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.
Memory may not be what you think: Both the ancient Greeks and other modern scientists offer theories of memory that expand far beyond our own brains. This book, “The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind” is a beautiful exploration of ancient memory and the radical transformation we went through as we went from communicating orally to communicating with the written word.
Mnemograph is a classic greek/latin construction: “mnemo” referring to Mnemosyne, the ancient muse of memory; “graph”, as we know, from the greek graphikos, relating to written words and pictures. In ancient (Greek and other cultures’) understanding, memory was understood to be something like a river in the spirit world — a resource to which people had access in varying degrees, something we either navigated or got lost in. It was understood to be something very different from our current notion: a cellular data retrieval mechanism housed mainly in the brain. Mnemosyne was the divine personification of memory, and it was she who mediated the human relationship to this “river”.
The poets were those who were spiritually the most well connected to the muses, Mnemosyne being the mother of them all. Clearly this explained how they could so accurately remember hours and hours of stories — and what they remembered, and told, was history itself. We now call this history “myth” — history as it became condensed and fermented in thousands of years of retellings/rememberings of the epic stories. The memories of the epic poets (Homer et al.) did not belong to them: It belonged to culture. It was generally understood that poets kept the memory of the culture. There was no other “history”.
I’m interested in bridging what is considered to be “natural” memory with “mnemonic” or artificial memory (i.e. memory imposed with a kind of delibarate associative technique) — and connecting this individual capacity for memory to our enormous potential for cultural memory. Redundant collective stupidity — environmental devastation, the retardation of democracy by money, and other sad hindrances — can only be overcome if humanity perceives it for what it is, in real time. Mnemograph, I hope, will be a key tool in cultivating an accurate and accessible cultural memory.
About three years ago, I had a revelation about “search” and news archives: Why did I need to have a search term in order to view a newspaper’s online archives? I was “browsing” through the New York Times’s archives, wishing I could recall (I mean have help recalling) in a general way what had happened six months earlier. In particular, I was curious about war in Iraq and Fallujah, and wanted to see the war news in the context of other events — presidential scandals, economic news, whatever. I did a search for “Iraq” and limited the query to being between May 1 and August 31 of that year (2003), and of course hundreds of results spilled before me like a dumped can of miscellaneous screws. Despite the fact that the data was well dated, and probably “tagged” with important keywords, history, as a continuum both across the spaces of “categories” and as a continuum of time, was entirely obfuscated.
I suddenly pined for a scrolling graphic timeline that could show the events of the world on such a continuum, and with some indication (scale, color-temperature) of importance. This jones was the seed moment for creating one myself. This project eventually came to be called “mnemograph” — a graphic tool for personal/historical/cultural memory.
Three years later, Mnemograph LLC has been born, and the umpteenth iteration of a Flash/Actionscript application is nearly ready for public “beta” consumption.
