Week 1: Introduction and Goals
Adam P -
Hello readers, this first blog will be an introduction to my project, TimelineForge: Weaving Events, Worlds, and Continuity Together.
I’m a huge movie fan and love to read, and when I watch or read something, I always try to understand the timeline of events for whatever world it takes place in. I find this helps me gain a better understanding of the story and immerse myself in the universe, boosting suspension of disbelief and my enjoyment of the story. These timelines aren’t always clear, though, and fans can spend hours trying to consider everything in the story in order to build them. As worlds get larger and larger with more evidence to consider, building the timeline becomes a gargantuan task.
My project will culminate in building a website that will allow fans of any story to build their timelines easily. Instead of having to manage hundreds of pieces of evidence from every novel or movie in a fictional world, my website will store that data. My algorithm will then take evidence such as dates, holidays, and character quotes like “It’s been 5 years since…” to narrow down the range of possible dates an event could have occurred. After cross-referencing an event with the rest in the timeline, my algorithm will significantly reduce the ranges for each event and finish building the complete timeline. This will eliminate the hours of logical analysis required by fans to build these timelines themselves.
My time over the next several weeks will be focused on building my website and its user interface, coding the algorithm to narrow down event date ranges, and in manually creating timelines for the novels Leaf Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez to use as proof-of-concept test cases.
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