A variety of approaches exist for annotating temporal and event information in text, but it has been difficult to compare and contrast these different corpora. The Richer Event Description (RED) corpus, as an ambitious annotation of temporal, causal, and coreference annotation, provides one point of comparison for discussing how different annotation decisions contribute to the timeline and causal chains which define a document. We present an overview of how different event corpora differ and present new methods for studying the impact of these temporal annotation decisions upon the resulting document timeline. This focus on illuminating the contribution of three particular sources of information – event coreference, causal relations with temporal information, and long-distance temporal containment – to the actual timeline of a document. By studying the impact of specific annotation strategies and framing the RED annotation in the larger context of other event–event relation annotation corpora, we hope to provide a clearer sense of the current state of event annotation and of promising future directions for annotation.