During our 2018 travels in Portugal, Laurie and I came upon a room-sized 500-year history timeline at the Jeronimos Monastery. We were fascinated by it and spent several hours walking through year by year, particularly enjoying the multi-track presentation of world vs. Portugal vs. local events. I awoke the next day wondering if there were already tools out in the world to produce electronic timelines. I imagined something like Google Maps that would let you navigate through a landscape of related events, zooming in and out depending on your desired level of detail. With a proper timeline tool one could crowd source a good definitive history of the world, and perhaps it could be an adjunct to Wikipedia.
In my morning reverie, I also cook up a couple of metaphors: threads of history that equate to lateral stories (or songs) that illuminate particular aspects of history/events. History is, after all, stories that tie together certain events. A good history is like a song that harmonizes the chaos of events into a memorable stream. Also, threads can be woven together to form stronger ties between events. Later, it occurs to me that threads can be shifted out of “real time” to compare individual lives/sequences against each other — a way to compare relative timelines of particular people or, say, Watergate vs Trumpgate.
With a little searching online, I quickly found a potential tool, time.graphics, with a “History of Human Civilization” example that’s not bad, except for the Bible bits. The tool also mentions using it for personal timelines which is an excellent idea I hadn’t even considered. Imagine a zoomable, custom timeline for your own life’s events, integrated with photos/media/links and the ability to share and compare it with others if desired. Time.graphics is an online tool that is free for a basic version but has an annual subscription for more capable versions. It’s a possibility but I vow to do further research to see if there’s anything better.
I got excited about these ideas and shared them with Laurie. She was intrigued as well, especially with the idea of working together and with others on presentations of history. With Laurie’s background as a teacher, she easily thinks in terms of timelines and can see their power as learning tools. She’s familiar with books like the Timelines of History and imagined there could be some online equivalent.
Later, in writing this post and doing some more searching, I discover Histography.io, a fairly amazing realization of graphically displaying thousands of Wikipedia events in a flexible timeline. It includes a way to click on topic threads and compare them, and offers a mode that lets you move by “editorial stories” through time. It’s a remarkable site, evidently developed as an academic project by Matan Stauber, an “interactive designer” who now appears to work for Apple in Israel. This site accomplishes some of what I was imagining, but is a closed single application and the further I’ve delved into it (admittedly not all that much, yet), the more questions I have over the events selected and linked together. Most of all, though, I wish I could get in and play with the tool. It’s the crowd-sourcing and personalized extensions that are missing.
I also stumbled across several other interesting sites. One is HyperHistory Online, a not-very-pretty but pretty thorough representation of history, with a complementary World History Chart and interesting origin story of its own. It’s the creation of Andreas Nothinger, a peripatetic beatnik-hippie-architect-jazz club owner who got started on this project relatively late in life. His Chart was published in 1989 and the online version started in the 1990s (and looks it, from the formatting and presentation). It at least recognizes the potential of crowd sourcing and extension pages, but it seems like everything has to go through Nothinger. It’s not perfect but it’s an admirable effort. Here’s a cute 2011 mini profile about Nothinger showing he was still kicking then. It’s not clear what will happen to the site if he’s not there to curate it.
Wikipedia itself makes a stab at timelines (list of timelines), but seems to have never settled on a good graphical format or layout. Wikipedia is the poster-child for crowd sourcing and extensive hyperlinks but it is fundamentally a text-based format. Trying to wedge a running list of topics into a sidebar doesn’t really cut it as a graphical presentation (or synchronoptic view, to use what seems to be technical term).
Another fascinating site is Our World in Data, with lots of interesting and frequently updated graphical presentations of data across a variety of topics. I especially like their chart of the 100 Worst Atrocities Over the Last Millennia, which gives a handy reference to compare scopes of awfulness. Most of the data are presented as graphs with a time axis, which may not really a timeline but can be functionally equivalent. These work especially well for numerical-driven data, but less well for text-driven events/info.
I found a timeline add-on tool for Microsoft Office, especially PowerPoint. It mostly makes Gantt charts for project presentations, but it could be useful in some instances. It has a free version but also requires an annual subscription to integrate it into other applications like Excel.
At the end of this initial plunge into timelines I haven’t really found what I’m looking for, but I’ve gained a bit of knowledge and insight. That’s a plus. I will keep looking to see what more I can find, and see if the urge to synthesize events into more digestible views sticks with me. There’s got to be a good way to do this, for general history, specialized topics and for personal histories.
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