Hints & Tips

Improve your efficiency on Geovistory by using these tools

Edit mode

Switch to 'edit-mode' before editing any entity, table or text:

Hint: Press Shift + E to switch between 'edit' and 'read-mode'.

Work with Tags

This very useful tool allows you to "tag" any entity with a specific label relevant to your research.

Important is that tags are not meant to store historical information. Their intention is to connect research specific information with your entities. For example, you might use tags such as:

Tags are not meant to store historical informations. Their intention is to connect specific information with your entities in the context of your research. For example, you might use tags such as:

• entity of importance for "network-analysis"

• further investigation needed

• missing information

• etc.

How to add a Tag

In the metadata section of any Entity, you will find a field call "tagged by". It allows you to add tags of your choice.

It's up to you to create your own tag library, in line with you personal project!

Add a tag with a name and a definition. A Tag is your own way to express an epistemological research

Mark favorites

For some information fields you might want to fill in multiple entries. For example, a person might have lived in several places or might have had several jobs in his career. One person might also have had different names: See the example below about "Amédée VIII", who was also known by the name "Félix V".

In order to mark one option as your favorite, just click on the three-points on the right-section, a table will appear where you can click on the star-shaped buttons to mark a favorite.

In addition, you can decide on the position of your entries. The first entry is also selected as your favorite.

Note that the favorite is chosen to be displayed as your entity label (in case that this information is configured to be part of the entity label). In the example above, the name 'Amédée VIII' is chosen as favorite and therefore appears on top as entity label.

Use the Time-span informations

In Geovistory, events are stores as Temporal Entities (such as a "birth" or a "membership"). They are linked to temporal information. You can decide whether you want to add this kind of information or not, depending on your needs.

Different options at your disposal to indicate a specific time:

One Date

If the temporal information is juste one date, it's easy. You can inform about the year, the month and the day (and even minutes and seconds). For dates before Christ, simply add a minus (-) before. You can also switch to the Julian calendar if you wish!

Add one date to your Entity

Begin and End

If you wish to enter a time span with a begin and an end, it's the same process:

You can inform about the year, the month and the day. For dates before Christ, add a minus (-) before. Switch to the Julian calendar system if needed!

Add a begining and an ending to your Entity

Advanced - Uncertain period of time

If you have uncertainty about the exact begin and end of your time span, then you have to select the advanced form. In the advanced form you find different options:

• at some time within

  • begin (earliest possible)

  • end (latest possible)

• ongoing throughout

  • begin (latest possible)

  • end (earliest possible)

You can fill in the fields that correspond to the information you have :

Geo-localization

Geo-localizing your entities is very interesting as it allows you to display them on a map. You can geo-localize the following entity classes::

• Construction/built work: A house, castle, bridge etc.

• Geographical place: The surface of a village, city, region or country etc.

In order to geo-localize an entity, it is necessary to add Geo-Coordinates. To to this, enable thhe edit-mode & access the specific fields of your entity.

You will find a field called "Georeference", which allows you to enter the Geo-Coordinates (latitudes and longitudes) of a point.

For the moment, Geovistory does not allow the registration of areas/surfaces (e.g. polygons). Please contact us in case you project needs to record this kind of information.

Work with two windows in two browsers

Geovistory is completely web-based. You do not need to install anything and can access your project from anywhere!

Close windows and clean up your browser to speed up Geovistory

However, this also means, that your browser has quite some work to do in order to display Geovistory. Hence, it relies on your browser's RAM.

If you experience slow downs using Geovistory, try cleaning up your browser and closing unnecessary tabs (also within Geovistory).

Work with two windows in two browsers

Many advanced users are working with two open Geovistory windows, copying from the one to the other and looking up information on one side needed on the other etc.

Maybe you want to try this as well?

In this case, in order to boost performance, we recommend using two different browsers (this allows you to take advantage of the RAM capacity allocated to each browser).

For example, open your Geovistory project in Chrome and Firefox/Safari simultaneously. You can work in either window as Geovistory shows information in real time as soon as you save a change.

Use sources as the core of your database

In the process of historical knowledge production, the constitution of your corpus of sources is often the first step of work, as sources provide the basis for your research data production. Geovistory can help you store and classify your sources so that they become the core of your database.

Sources contain different kind of information (event, place, person, etc.) that you extract in the form of entities in order to answer your research question. In Geovistory, extracted information is stored in semantically defined classes.

In order to visualize the origin of the information stored in your entities, Geovistory allows you to link your entities with sources listed in your project through a linking & annotation process.

You can therefore consider the list of your project's sources in Geovistory like a Geovistory library relevant for your ongoing research project.