although this could be entirely due to my intense dislike for '40s era movies. And the poster always used to illustrate items filed under the "gaslight" heading does nothing to illustrate the un-hip reader as to WTF concept is being discussed, without reciting the entire introductory paragraph used here.

The timeline looks like an interesting structure although I fear it would take an awful lot of time and work to fill in sufficient detail. Just clicking on a dot of "Tom Ridge raises threat level to orange" doesn't convey what else was going on at the time without puzzling out what that date would have indicated about the stage of the election, events in the war, or other contextual activity to explain why he did it then and why (perhaps in period, perhaps in retrospect) this was important and why it was part of the "gaslighting' campaign.

Hell, it could have tied in to the investigation, in full steam at the time, of the TANG/AWOL case, the Swiftboater's horseshit, or the withdrawal of Tongan troops from the "coalition" in Iraq having just been announced.

There's a book, last edition I saw was a few years back, called "Timelines of History." Cool thing about that is the number of categories, so you see what was going on in politics, and religion, and science, and cultural shit, and I forget the others, all at the same time in 1427 or whatever year you select. Aside from being heavily Eurocentric it's quite fascinating. Maybe a project like this needs to be done on a Wiki scale to fill in enough data, cuz *I* damn sure am not in a position to do much with it.

(hangs head in shame at offering discouragement to something you obviously worked hard and well upon.)

... to lure researchers into using the tool.

It took a few hours, but most of that was copying content out of the old blog.

If content is to be created, attention to categories and careful attention to headlines, plus setting a start and end date should be all that are required. So timelines can be developed incrementally, with a bit of planning, on a post by post basis (the view that creates this timeline is essentially a selection from tags organized by date).

We could also retrofit existing posts, for example--which we have on a wiki scale, for all but wikis on a monstrous scale like WikiPedia. This was more a proof of concept than anything else (which is why I chose 2004 data).

It also seems to me it's a natural for putting the emails into context....

Re: Gaslighting -- I've just never come up with a better catchphrase. And there's nothing wrong with being hip; it's being hip and having a goatee that I mind.

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

...but the technique is also very familiar by another name.

You can drive somebody stark raving nuts doing this, but the best illustrations are in the old Mad Magazine Spy Vs Spy cartoons.

One spy sets a trap.
2nd spy sees it, misses it, sets a trap in retaliation.
Spy one returns, is frustrated, avoids spy 2's trap -- and falls into his own.

I can't remember if it was Charlie Chaplin, or Laurel and Hardy, but there's an old silent movie of a guy coming down a sidewalk, and the camera cuts to a discarded banana peel in his path, and then you see him walking again, and then he steps -- safely over the banana peel, and falls down a manhole.