BCE Dates in Neatline Time

I've reviewed the posts regarding Neatline Time dates, and I wasn't able to find anything that explains how to make BC/BCE dates display on the timeline. Could you cover this? Thank you.

You would do this by adding a dash before the date:

-0200-01-01

We'll add this to the documentation.

Thanks for the answer, Jeremy. Unfortunately, it still isn't cooperating. I've tried a couple of different queries in the timeline in which I would like some BCE items to appear, but none of them pulls in my item. Any ideas? Also, assuming I can get it to work, would I create a time *span* the same as I would for CE dates?
Thanks!

Unsure about the query, millner. If you do the same query in Omeka's advanced search, does it return that item in the results? If not, that means its not matching up with that query, for some reason.

As for spans of time, you should be able to do the same thing you can with CE dates, which is add a / between your start and end date:

-0200-01-01/-0200-12-31

Thanks, Jeremy. I tried a variety of queries in the Omeka advanced search and got the results sets I expected to get each time. None of these queries pulled my BCE item into Neatline Timeline, however. I guess I will need to contact Neatline about this issue.

millner, if your site is publicly available, would you mind sharing the URL?

Also, can you get the same items to appear if you use CE dates?

Thanks, Jeremy. I tried a few more combinations and discovered that it's not the negative sign that's causing the problem--rather, it seems that zero as the first integer is the culprit. Items assigned the date -1000-01-01 or 1000-01-01 show up on the timeline. However, items assigned the year 999, for instance--with or without a leading zero, and with or without a negative sign--will not appear on the timeline. (Additional bit of minor weirdness: "-1000-01-01" appears as 1001 BC, even though the date in the pop-up data is correct.)

millner, if you're not using the latest version of Neatline Time (version 1.1.1), please upgrade and see if that fixes your issue. We released a bug-fix version last week that specifically dealt with years with fewer than four digits.

Thanks very much for your help with this, Jeremy. We do, indeed, still have 1.1.0. The upgrade should do the trick.

As for the minor weirdness with negative dates, that's just one of the quirks of the way ISO 8601 specifies BCE dates.

There's a "year zero" in this scheme of writing dates, and it corresponds with 1 BCE. Every negative date is then off by one from its BCE equivalent: 1 CE: 0001, 1 BCE: 0000, 2 BCE: -0001.

It's a very math-y way of representing years.

Thanks, John! That will be easy to compensate for.

I have another question about timelines, this time about the timeline in Neatline "proper" rather than Neatline Time: I noticed that although I can use "Set Map Focus" to select the zoom level of my map display, I'm not able to do the timeline equivalent, which is to say, have the timeline begin at a particular date. In Neatline Time, the timeline defaults to the earliest item. Is there a way for me to set a default in Neatline? Thanks.

No current way to do that now, millner, but we're aware of it. Looks like someone filed an issue for it in our Github.

Thanks, again, Jeremy. I appreciate the quick response.