A quick update to the timeline project I mentioned last week, I have a rough draft of it set up! I am using Flourish right now, but to be honest it is not being too cooperative. The software is free, so I can’t complain there, but it has minimal user freedom when it comes to displaying the information that it ends up being rather confusing. I am looking for other alternatives at the moment, but for now you can view my work so far here.
I think with my initial playing around that I want to create a timeline with three distinct categories: Real world or folkloric events, literary publications, and film releases. From there I can show a vague sense of periodisation, like the Hammer era or the Romantic period. So I will be looking for softwares/freewares that are able to show multiple trends of history in a much more digestible format. Until then, the Flourish graphic will have to suffice.
Already, I am noticing a lot of cool things in regard to temporal spacing and these vampire works. For starters, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released during the boom of motion picture and camera innovation. This is fascinating as we often times think of Dracula as a phenomenally old book, but in comparison to the rest of the vampire literary corpus it is profoundly modern, and further cements the work as an epochal moment for vampirology. Similarly, there is a cool cause and effect being demonstrated with the Serbian vampire cases and the Western European reaction to them in literary form. And it just goes to show how fast information spread and how circumstantial the acquisition of the region by the Austro-Hungarian empire was for vampire literature. Had Serbia stayed in Ottoman control, we might have had a Turkish vampire craze instead!
With all that to say, the timeline is still in it’s infancy. There are many other entries that need to be introduced and as such, I want to find a good software that allows you to zoom in (down to the day would be nice) and explore a specific time. For now, there is a rudimentary resource for those interested in the chronology of vampires and vampire fiction that I will be updating periodically, and I hope to bring an update soon on the new potential software. If you know of one, please do put in the comments any recommendations that you have. And also provide feedback on what may be confusing or uncertain if you do end up taking a look at the prototype timeline linked above.
Leave a Reply