In preparation for Vicky I've been doing a bunch of reading on meiji japan and thereabouts. I have like 20 bookmarked sites and various print outs etc. I've become mildly obsessed. Piecing through all of it is a pain in the ass, and finding the information if I forget which source its from is far worse.
So I wrote myself a tool to organize and consolidate everything into one highly configurable timeline. It doesn't do EVERYTHING I want it to do yet, but it does do a good job of organizing encyclopedia type events, by date.
You have to enter the data by hand, but what makes it interesting is I built in a tagging system, that allows you to tag events with People, Nations, or general categories ("Domestic Dissent", "Domestic Infrastructure", "Foreign Policy", "Western Imperialism", etc - the tag list is customizable so you can add or remove as needed).
You can then sort or filter the events using whatevever criteria you want - want to see instances of British Imperialism from 1850-1900, just a couple clicks. How about British Imperialism and China in the same date range? Again, a couple clicks. You can search by any combination of tagged People, countries, or general circumstances.
I personally think its really cool, and intend to extend its features for my own personal historic catalog, and maybe soon add in a Vicky Event Generator that will allow you to generate and edit Vicky events using a GUI, and to generate events based on the historic data you've entered. But the vicky extension will come later and is probably about 20 hours of work, so I wouldn't get around to it till mid next week at the earliest.
I post this msg on this forum cuz I thought this community might be really interested in a tool like this.
Right now I have it running off of SQL Server, so it probably isn't of much use to any of you. But if there is a lot of interest I'll make one that runs off of Access, or if there is a ton of interest and not a lot of people who have access, I could make one that runs off of pure text files and requires no additional software.
Anyway, I thought I'd just post a msg about it - I can't stick up screen shots unless someone wants to lend me server space.
So I wrote myself a tool to organize and consolidate everything into one highly configurable timeline. It doesn't do EVERYTHING I want it to do yet, but it does do a good job of organizing encyclopedia type events, by date.
You have to enter the data by hand, but what makes it interesting is I built in a tagging system, that allows you to tag events with People, Nations, or general categories ("Domestic Dissent", "Domestic Infrastructure", "Foreign Policy", "Western Imperialism", etc - the tag list is customizable so you can add or remove as needed).
You can then sort or filter the events using whatevever criteria you want - want to see instances of British Imperialism from 1850-1900, just a couple clicks. How about British Imperialism and China in the same date range? Again, a couple clicks. You can search by any combination of tagged People, countries, or general circumstances.
I personally think its really cool, and intend to extend its features for my own personal historic catalog, and maybe soon add in a Vicky Event Generator that will allow you to generate and edit Vicky events using a GUI, and to generate events based on the historic data you've entered. But the vicky extension will come later and is probably about 20 hours of work, so I wouldn't get around to it till mid next week at the earliest.
I post this msg on this forum cuz I thought this community might be really interested in a tool like this.
Right now I have it running off of SQL Server, so it probably isn't of much use to any of you. But if there is a lot of interest I'll make one that runs off of Access, or if there is a ton of interest and not a lot of people who have access, I could make one that runs off of pure text files and requires no additional software.
Anyway, I thought I'd just post a msg about it - I can't stick up screen shots unless someone wants to lend me server space.
