Palladio can be used to visualize events over time relating to a particular subject. For example, I used it to display pit bull attacks in the United States over the past year as well as Melville’s travels in London. I was more successful using a Palladio sample dataset showing births, deaths, and arrival points of 72 notable historical persons (e.g., artists, aristocrats). There was a lot of missing data, however, although there were fields created for these data (e.g., pictures, gender). In the other datasets I tested, longitude and latitude data were provided, but in two different cells; they had to be combined into a single cell to be read by Palladio. I had trouble using OpenRefine to correct this (some longitudes also ended with commas, while others didn’t, presenting a data cleaning challenge - since the commas were needed before cell merging; I couldn’t add commas to all cells without first removing commas from the ones that included them). Apart from data cleaning issues, Palladio was a very interesting tool that allowed for several graphical and map visualizations. Facets could also be used to visualize only particular subsets of data (e.g., only persons who were born in particular cities). I found the timeline tool particularly useful, because Palladio will read and concatenate duplicate dates within the same column, interpreting them as multiple events on the same date, and counting them as such – rather than (e.g., as Excel does) displaying them as one event occurring on the same date.

All of the other tools I used were interesting and provided unique data visualization opportunities, but with significant restrictions. For example, space in these tools can only really be viewed “from above” (perspective is fixed in space, even if the location or event isn’t). StoryMap JS has the same downsides, essentially, as the Timeline JS tool from the same creators. The ArcGIS StoryMaps tool is particularly powerful, but complex. Many different media (e.g., images, video, audio) can be associated with the provided data. All of these tools can be used to construct narrative displays. Time and space can, in all of these tools, be displayed simultaneously – but they are each designed to show these connections in very particular ways.