Does any timeline software work with Date Metadata?

DEVONthink
1

I’ve been messing around with the Aeon Timeline demo to visualize the biographies of various authors in my Devonthink database of 19th century periodicals. I use the custom meta data data field quite a bit, and I’m wondering if Devonthink can export this metadata to this type of software.

(Or can Calendar be hacked to good effect)?

2

I’m not seeing any integration, so I’m guessing you’d be exporting DT data as a .csv file
I’d be using an applescript, and see no reason why date metadata can’t be included

You might be interested in the discussion at Export metadata

3

You need to be more specific about what type of metadata is supported for import into the application.

4

I’ve drawn inspiration from this script.

playing around with it, but Devonbthink complains

set customMD to custom meta data of this_record
			set this_date to date of customMD

"Can’t get date of {mddate:date “Saturday, January 24, 1891 at 7:00:00 PM”

So, I need some way of coercing “Saturday, January 24, 1891 at 7:00:00 PM” into a usable datastructure.

Already I’m sort of regretting using “date” as a identifier in case it’s a reserved word in Applescript/javascript, but as Devonthink warns, it can’t be modified afterwards. Oh well.

5

Hey, Jerwin, this is actually almost automatic with Aeon Timeline.

My Devonthink custom metadata is time and date fields called Start and End. I have single line text fields for Parent, Participant, Observer, Arc, Location, and a multiline text field called Summary.

Fill those fields out where needed. You can select all your documents, or any subset, and use Tools → Create Metadata Overview.

That will create a file in whatever Devonthink group has the focus called Metadata Overview.tsv. It will be a tab delimited file of all the metadata for the documents you selected. Drag that file to your desktop or someplace easy to find.

Now open (or create) an Aeon Timeline file and use File → Import CSV or TSV. It will prompt you for an input file. Tell Aeon to open your Metadata Overview.tsv.

This will give you a preview of the import file. Make sure “My file includes a header row” is checked.

Use the dropdown boxes to associate import fields with Aeon Timeline values. DT’s name field is a good choice for the Aeon Label.

That’s it. No human intervention and not too many mouse clicks.

I did this a bunch with AT 2 and a few times with AT 3. I haven’t seen any problems.

Good luck!

2 Likes
6

Awesome, thanks.