: how do they differ from each other?

#2

The intended use of places in the templates is to have them attributed to events, so you can see which events occurred in what places. However it is designed to be flexible for different use cases, so you can change it so that Locations can have dates and show on the timeline. You could also add another entity type called “Period” which does appear on the timeline, which you could use instead.

You can still use Locations to organise your timeline even if they don’t appear on the actual timeline itself. If you assign each event a location, you can then filter or group your events by location. This would show each periods timeline, there just wouldn’t be an overall parent event that covers it.

Another way to display periods if you don’t need to have them as an event on the timeline is to use Calendar Markers. Calendar markers appear at the top of the timeline, and if they have a duration will highlight that area, but don’t appear as events.

In regards to the historical template with Source and Sources, which exact template did you open ?(Historical has a couple). I was unable to find one that had both Source and Sources.

#3

Thanks for these comments: I’ll play around with the locations and see what I can come up with.

I’ve discovered that the Source/Sources thing is only present in the Winckelmann-timeline, which I had begun messing around with in Timeline 2 and imported into Timeline 3 as an “historic timeline”. New timelines with that template don’t have the two categories. So it might just be an import glitch and I will just need to rebuild it from scratch in Timeline 3 to sort it out.

#4

If your original version 2 timeline had an entity type named “Sources” instead of “Source”, then importing this into the historical template in version 3 would cause the template to have both of them. You can turn off entity types you don’t want in Timeline Settings->Data Types, and selecting/deselecting the ones you want in your template.