Timeline coherence and editorial vision

This is a meta page about timelines. View all meta pages about timelines

This page is about some of the overall qualities that help make a timeline useful and great, that go beyond more local aspects such as the inclusion criteria and detail construction. Timelines can have good "technical execution" in terms of solid and well-adhered inclusion criteria, and strong detail construction, and yet have scope for improvement in a more subtle, holistic fashion. This page covers some of these holistic angles that are harder to evaluate at the individual row level but make the timeline as whole stand out and add value.

A reprise of the chronological sequence

When talking of detail construction, we emphasize that rows should have sort order independence, allowing for sorting by various columns to understand the topic in different ways. The timeline coherence and editorial vision perspective, however, partially reinstates the importance of the chronological reading of the timeline. It says that even though we want the timeline rows to have sort order independence, we also want to pay attention to the story the timeline tells if read chronologically, which is the default and most common way of reading the timeline. In particular, what considerations and frames are introduced through the timeline, and how do they interweave with each other?

The structure/surprise dimension

Timelines benefit from a strong structure, through good inclusion criteria and good detail construction. However, good timelines also have a "surprise" element, including rows that surface unexpected connections with other domains, and including details within the rows that surface unexpected relationships of the row to other parts of the topic. These surprise events or surprise inter-event connections may skirt the boundaries of the explicitly stated inclusion criteria or detail construction guidelines, but in a way that has a strong payoff: the insight the reader experiences at the connection makes up for the disorientation of seeing the expected structure subverted.

Strong payoff is the key point: a surprising row that doesn't justify itself after the fact is just a violation of structural expectations without the compensating upside.

An example is the early rows in the timeline of Bay Area Rapid Transit, including the row about Emperor Norton and some of the early events in Bay Area transportation before BART, that one may not think to include in the timeline of BART, but that justify themselves by providing historical context.

The prelude rows

The prelude rows, that cover the time period before the subject of the timeline became a thing, are important for several reasons:

• These are the rows least constrained by inclusion criteria, as there are fewer "must-include" rows from a purely technical perspective. Therefore, there is the most creative freedom and aesthetic judgment involved in what to include. In particular, the structure/surprise dimension has most promise here.
• These also happen to be the earliest rows one reads in a chronological read of the timeline, so they play an important role in setting the frame of the timeline and introducing considerations that might continue to get referenced in different ways throughout the timeline.

Prelude rows, though they appear chronologically first in the timeline, are often hard to write early on in the timeline construction process, and it's worth adding and revisiting them periodically throughout the process of timeline construction rather than trying to write them at the start of the timeline.

What the prelude can contain

Here are a few ideas for things that the prelude can contain:

• Vision/imagination of the timeline subject before it existed, often starry-eyed, perhaps inaccurate in important ways. How this vision relates to what would finally transpire is itself important. An example is Emperor Norton's proclamation laying out his vision for the Transbay Tube as a prelude event in the timeline of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART).
• Motivating backdrop events, for instance, competing things that existed and either succeeded or failed (for instance, for timeline of BART, alternative transit systems in the Bay Area), or complementary things that raised the importance of doing the thing (for instance, for timeline of a transit system, increase in population or vehicular pollution in the area served).
• Reports, studies, etc. doing detailed feasibility analyses either of the timeline subject itself or of other preludes to it.
• Life events of specific people involved in creating or championing the timeline subject, to the extent relevant. We do want to avoid going the hagiography route, but if an individual is a very important driving force for an organization, and the individual's life experiences or intellectual evolution led to the decision to found the organization, information on this may be worth including. For instance, for the timeline of Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Eliezer Yudkowsky was a critical figure in the founding of MIRI, so some information on his life and intellectual evolution even before MIRI was conceived is genuinely helpful background information.

Backdrop events after the prelude

While the prelude is almost entirely backdrop or preparatory events, the period after the prelude is trickier: actual events directly connected to the timeline subject are happening. But often, some of the most interesting changes are the ones not directly happening to the timeline subject but to the backdrop it's operating in.

One way to frame this is that there are, effectively, two timelines. One is the timeline that's directly about the timeline subject. The other is the timeline of the backdrop, which evolves in ways that seemingly don't affect the timeline subject, but then at some point cross a threshold where they affect the timeline subject. For instance, for a transit system, things like population growth or decline, competing transportation modes (highways, buses), changes to work-from-home tendencies, etc. may appear to not be making any qualitative changes until they reach a tipping point (sometimes through a precipitating event such as the COVID pandemic, and at other times through gradual accumulation).

It's generally impractical to write the entire backdrop timeline along with the timeline of the timeline subject, because the backdrop is too vast. On the other hand, just mentioning backdrop events at the point they actually impinge directly on the timeline subject makes the reader feel like things emerged out of left field.

The trick is to sprinkle just enough of the backdrop so that the background timeline is at the periphery of the reader's consciousness when reading the timeline chronologically. The reader, if doing a careful chronological reading, is primarily thinking about the main timeline subject, but simultaneously keeping in mind how the backdrop is evolving. This could in some cases be accomplished by emphasizing backdrop connections in rows directly about the timeline subject. In other cases, explicit rows about the backdrop may need to be added, with explanation of their retrospective significance to the timeline subject. For instance, a timeline about a transit system might include rows about events that were pivotal in increasing the city's population, even though the effects of these on transit demand would emerge much later.