
Horizontal History - rfreytag
http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html
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filoeleven
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
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.

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

