Use Cases

Real-world examples of how TimeTiles can be used across different fields.

Investigative Journalism

Police Accountability

A newsroom has a database of fatal police encounters spanning five years. The data includes victim demographics, officer information, location, and incident details.

With TimeTiles: Import the CSV, enable public filtering by victim demographics, time period, and incident type. Readers explore geographic clusters and temporal patterns themselves — discovering stories in the data rather than being told what to think.

Environmental Investigations

An investigative team tracks industrial permit violations across a state. Data comes from EPA databases, corporate filings, and community health records.

With TimeTiles: Combine regulatory data with community demographics. Show the correlation between industrial violations and neighborhood characteristics. Filters let readers drill down by company, violation type, and time period.

Academic Research

Conflict Documentation

Researchers document incidents during a conflict using witness testimony, satellite imagery analysis, and open source intelligence. The dataset grows to tens of thousands of entries over several years.

With TimeTiles: Import and continuously update the dataset via scheduled URL imports. Enable temporal filtering to show escalation patterns. Maintain detailed metadata for legal proceedings while presenting an accessible public interface. Server-side clustering handles the scale.

Urban Studies

A research team analyzes gentrification by tracking business closures, rent changes, and demographic shifts across a city over a decade.

With TimeTiles: Import multi-year datasets as separate datasets within a single catalog. Each data source (business licenses, real estate transactions, census data) gets its own dataset with its own schema. The explore interface lets stakeholders compare patterns across time periods and neighborhoods.

Activism and Advocacy

Community Organizing

A tenant organization documents landlord negligence across hundreds of properties. Data includes building violations, health citations, and complaint records.

With TimeTiles: Map violations by property owner across the entire city. Reveal patterns of negligence by landlord and neighborhood. Filter by violation type, severity, and time period. The resulting chronicle becomes evidence for policy advocacy.

Human Rights

An NGO tracks systematic persecution across a region. Incident reports come from affected communities, leaked documents, and witness testimony.

With TimeTiles: Create private chronicles for sensitive data with appropriate access controls. Support both confidential research and public advocacy from the same dataset by configuring different views with different visibility settings.

NGO and Non-Profit Work

Disaster Response

A relief organization tracks storm damage assessments, insurance claims, and recovery milestones across affected areas.

With TimeTiles: Combine immediate damage data with long-term recovery information. Show disparities in response times and resource allocation across communities. Use scheduled imports to keep the chronicle updated as new data comes in.

Public Health Surveillance

A health department monitors disease outbreaks by tracking case reports, facility data, and environmental factors.

With TimeTiles: Create interactive chronicles showing case density over time and geography. Correlate health outcomes with environmental monitoring data. Enable exploration by demographic group and area. Present complex epidemiological data in a format accessible to the public.

Getting Started with Your Project

1. What’s the story? — What patterns or relationships do you want to reveal?
2. What data do you have? — Each row needs at minimum a date, location, and title
3. Who’s the audience? — Researchers, the public, policymakers, or internal teams?
4. One-time or ongoing? — Will the data be imported once, or updated on a schedule?

Ready to start? See the Getting Started Guide to import your first dataset.