Setting Up Chronolator Documents
What is Chronolator and what does it do?
Chronolator was originally written for Microsoft Word. It is now complemented by some tools at tools.chronolator.com that run in a Web browser such as Chrome.
This Help is about Chronolator for Word, apart from the topic Working with the Browser Tools.
Chronolator makes it easy to produce and review the chronologies that are needed to review interactions between different agencies and organisations.
Little specialist knowledge is required to use it. There are no new programs to learn or install, and only a basic knowledge of working with Word tables is required.
Chronolator has something to help everyone involved in using a chronology to investigate a case:
Gathering and collating chronologies from multiple agencies is a time consuming task, particularly if they each have different ideas about what they need to provide. Chronolator enforces the standards set by the administrator (for example, what column headings the chronology table should have) and automates the merging of individual chronologies.
Transcribing written records from various sources into a consistent format is a tedious and error‑prone task. Chronolator simplifies the process with a number of tools. There are tools to sort records into order, to put dates into consistent formats, and to check for a variety of problems.
The final objective of a chronology is for someone to make sense of the events it contains. Chronologies are often anonymised, which can make it difficult to build a mental picture of the people involved. The Chronolator anonymisation tool lets you switch back and forth between anonymised and personalised views of a document.
Other tools for reviewers include:
The Chronolator Reviewer's Tool (one of the Chronolator Browser Tools) includes many of these features, and also produces graphical timelines.
The Chronolator process begins when the Case Review Administrator sets up an Internal Chronology, which is a Word document containing a table whose headings and other characteristics are specified by the Administrator.
The Case Review Administrator distributes the Internal Chronology to the various organisations whose data is required.
If an organisation needs to collect data from several departments, the recipient can forward the Internal Chronology to them and ask them to complete it rather than calling for their original records. Anyone forwarding a document in this way is called a Local Administrator.
When the holders of the original records have completed their documents, they return them to the Administrator who wanted the information (either the Case Review Administrator or a Local Administrator). That Administrator uses Chronolator to merge them into a Composite Chronology.
There is no limit to the number of levels of Local Administration.
The diagrams below illustrate the flow of documents between administrators and data collectors.
