Lately I seem to be noticing timelines more often. I’ve seen that there are some really horrible timeline utilities used in various news articles, and lots of one-off graphic treatments when a certain event includes highlighted times to recreate a scene (think crime reporting). Of course there are also timeline apps that let you do project timelines for work, or historical timelines for education. Some open source scripts exist to help include time data in a web page, but there does not seem to be any easy to embed tool/service that has become a best practice in any way.
None of these options really seem to offer strong narrative design customization – all more attacking the complexity of managing sequential data rather than the output. And I don’t see anything that easily lets you bring in existing data from a verified source – is there not some central Wikipedia style time event API that lets you layer in verified (and filterable) historical data to integrate into your own views of time? Scenarios such as seeing what is going on in the world layered on your own family history, or for seeing what happened in the business news last month when your marketing numbers had some unexpected spikes.
Going to keep thinking about this and try to determine if there’s anything really there worth pursuing…