A timeline takes its first steps
We are excited to announce the alpha release of TimeFlow: an open-source analytical timeline for reporters. This is a project we’ve been working on with Sarah Cohen, a Knight professor at Duke University and former reporter at the Washington Post.
The motivation behind TimeFlow comes from Sarah’s realization that visual analytical tools for reporters are rare. There are good visual presentation tools out there, but those that allow journalists to mull over hundreds and thousands of data points, slicing and dicing the information as they go along are harder to come by. Given this mandate, we set out to rethink timelines,
striving to always show as much textual detail about the data as possible (a goal dear to reporters that, interestingly, goes against the visualization impulse to always aggregate).
TimeFlow offers five different viewing options: timeline, calendar, bar chart, table and list. There is also considerable flexibility in filtering values, combining filters, and re-arranging points on the screen.
TimeFlow is a Java desktop application. Read more and download the files at the TimeFlow home page.
Give it a spin and let us know what you think!
Also, if you’re interested in contributing to the future development of the tool, we welcome help in that front too!
5 comments
It won’t work in Ubuntu/Linux because of a security risk:
The file ‘/home/harddisk/TimeFlow/Timeline.jar’ is not marked as executable. If this was downloaded or copied form an untrusted source, it may be dangerous to run. For more details, read about the executable bit.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Daniel Lathrop, Amy Rolph, Sarah Schacht, Bx Mx, Shane Landrum and others. Shane Landrum said: Dear sweet Clio, this might be the tool I need. RT @nowviskie: RT @wattenberg: Our new open-source visual timeline: http://bit.ly/dDAQ5j [...]
I was able to convert some interesting stuff from simile and was able to create some visualizations,however when I save the file, I can’t open it again. Timeflows always says “Couldn’t read file”.
Even the examples I couldn’t open the files.
I am using a windowsxp machine, java version:
java version “1.6.0_20″
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_20-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 16.3-b01, mixed mode, sharing)
And here is a file fragment with the header that was created:
#TIMEFLOW format version 1
#TIMEFLOW source [source unspecified]
#TIMEFLOW description
#TIMEFLOW field data Date/Time
#TIMEFLOW field size Number
#TIMEFLOW field nome Text
#TIMEFLOW field UNPARSED FIELDS Text
#TIMEFLOW end-metadata
#TIMEFLOW alias TIMEFLOW_START data
#TIMEFLOW alias TIMEFLOW_LABEL nome
#TIMEFLOW alias TIMEFLOW_SIZE size
#TIMEFLOW ====== End of Header. Data below is in tab-delimited format. =====
data size nome UNPARSED FIELDS
Jan 4 2009 19:07:00 209.0 $AdminControl.txt
Jan 4 2011 18:44:00 40.0 19-cultura.txt
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Regards
George
Martin, lets talk. I’m working on similar stuff but I’m doing it in Raphael.js so that its a web application for more accessibility.
[...] Auch wenn die Chefs selbst nach nur einer knappen Woche Lebensdauer der eigenen Firma “FlowingMedia” von Google assimiliert wurden: TimeFlow ist ein Open Source-Tool um chronologische Verläufe optisch aufzubereiten und strukturierte Datensätze einfacher zu analysieren. Nach eigenen Angaben richtet sich die Anwendung, die unter Mitarbeit von Sarah Cohen (u.a. Washington Post) entstand, insbesondere an Journalisten. Hier gibt’s noch einen Blogpost dazu: A timeline takes its first steps [...]
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