erochest
commented
10 years ago The OP was wanting this fixed in Neatline, not NeatlineTime, and I've opened this issue at scholarslab/Neatline#341.
I've started implementing this in the feature/bce-display branch, but it's incomplete. Before this issue can be considered done, NeatlineTime needs to parse and handle BCE dates, period. Currently it does not.
Plus, when that happens, because this will be implemented as a filter in both plugins, they'll potentially clobber each other, offsetting each date by 2 years instead of by 1. Just keep that in mind.
So for now I'm going to close this issue. In the long term, we do need to be able to handle BCE dates, and we can re-open this once people ask for it.
A Omeka user on the forums rightly noted that it's awkward to actually display the BCE dates that are offset just to have those items appear on the timeline properly. The SIMILE timeline relies on ISO 8601 for date formats, and ISO 8601 uses 0000 for 1BC, so you have to offset by one for every year going back past 1BC. (E.g. 2 BC is -0001)
Give that we've required folks to enter it this way to properly show up on the timeline, I'm inclined to build in some mechanisms by which that date is displayed in a reasonable, human readable way in other places where DC:Date is displayed. (E.g. the text bubble on the timeline itself, or on the Item record.) This could be done relatively easily using filters in appropriate places.