Keep a research chronology that holds its sources: dated events over decades or minutes, grouped into chapters, filtered by tag, exported as a table or a print document.
Research produces a great many dated facts and very few places to put them. A chronology in a document goes stale the moment the next fact arrives; a chronology in a spreadsheet cannot show you a decade at a glance.
The time horizon runs from seconds to years, so a project reading nine centuries of parish records and a project reading four hours of telemetry use the same software at different scales. Events are single moments or ranges, which is what a reign, a tenure or a field season actually is.
Each event holds a rich-text description, a source, the people involved, a place with real coordinates, tags, and as many images as it needs. Chapters group events into periods, so a long timeline still has a table of contents.
Filters narrow a timeline to the events in question: search, the event’s own category, any of its tags, whether it carries a source, and a period. The selection is remembered per timeline and survives a change of style, so every view draws the same filtered set.
The Map style places every located event on one route — useful when the question is where the evidence clusters rather than when. Bulk photo upload reads the date and GPS coordinates out of the files themselves, which turns a folder of fieldwork photographs into dated, placed events without typing.
Export follows what is on screen. The PDF is a document rather than a screenshot: a title sheet with the period and the counts, then a dated column with photographs as thumbnails in the text. The CSV is one row per event and every field, and it is the same file the importer reads back — so a chronology can move between a spreadsheet and a timeline without being retyped.
River: A reading shape for a long chronology — a line with cards either side.
Map: Where the evidence clusters, rather than when.
Log: Every event as a sortable row, for counting and cross-checking.