I’m testing a new javascript code that I hope is simple and viable on various browsers, blogging systems, etc.: It’s especially tricky to fit interactive timelines into these narrow-column formats, but do it we must! If you have thoughts on embedding methods and preferences, let us know.
Of course you should read some Herodotus — who, around 450 bce, essentially invented the practices of history and journalism — but it doesn’t seem appetizing, does it. To get you excited about this fellow, you should first read Ryszard Kapuscinsky’s Travels With Herodotus. Says Kapuscinsky:
And so a person consumed, obsessively tormented by allusion reaches for Herodotus. How many allusions he will find there.
Like Herodotus, who walked across the known world in his day, Kapuscinsky was a paripatetic world journalist and seemed magnetically drawn to fascinating places at explosive and transformative times — in Ethiopia in the early 70s, for example, where he reported on the fall of Hallie Salassie. (His classic The Emporer is from that period). Travels is a reading of Herodotus mixed with Kapuscinsky’s own brilliant travel writing and journalism.
I’d highly recommend this beautifuly layered book: I’m re-reading it and enjoying it just as much as I did a year ago.
We’ve quietly been offering our “Plus” tools to anyone who inquires and to people who have provided serious feedback. One of the features that’s long been on our to-do list is a legend. Since the beginning, one has been able to assign small icons to events: Now you can label entire sets of icons with a legend or key.
Currently if you apply a legend to a timeline, you can also click on a key icon and filter the timeline, and view only events with that symbol.
This is the beginning of another dimension for TimeGlider: more “meta information” about timelines. This will lead to other nice ways to organize data within a timeline. Many people have requested being able to have horizontal bands or “lanes” on which specific categories could be found. This legend system is an inroad to that.
A few of you have already written in to suggest improvements for workflow and usability. We’ll keep working on it. Some other features to come: adding RSS feeds to published timelines, photo sets, and more.
Again, legends are available to people who sign up for our Plus tools. If you’re an existing member, you can upgrade here, or if you’re new, you can sign up with plus tools by going here. Please, if you use these “beta” tools, make sure to send your feedback, for pete’s sake.
A hackneyed philosophical question, but it’s worth asking now and then: What is time? Many immediately say, “You can’t separate time from space!” So: What is timespace? Well… let’s say time and space are two aspects of a larger, less graspable package. We’re able to perceive many points in space at the same time and integrate them with our brains to see shapes, distances in the background with a bird or someone’s face in the foreground. In space we’re quite mobile. Time, on the other hand, offers us few options. It’s more like a giant wave on which matter and space are being flung ever forward.
To turn to TimeGlider for just a minute, this project has been interesting because we’re seeking (as our elevator pitch would say) “to do for time what applications like Google Earth do for space”. The steady, measurable continuum of time, while it’s not an existing “geography”, is still regular enough that plotting it on a graph is quite useful. Google, MapQuest, et al. have the advantage of having an existing substance to which a two dimentional map can be an analog, with recognizable borders, landmarks, precise locations, and above all, names. So even though history offers no such analogs, what I’m hoping is that, from the efforts of historians both amateur and professional, we can create a large set of visual time-maps that relate to certain cultures and common memories.
The physicist David Bohm presented a striking case that the universe has a deep, subtle structure akin to a hologram: Every particle has within its endless sub-structure a kind of implied, or enfolded, version of the entire universe — in real time. He called this “the implicate order”. This might seem like a mere fantasy, but consider this. In any point in the room in which you are sitting, the light from all other points in the room is passing simultaneously. Place a spherical camera in any position in the room (or your eyes) and everything is available, from all points. Step outside and some light emanating from every tiny blades of grass, even in the farthest distance, is reaching your eyes. In other words, there is a huge amount of information available inside every point in space. Light is just one spectra and frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum. In a nutshell a “broadcast” from every point in space is reaching every other point in space. (I’d highly recommend either Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order or Lee Nichol’s compendium, The Essential David Bohm.)
So might all events in time be affected or informed by all other events? To be continued…
If you’re at all interested in history, photography, or just the human experience, you should check out Shorpy.com. It’s a quite thoughtful photoblog featuring a few archived photos every day, usually from the 1950s and earlier. The site ” is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.”
Mnemograph is now TimeGlider! After months of (failed) “naming powwows”, scouring the available domains, coming close to choosing other names, and so forth, we finally agreed that TimeGlider is a perfect name, and we were able to secure the .com domain for a pretty good price.
Certainly “Mnemograph” was close to our hearts, and was a perfect “Latinate” expression of what we’ve been after: it stood for time, memory, and visualization, and provided some mythological depth. But no one could remember it accurately, or at all. Whenever I would call MediaTemple, our hosting provider, and tell them which domain we were dealing with, I would have to say “M as in Mary, N as in Nancy, E, M as in Mary, O-G-R-A-P-H”.
As we go through this name switch, it will certainly create some confusion and tangles on the server, but so far, it seems to be relatively seamless.
The book is Europe’s Last Summer, by David Fromkin. Here’s why: 
For some reason, I’ve become fascinated with the First World War — known aptly still as The Great War. Last year, I decided to create a timeline about it, and used a “timeline” from the Wikipedia (really just a table of events and dates) to build it. You can see it here in progress. This has led me to read a couple of books, including The Somme by Martin Gilbert, The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman, and others. But all along I’ve been bewildered by descriptions of how the war started. In all accounts, there has been a huge missing piece that no one is willing to admit was missing: The assassination of a major political/royal figure in the Balkans as a start to the war, despite being a casus belli, didn’t make complete sense, and didn’t seem to justify the war going from a local (and relatively common) Balkans war to a “world war”.
Fromkin, a professor at Boston University, does a splendid job of unraveling all the tangled elements — and introducing recently discovered events — of the “July Crisis” of the Summer of 1914, and makes real sense of it. The book is short and stays on its clear path beautifully. It seems like a missing key to any World History education.
This week, I’ll start adding events to my WWI timeline from Fromkin’s book, and will seek him out too for other ideas. Fromkin also wrote A Peace to End All Peace — another brilliantly elucidating book about the end of WWI and the formation of the Middle East: More on that book on another day.
Earlier this month, we were very pleased to see that the Dutch broadcaster NOS built a very nice and extensive timeline about the U.S. election and featured it on their site. NOS is sort of the Dutch equivalent to the U.K.’s BBC, specializing in news and sports.
Here’s the page on the NOS site, and here’s the timeline that they link to.
This is a fantastic way to use Mnemograph — as an accompaniment to a larger, ongoing media story. NOS was able to update this timeline in real time, during Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, even while as traffic to the timeline was popping like popcorn.
Notice, also, how they cleverly used short but wide images to save vertical space.
Thanks NOS, and congratulations Senator/Pres. Elect Obama.
For months, we’ve lived with a very minimal website. Perhaps this has lent a certain mystique to Mnemograph during this beta phase. Finally we’ve put together a more comprehensive “brochure” of our offerings, who we are, and what our mission is.
This seems to mean that we’re no longer flying under the radar, but are now beginning a more concerted effort to put ourselves on the radar.
Along with this new site, we’ve introduced (a few weeks ago) a serious upgrade of Mnemograph, one which includes our most innovative feature yet: size=importance. You can read about it a bit here. The beauty of this system is that it allows one to create a kind of “cloud” or landscape of events — the more important titles standing out in the foreground, less important events fading into a background, receding into space — and saving space, so that things don’t get horrendously stacked up when one is zoomed out.
Don’t forget to write to us about your experience with making timelines. Tell us about how you found us, why you need a timeline application, and so forth, in gushing detail. Here’s a link to our feedback page, just in case.
– MR
This month the rubber has hit the road with actual, semi-random people using the application. Every bug that emerges is both a pain in the arse and an important discovery that will improve the system.
If you are interested in being a tester for Mnemograph, you can sign up for a free beta account here.
It’s exciting to see that even though we’ve put no effort into SEO (search engine optimization), we’re top of the heap for “web-based timeline software”. Coming up on Google’s p.9 for “timeline software” isn’t so bad yet either.
The other major presence on the web for timelines is an MIT project, simply called “Timeline” which is part of a suite of ajaxy experiments called SIMILE. It’s drawn the attention of a lot of hackers because it’s pretty easy to configure with XML or JSON data. The average person would have to go to The Encyclopedia Britannica’s Timelines, which is a modification of the SIMILE project — the only one to build a decent user interface.
This CSS/Javascript/XML model has lots of advantages: it’s pretty zippy. It also has severe limitations in terms of scaling and other important interface elements. If there are too many events stacked vertically, there seems to be no way to access the events the break through the upper part of the frame. I look forward to seeing someone adopt the SIMILE project and take it farther. Many others have built Simile “mash-ups” with various data. The nicest one I’ve seen goes back into geological time.