How to handle different names for same character

SteveJK · November 4, 2022, 8:41am

Hi,
In my historical time, in many cases individuals can have different names in different circumstances.
e.g.
James I of England is James VI of Scotland
Philip II of Spain is Philip I of Portugal
Pope Clement VII’s is Giulio de’ Medici, when he’s not Pope

I’ve tried creating multiple people entities and linking them via a bidirectional relationship,

e.g. James I of England and James VI of Scotland are linked by a relationship called AKA (also known as)

and I’ve tried extending the person’s name to include all their names,

e.g. using “James I of England, James VI of Scotland” as the person’s name

Both of these have problems. Does anyone have a better way of doing this?

I’ve only been using Aeon for a week so I’m still figuring things out

Thanks, Steve

mattarmon · November 5, 2022, 10:54pm

Hello there,

you might try to create a Character Group

Your group could be “James” and the single characters could be his identities (of England, of Scotland, etc…)

Then, in the settings menu

you could go to Data Types

Click Edit on relationship and the from here

You could edit a property to accept a “Character Group” item. (see in the bottom-right corner, “Allowed item types for this relationship”

This is just one possible way. Messing around in those settings, lets you create your very own entity type (you are not tied to “Character Group”, you can create an entity called “Person” and then another entity called “Identity” and then specify that the entity “Identity” has “Person” as parent entity)

Hope this helps,

Matt

SteveJK · November 7, 2022, 9:41pm

Thanks for your reply Matt.

Had a couple of attempts trying to figure out whether it would work for me, and variations of it.
Like the other methods, It almost works but still has its problems:

It would be great here if I could concatenate the group name (James) with the person name (IV of England) to produce “James IV of England” in one bar

Similarly I could use a parent name (Henry Tudor) and a full title (Henry VIII of England) as the child:

Which might look better on the timeline if I could hide the parent line.

Thanks again for your reply, Steve

Updated:
A good solution that allows me to see the other names for the same character on the timeline is to enable Short Label in that Item Type’s Compact Display field. i.e.

I created a relationship called AKA (also known as) with item type relationships linked Person to Person
Changed “Person”'s Item Type Compact Display field to Short Label
Checked “Person” in Relationships on the timeline Item card option.

Any relationship that points to a Person data type now has the name[s] of the person contained on the item card