Week 3: How to Construct a Timeline
Adam P -
Hello everyone, I’ve been working on the timelines for Leaf Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez to use as test cases for my algorithm. Today I’ll walk you through how my algorithm will attempt to determine when events in a story occur. Let’s take a look at an event from Leaf Storm, where a character named Meme had an incident at a church, but we aren’t given the date.
The main body of the novel takes place on 9/12/1928, and a character named Isabel narrates she’s turning thirty. Accounting for rounding, we can assume her age between 29.5 and 30. My algorithm would narrow the range for her birth to 9/12/1898-3/12/1899, 29.5 to 30 years before 9/12/1928. If a user enters a character’s age during an event, my algorithm will link the event to their birth, in this case linking the main body of the novel on 9/12/1928 to 29.5 to 30 years after Isabel’s birth.
We learn Isabel was no older than 13 during the incident, so my algorithm would link her birth to 0 to just under 14 years before the incident, meaning the range for the incident is narrowed to nothing after 3/12/1913, the day before Isabel’s latest possible 14th birthday.
The church event was 3 or 4 Sundays after Meme’s departure, confirming the incident took place on a Sunday. My algorithm would then link the church incident to 3 or 4 Sundays after the event of Meme’s departure and narrow down the range to only include Sundays 3/9/1913 and before (3/9/1913 is a Sunday).
Isabel was 17 when she noticed the doctor’s room was locked in October or November 3 years after Meme’s departure. My algorithm will then link Isabel’s birth to the event of her noticing the locked room. Since Isabel was 17, my algorithm would narrow down the date range for her noticing the room to (10/1/1915-11/30/1915, 10/1/1916 – 11/30/1916) based on the range we have for her birthday.
Isabel noticing the room would be linked to 2.5-3.5 years after Meme’s departure, so the earliest she could leave is 3.5 years before 10/1/1915, giving us a new lower bound resulting in a new range of 4/2/1912-5/30/1913. Since the incident was 3 or 4 Sundays after Meme left, the range for her departure would be reduced to 4/2/1912-2/22/1913 given the incident’s upper bound of 3/9/1913, and the range for the incident would be reduced to Sundays in the range 4/21/1912-3/9/1913.
We learn that Meme left two days after a character mentions the doctor has been here for 8 years since his arrival in 1903, so the latest day for the doctor’s refusal to help is 6/30/1912, just under 8.5 years after the latest date in 1903. If Meme’s departure is 2 days later, that range is now 4/2/1912-7/2/1912.
This means the algorithm will narrow the range of Meme’s church incident to 3 or 4 Sundays after the dates in that range, producing the new range of Sundays in 4/21/1912-7/28/1912. It took several steps, but we can narrow down when past events take place from an undefined day Isabel was no older than seventeen all the way down to one of fifteen days in 1912.
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