Timeline: The powerful idea of temporal representation in obsidian

[Altostratus]

@CawlinTeffid

It would be great to have a description of your system in the Share & Showcase category

There you go

Until a better timeline shows up

In a thread discussing ideas for a future graphical timeline plugin, I was asked if I could share the event-based timeline setup I use for historic research and writing. The following is obviously a work in progress and I add stuff whenever it is needed, but so far it has proved to be very useful. It lacks graphical spans or period lines, but it does what I need it to do. It has the advantage of using only the Dataview plugin which, imho, could be the basis for any future timeline plugin since i…

[lm.romain]

In my case, that’s almost all I need.

Just missing the graphic part (with gantt chart style) and a more affordable function to show and sort easily according to the selected tags.

All others shiny features are not really neccessary

Thanks.

[dml0sc]

This would indeed be an interesting plugin. Have somebody taken a look at the free timelines that kightlab (Northwestern University) has developed? Here is the tool. Something like that would allow us to create timelines as slideshows.

[wkevwang]

Hey all, I’m a developer and interested in helping the community by making a timeline view. I’m very interested in the space of visual organization of notes and I thought this would be an interesting project to take on.

I’m curious, what specifically would a visual timeline improve on over the dataview query shared by @Altostratus? It seems like having physical space to denote time, overlapping blocks, and overall easier UX would be benefits, but wanted to get some more thoughts here.

[jmbarkei]

Hello @wkevwang, good to hear, that you would like to solve this problem. And sorry, if I am repeating myself here.

There has been a discussion of creating a support for the markwhen-App/Library here. This could be a good entry point for you.
It’s unfortunate that there is this duplication of subjects …

Unfortunately the creator of markwhen insisted in this discussion on retaining his markwhen files and their .mw extension in Obsidian.

I don’t see that this would work. It certainly did not in case of Excalidraw, which (imho) looks like a similar case of integration of an “external” library (correct me, if I’m wrong). That’s why I pulled out of that discussion. But maybe you can find a way around that.

I would be very happy if you succeed, and if you were interested in any ideas, contact me (but beware: I NOT a developer )

[lm.romain]

Hello, thanks @wkevwang for your interest

Markwhen should simply remain an alternative. @Altostratus showed that it was possible to make a functional timeline, just missing the visual part to navigate horizontally over time.

I see the visual aspect of this timeline with a dedicated page in the same way as the GraphView, all notes with a “start date” and/or an “end date” appear in this timeline. Then, a selection of the event type is made by a filter panel, selecting the tags we want to display.

But I imagine that some people will prefer to create several dedicated timeline. That would be independent and defined by a subject

[jmbarkei]

Hello @wkevwang , I just found another possibly even more helpful and suitable (because: open source & locally usable) library for creatins Timelines, called: TimelineJS. It works with javascript and could therefore be easily adaptable for Obsidian.

Maybe you take a look!

[fmeres]

I found this post while looking into if anyone had implemented timelinejs in Obsidian before. It shouldn’t be too complicated - meanwhile, o e can also use their online tool to make timelines and embed the html in Obsidian notes/canvas.

[OliverZilli]

I found three or more community plugins for timelines. However, it would be really nice if something like timelines could render based on dataview.

Timelines based on dataview, would make syntax much more universal.
Require a dataview query to assemble a table with a column for each attribute

    ```dataview
    TABLE class, data-date  data-title, data-class, data-img, data-type, data-end
    FROM #timeline/seriesA
    ```

Also debugging would become easy

• Create the table in dataview
• Replace the ```dataview with ```timeline

[disastro]

Mermaid has Timeline which Obsidian supports, just leaving this for posterity! I think the support for more diagrams came at the same time as the properties update.

[TanelTM]

And you can actually render a mermaid timeline from dataviewjs

```dataviewjs
const content=`\`\`\`mermaid
timeline
    title History of Social Media Platform
    2002 : LinkedIn
    2004 : Facebook
         : Google
    2005 : Youtube
    2006 : Twitter
\`\`\``

dv.span(content)
```

[markwhen]

The markwhen plugin is in beta - it supports timeline, calendar, and oneview at the moment. It’s not as full-featured as the VS Code plugin or the web editor but it works for displaying timelines. Next up is hopefully editing from the timeline view (dragging event ranges, stuff like that). Issues and feature requests should be raised on the github page.

Big thanks to @Acylation for actually getting this over the finish line!