Historical timeline in Obsidian

[peaks]

I’m a student currently taking a comprehensive history course. I’d like to try and index my notes and thoughts into a centralized, chronological format for future reference (e.g. studying) in my Obsidian Zettelkasten. I am by no means an advanced user, especially when it comes to the Zettelkasten organization style, so I was hoping others might have ideas on how to implement this.

My current thinking is that I will have one pinned “timeline” note in which I link to all of the entries that I write for the class in a timeline format, and have brief summaries of important events and major ideas with links to separate notes for each one. An example entry might look like:

1440

• [[Printing Press]] invented
  • helped to standardize punctuation all across the land.

And then under [[Printing Press]] I would elaborate on its effects and link to other notes.

However, I’m not sure how this would fit in with the rest of my Zettelkasten (I was simply thinking that the index note would be separate from the rest of my system), and I wanted to ask around before I implement this system and potentially miss out on a better one. Has anyone else needed timeline-sort of index in a Zettelkasten or in a system like it?

[romanov.maxim]

This is actually quite interesting, but this kind of timeline-index should aggregate automatically, rather than created manually. There are different html-based timelines available (for example, https://timeline.knightlab.com/) that can be used to generate a timeline from atomistic Zettels. For example, the timeline may include only notes that have chronological tags, something like YY1440 for a specific year; YY1440-1450 for a range, etc.; these tags can be enriched with thematic context, like YY1440:print or YY1440:Europe. Timeline could be a plug-in similar to that of the graph network of notes.

[romanov.maxim]

You should move this to plugins or feature requests.

[egoexpress]

If you want to create the timeline manually have a look at the Linking Your Thinking (LYT) approach.

From what I understand the LYT system sits atop of your Zettelkasten and provides meta-notes (‘Maps of Content’ or MOC) - that would be your timeline. Maybe @nickmilo could give some input on this.

[nickmilo]

Exactly this.

@peaks This sounds like a lot of fun—and very practical for your studies.

Yeah, I agree you’ll probably find making a higher-order note (MOC, meta-note) your best bet.

The beauty of using a higher-order note is that it doesn’t affect all your base Zettelkasten notes. It just gives you an augmented view—which you can use whenever it makes sense.

[peaks]

It seems that someone got there before me in plugin requests. Considering the response to those 2 previous posts, it doesn’t seem to be that popular of an idea.

@romanov.maxim

There are different html-based timelines available (for example, https://timeline.knightlab.com/ ) that can be used to generate a timeline from atomistic Zettels.

This does look like something that could

1. Be made to fit in with obsidian’s aesthetic and normal functions and
2. Be implemented without too much work

but my (lack of) background in software development means that my judgement doesn’t mean much.

[peaks]

Thanks, I’ll look into that.
I’ve thought about meta-notes in the past, but having a pre-built system of implementation makes it so much easier to implement.

[peaks]

This approach is exactly the type of thing I was looking for! Thank you for putting in all the work that you have in developing this approach - beginning in obsidian is definitely the hardest part, and even just skimming the surface of the resources that you’ve compiled here makes it clear that they’ll be very useful.

[AMATHYST_MLX]

I’ve recently bumped into this need myself. Since this appears to be one of the only threads on the topic and I’m necroing the hell out of it, It would be worth updating that this project is exactly what I needed. It’s also accessible in Obsidian community plugins and is aptly named Timeline.

[jesvtb]

I am reading history for pleasure only, but below is what I do with history in my obsidian. Maybe it can offer some help.

The center of the history notes are #reign and #period

#reign represents the period during which an individual manages a polity.
EDIT: I should add that although #reign carries the name of the ruler, it is in my mind not merely about the ruler. It is a representation of a period and context, which is a concept common in east asian reigns, where the emperors name his own “periods”.

I will always give #reign metadata as below.

reign:
  begin: YYYY
  end: YYYY

For notes like [[roman empire]], which is a #polity in my files, they don’t have exact begin date or end, simply because I find it against nature. Empire doesn’t fall into the world on a particular year, it evolves.

So, everything except for #reign gets #period/1500s, or #period/0300s in my notes so I can explore hidden connection in graph mode. Mostly helpful in comparing what was happening around the same centennial.

Having a clear timeline of reigns then matter to me. So whenever I create new reign, I have a templater that inserts a timeline item in the reign note. This will automatically capture the metadata “begin” and “end” in my note. And the note record will be updated into my [[polities]] file, as shown in the red bars timeline. The [[polities]] file contain other indexes, but won’t explain further as those aren’t directly related to your concern.

<span 
	  class='ob-timelines' 
	  data-title='<% tp.file.title %>'
	  data-date='<% tp.frontmatter.reign.begin %>'
	  data-end='<% tp.frontmatter.reign.end %>' 
	  data-class='reign' 
	  data-type='range' 
	  > 
</span>

[paranoiks]

I’ve been trying to get this timeline stuff to work to no avail. I managed to get the vertical timeline working using the same plugin as you but not the horizontal one. Did you have to do anything special to enable the horizontal timeline?

[chloezhou97]

Omg how did you create that timeline diagram inside obsidian? I have always wanted to do the same but don’t know how to achieve that.

[jaik]

How were you able to get the horizontal timeline working with this plug-in? I would love to do something very similar to this for the history of thought but am having a really hard time getting the horizontal timeline up and running even though i followed the instructions in the developer’s github web and on their youtube video.

Love your project btw

[jesvtb]

All my notes that is a party, person, family/dynasty have a tag “#leadership”. If I’d like to see them in the timeline, I will fill up the note’s frontmatter with a start and begin year. I am using this plugin.. I add the following inside my note.

inside individual note

---
tag: leadership
begin: 1935
end: 1940
---
<span 
	  class='ob-timelines' 
	  data-title='constantine I'
	  data-date='306'
	  data-end='337' 
	  data-type='range' 
	  > 
</span>  #timeline 

template automate

The component above is more or less automated now with the help of Templater, please refer to their doc if you want to understand how the following code work. NOTE: You MUST have “begin” and “end” filled up before adding in the template. You can obviously change the terms to anything you want.

<span 
	  class='ob-timelines' 
	  data-title='<% tp.file.title %>'
	  data-date='<% tp.frontmatter.begin %>'
	  data-end='<% tp.frontmatter.end %>' 
	  data-type='range' 
	  >
</span> #timeline

combined timeline

Then I have a integrated timeline in a note with following:

```timeline-vis
tags=leadership
startDate=-0500
endDate=2000
minDate=-0500
maxDate=2000
divHeight=300

change since last post

My original post uses “#reign”, but then I decided to change them all to “#leadership” instead. Same goes frontmatter structure, “begin” and “end” used to nested, they are not nested anymore. (brain evolves as you see).

#timeline in the is not required. I believe isn’t required also.

As for the look of it, I am well versed in css so it was all dry fix. If you aren’t familiar with css and inspector, you’d have to refer help elsewhere to style your own. I recently overhauled my css, and my timeline comes as default as well because I haven’t got the time to “refurbish” it, but all the above shall do the job.

I have not look at the developer’s doc since my original post to know if there’s any other better way to do it. And I believe my setting for the plugin is default.

[TrennaTheSecond]

I have a way of collecting things that happened in certain eras using aliases.

This doesn’t serve exactly the same purpose, but may be useful for people who handle a larger volume of dates. I’m a history grad student, and my fellow grad students and professors have been interested in this approach.

One would have to decide if you’re doing decades, centuries, etc. In the circles I’m in, people tend to specialize in a couple hundred years so we tend to use decades.

I have a note called “1850s”, in which I typed:

---

alias:  1850, 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855, 1856, 1857, 1858, 1859

---

Now I can go through all different types of notes: Notes I wrote, imported highlights from Kindle books, anything, and create a link each time a year is mentioned.

Then, that note “1850s” has an assortment of backlinks:

Since each backlink is an argument / hypothesis / main idea, I can skim the note for what was going on in that decade. I am a very new user, but imagine a person could also generate tables that display these. For me personally, the backlinks are most useful because I can expand or condense the view to see the full paragraph and whether it came from my own writing or someone else’s.

Overall this helps me accumulate a lot of information quite rapidly, since in some cases I’m just skimming highlights I imported (Kindle to Readwise, or Zotero to cut and paste), double-clicking a year to highlight it, and tapping [[, which pulls up the alias.

Different people might want to break it up by region; I’m intentionally putting everything together for now because it serves my purposes to see “too much”, which provokes the question “Is there a connection”.

[Chat.24252]

I come to this post 3 years later as I am currently starting to study a course on history (not a degree though). I sparked interests to organize my learning in Obsidian, then yes, the app brought me to the community and this post.

Inspired by the discussion of this post, I put the questions to ChatGPT, after a series of discussion with it, GPT designed a automated timeline that totally fits my need. Whoever come to this post with a need of a obsidian timeline, I encourage you to make use of the discussion and also generative AI to help design your workflow.

May this comment, together with the pervious discussion, bring this original post from per AI era to 2024.
Good luck everyone.