I'm not sure if this belongs here, but I'm working on research for something I hope to turn into a book at some point. I think I've uncovered an interesting angle to an urban legend with roots in WWII - as best I can tell no one has put together what I think I've figured out. (Sorry for being vague)
The problem is I'm trying to track dozens of people who wanted to keep their relationships to each other private. Early on in my research I learned not to ignore any names that popped up just because I didn't recognize them. Every once in a while the name pops up again and it leads to a connection I didn't see before. But now my time line is getting unwieldy.
Is there any kind of timeline/mapping software out there that I might use to show, for example, that "Person A was at this address on this date and Person B was also in town at the same time"? Ideally, I'd sort the info in a spreadsheet - NAME, DATE, LOCATION, NOTES, LINKS - and then people's timelines would form in layers on a map.
Does anything like this exist? If not, I'm open to any suggestions you might have for record keeping, organization, and note taking.
Thanks in advance for your time.
If you can document links between the people in your study (being in town on the same day doesn't indicate interaction!), some of the techniques developed for Social Network Analysis may prove helpful. I'm working on a project that involves studying the interactions between people in a Bronze Age city and have found SNA extremely useful. Here's a sample visualization.
Social Network Analysis essentially maps the relationships between people. At its simplest, it documents whether a relationship exists. At its most complex, it can incorporate aspects like the directionality and intensity of the relationships. SNA provides a quantitative method of calculating social networks, including degree (the number of connections an individual has), betweenness (the degree to which an individual connects network segments and functions as a broker or intermediary), and closeness (how quickly an individual can reach other individuals in a network).
For good examples from my field of the use of SNA in historical research, see "Six Degrees of Alexander: Social Network Analysis as a Tool for Ancient History" and "Social Network Analysis of Cuneiform Archives: A New Approach."
There are several tools for SNA, but Gephi is arguably the most user-friendly. NodeXL is popular as well.
References:
I remember something like that from a stats class I took in grad school. Sadly I do not remember what the software is called. Plus that was a lot of years ago so who knows if it is even around.
Try r/statistics and ask about conducting a snowball study of a real-world social network and you need software to map node location and strength of ties for a social network analysis. If you can overlay node location on a particular day or days on a world (or whatever geographic area you need) map that would be helpful.
Maybe r/statistics can help, maybe they can point you to someone who can, or maybe it is a dead end. I don't know but it's worth a shot.
