Histography - Timeline of History

The timeline seems among the most inescapable metaphors we have. And yet, in its modern form, with a single axis and a regular, measured distribution of dates, it is a relatively recent invention. Understood in this strict sense, the timeline is not even 250 years old. How this could be possible, what alternatives existed before, and what competin

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History, which contains literally everything that has happened to human civilization, is the data of the social sciences.

As The Scholar's Stage puts it: The problem with history is that it is too big. It is impossible to get a fine grained picture of every people and era on the planet. There is just too much of it.

TWO DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY:

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I should be able to scroll through the history of my browsing as an enormous branching graph that I can annotate, travel around, share with others, and version.

Art and photography give you a snapshot of a time and place, a detailed idea of what it would have been like to be there. Narratives and timelines make history coherent and interesting by hijacking our love of stories. Maps provide a large-scale overview of an entire period, joining together distinct narratives.

A detailed description of a historical event, just like a painting, a photograph, an artifact, a period film or anything that remains bounded to a single point in space and time, is a snapshot of history. It can't, by itself, provide a deep or a broad view.

The history of technology and globalization are the expansion and connection of knowledge. All written knowledge, from the Rosetta Stone, to the Talmud, to the modern academic paper, are graph structure. Yet, 21st century digital media still imitates the linear scroll.