When engaging in the visual analysis and communication of cultural collections and other types of complex historical data, scholarly or public audiences rarely get to see their multidimensional richness. Commonly, visualization tools require analysts to selectively ‘cut’ into the complexity of the data to highlight and project particular aspects, while neglecting other facets and data dimensions. Figuratively speaking, multiple views allow to grasp vital parts of the proverbial elephant, while hindering us to see the whole, dynamic organism in its particular context. If we want to overcome this state of affairs, we have to (re)connect and (re)assemble the partial impressions from multiple views for ourselves, which turns out to be a demanding cognitive task. To provide a more integrated approach to the analysis of event-based data, we introduce the PolyCube visualization framework. As a web-based visualization system, it draws together multiple perspectives to convey a bigger picture for complex, time-oriented data, and to support synoptic exploration of the data, as well as navigation between specific perspectives for expert and casual users alike.