Richard Flynn :: no comment

My final exams finished nearly three weeks ago, and thus also my Oxford career. Something which occurred to me as I prepared for Schools was how most of my various papers were linked chronologically. So, after I finished, for want of much else to do, I sat down and made a timeline of the things I studied. This is probably of no interest to anyone other than me, but there you are.

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What you can see from the timeline is that there is a gap where I studied nothing between the 5th century B.C. and the 1st century B.C., and the a shorter gap between the end of my Medieval French paper (1530) and the 17th-century portion of my Ancient and French Classical Tragedy paper. Otherwise there was always theoretically something which I was studying during the period between the 1st century B.C. and the late 17th century.

What I haven’t included on the timeline are those things on which I was examined which are less easy to place in a historical continuum, such as current-day Romance linguistics (as opposed to the history of the development of the Romance languages, which conveniently bridges the gap between my Classics papers and the Medieval French paper), or my various French translation and language papers. The fact is, however, that the majority of my papers were based around some period of time (even if they were not strictly ‘history’ papers). The one paper which is split up into three distinct periods—coloured red—is Ancient and French Classical Tragedy, which covered fifth-century-BC Greek tragedy, the tragedy of Seneca the Younger (1st century AD), and 17th-century French tragedy. All the other papers are grouped together, organized by colour; I have included a note over the relevant periods giving the name of the paper in question.

Preparing the timeline

Some brief observations about the timeline itself. I prepared it using BeeDocs’ Timeline application (the non-3D version), which I used at the beginning of my revision period to give myself an overview of the content involved in each paper (or most of them, anyway). It’s an application I like—a very clean Mac application—but it has some shortcomings.

The biggest problem is probably the inability to change events’ vertical position. Timeline works out where it wants to put an event (based on the event’s dates) and then you can’t do anything to change the position. For the most part this doesn’t matter, but sometimes things get laid out in a somewhat boneheaded way: Augustine’s baptism in 387, for example, should come just below his conversion experience in 386 and just above his consecration as Bishop in ?395, and not right at the bottom of the page.

Another big shortcoming of Timeline is the fact that you can only have one font style for the whole document. Again, this makes sense from the point of view of simplicity: when you change the font, you can be assured that all the events and all the other text is now being set in that font. However, it would be good to have some character-level styling too. In particular I wanted to italicize the names of individual books, but that’s simply not possible.

Finally, there seems to be some slightly buggy behaviour in the version of Timeline I’m using. I decided to show the era only for events which involved dates B.C. This is pretty easy in Timeline: you just select one or more events at once, and change the relevant setting in the Events inspector. There are numerous options for displaying eras: ‘BC/AD’, ‘B.C./A.D.’, ‘BCE/CE’, etc. I wanted to have ‘B.C./A.D.’ but at some point I must inadvertently have selected ‘BC/AD’ (without the full stops) for some of the events. Try as hard as I might, I could not get those to display in the timeline document with the full stops, even though the Events inspector for those events showed that they were indeed set to ‘B.C./A.D.’. What eventually worked was saving the document, restarting the application, and reapplying the era-display change. That’s most certainly a bug.

Anyway, it’s time to start forgetting about most of this stuff now, I suppose.