6 ms·

Horizontal History

30 points by rfreytag 11y ago

lfowles 11y ago
Fascinating, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking some individuals live in separate alternate histories.
filoeleven 11y ago
The author's comments on needing to have a better understanding of the state of the world that surrounded any particular person or event rings true to me. It's one of the reasons I enjoyed Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence, a sprawling historical account of western civilization from 1500~2000. He deliberately de-emphasizes the exact dates of things, aiming more to show the significant events within the surrounding "mood" of the general time and place in which they occurred. Barzun also emphasizes that "a reader of history must be a reader of histories" due to the perspective or bias that any writer of history is bound to impart upon the work, just as the author suggests. While I found the second chart showing lifespans as vertical bars to be interesting, I think that it doesn't quite do what the author set out to do. I can see that these three or four people were alive at the same time, but it doesn't so much help me to understand how what person A did might have influenced person B to do whatever it was they are remembered for, or even if the influence was the other way round. A might have been a late bloomer and B a prodigy. With lives frequently spanning half a century or more, there's a lot of room for interpretation. I am not complaining: this is an interesting proof of concept. It could be improved, I think, by adding additional markers to the lifelines for each person's achievements, and also perhaps having by bands of color in the background showing large-scale events such as wars, disasters, etc. Of course then you'd get into the mess of sorting out e.g. how much influence a war between England and France had on contemporary events in Germany, possibly necessitating more complications in the visual display. In fact upon first seeing the lifeline chart, I thought of Barzun's big book and how handy it would be to have an interactive version of the chart where I could click on a lifeline, or a defining moment, and be shown the relevant section(s) of the book, or really any number of books. In that respect it would function as sort of an index for finding specific historical events and understanding their surrounding contexts. If I were a technically-minded historian working today, I'd set my sights on implementing something like this. A visual, clickable exploration of history seems like something lots of people would get into.
- alexvoda 11y ago
  The idea to make an interactive version is not new and I and most probably several others already had it before reading this article. The technology is all there on the web. Just look at this: http://evolutionofweb.appspot.com/ http://evolutionofweb.appspot.com/ The issue is there is a huge amount of crisscrossing data that needs to be curated, classified, adapted and maintained. It's a shame Wikipedia is no longer as forward thinking and reputable as they once were. They would have made a great steward of such a project. Of course we can still use the data Wikipedia has but someone still had to maintain the great parallel timeline project. It's so unfortunate that in the end the downfall of almost all things made by groups of people comes from within those very groups. And unfortunately this phenomenon is probably not going to change very soon. And speaking of groups. On the same timeline we could plot the lifeline of a lot of other things like organizations, construction projects, movements, etc.. And as you said events would be displayed horizontally intersecting with all those involved. It is unfortunate that past and current approaches of teaching history at all levels do not make use of such an obvious concept. It's not super hard to figure out that things happen at the same time and influence each other. And it's not like it is impossible to use such representations without computer interactivity. Interactivity just makes it better. All history is thought as a fairy tale and emphasis is placed on knowing the exact date and time of an event instead of knowing how it relates to other contemporary and past events. All of this makes history have appeal limited to people used to thinking sequentially. Current approaches to history are impenetrable for someone who thinks about the big picture first. The common approach to history simply can't see the forest for the trees.

30 points by rfreytag 11y ago

Fascinating, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking some individuals live in separate alternate histories.

The author's comments on needing to have a better understanding of the state of the world that surrounded any particular person or event rings true to me. It's one of the reasons I enjoyed Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence, a sprawling historical account of western civilization from 1500~2000. He deliberately de-emphasizes the exact dates of things, aiming more to show the significant events within the surrounding "mood" of the general time and place in which they occurred. Barzun also emphasizes that "a reader of history must be a reader of histories" due to the perspective or bias that any writer of history is bound to impart upon the work, just as the author suggests. While I found the second chart showing lifespans as vertical bars to be interesting, I think that it doesn't quite do what the author set out to do. I can see that these three or four people were alive at the same time, but it doesn't so much help me to understand how what person A did might have influenced person B to do whatever it was they are remembered for, or even if the influence was the other way round. A might have been a late bloomer and B a prodigy. With lives frequently spanning half a century or more, there's a lot of room for interpretation. I am not complaining: this is an interesting proof of concept. It could be improved, I think, by adding additional markers to the lifelines for each person's achievements, and also perhaps having by bands of color in the background showing large-scale events such as wars, disasters, etc. Of course then you'd get into the mess of sorting out e.g. how much influence a war between England and France had on contemporary events in Germany, possibly necessitating more complications in the visual display. In fact upon first seeing the lifeline chart, I thought of Barzun's big book and how handy it would be to have an interactive version of the chart where I could click on a lifeline, or a defining moment, and be shown the relevant section(s) of the book, or really any number of books. In that respect it would function as sort of an index for finding specific historical events and understanding their surrounding contexts. If I were a technically-minded historian working today, I'd set my sights on implementing something like this. A visual, clickable exploration of history seems like something lots of people would get into.

alexvoda 11y ago
The idea to make an interactive version is not new and I and most probably several others already had it before reading this article. The technology is all there on the web. Just look at this: http://evolutionofweb.appspot.com/ http://evolutionofweb.appspot.com/ The issue is there is a huge amount of crisscrossing data that needs to be curated, classified, adapted and maintained. It's a shame Wikipedia is no longer as forward thinking and reputable as they once were. They would have made a great steward of such a project. Of course we can still use the data Wikipedia has but someone still had to maintain the great parallel timeline project. It's so unfortunate that in the end the downfall of almost all things made by groups of people comes from within those very groups. And unfortunately this phenomenon is probably not going to change very soon. And speaking of groups. On the same timeline we could plot the lifeline of a lot of other things like organizations, construction projects, movements, etc.. And as you said events would be displayed horizontally intersecting with all those involved. It is unfortunate that past and current approaches of teaching history at all levels do not make use of such an obvious concept. It's not super hard to figure out that things happen at the same time and influence each other. And it's not like it is impossible to use such representations without computer interactivity. Interactivity just makes it better. All history is thought as a fairy tale and emphasis is placed on knowing the exact date and time of an event instead of knowing how it relates to other contemporary and past events. All of this makes history have appeal limited to people used to thinking sequentially. Current approaches to history are impenetrable for someone who thinks about the big picture first. The common approach to history simply can't see the forest for the trees.