Scholarly Introduction

The Orlando chronology comprises more than 30,000 events or statements attached to a date or date span. This provides a dynamic framework offering a temporally ordered perspective on much of the material that is susceptible to being seen in this way. Some of its timebites come from entries on writers and their texts. Others, dealing with material and cultural contexts, are free-standing. In a sense none is complete in itself, since all are designed to be read in the sequence produced by a particular search. Even the timelines in writers' entries are not drawn exclusively from within those entries, but from all events within the textbase that mention the writer concerned.

The dynamic nature of Orlando chronologies means that one event appears in timelines on Paris and on Mary Wollstonecraft and on the French Revolution; another in timelines on Cicely Hamilton and on women's suffrage and on the Scala Theatre, London. And a click takes you from the Paris timeline to the Wollstonecraft entry, or from the suffrage timeline to the Hamilton entry.

Chronologies can be produced by searching without content (on a given week or year) or by scope without content (on a given year in national and international event types only, or in social climate only, or at the most selective level only), or by text-only searches on words, or on words combined by Boolean logic; or by searching on the contents of Orlando's core hyperlinking tags (name, place, title or genre of text, or organization name); or by searching on those tags without content (though many such searches will produce unmanageably large results if not limited in other ways).

Tag searches sometimes produce a separate screen of Events, depending on where the tags searched are positioned in the tagging hierarchy. Tag searches can thus create highly selective, partial, chronologies using some of the more specific tags in the tagset: for instance political allegiances of authors, gendered responses to texts, rejections by publishers, or the serial publication of texts. In each case the timeline will be a selection from a larger set of results that includes statements not tied to a particular date. (On how the chronology is designed to "hybridize chronology with critical investigation" see "Dates and Chronstructs: Dynamic Chronology on the Orlando Project.")

[For more information on using the chronology see Entry points: Chronologies.]