I'm thinking someone must've done this already. An idea I've had for a while: large-scale interactive website. Can zoom in or out, pan along multiple timelines. Can filter certain trends--for instance, technological growth, territorial expansions, economic patterns, politics, religions, resources, agriculture, musical trends, and so forth. Enables you to see, if you zoom far enough out, thousands of years describing the evolution of literature, the rise and fall of empires, and so forth. Would be heavily database intensive, very data-centric. The main feature would be the user's ability to search for specific criteria, and the tool would output the data in beautifully designed graphs, either as static images, or animated timelines.
Has this been done already? I do understand the difficulties involved in creating such a thing, the limits of data aggregation, librarian science having its limitations, questions as how to qualify or quantify the data in question, etc, but I'm hoping small strides at least have been made towards such an idea.
So here's two. Let's start with that and then talk about what they're lacking. http://www.timemaps.com/history http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/History_n2/a.html I would argue that hyperhistory lacks an interface that isn't straight out of geocities, but hey. It's not like I put a lot of work into this.
The first link, timemaps, definitely on the path of what I was thinking. Nowhere near as complex and detailed as I'd like, but in the ballpark. Thanks. The second link... I silently chuckled at "an interface that isn't straight out of geocities". Then I visited the site. And busted up laughing. For several moments I continued to stare at that framed webpage, looking for animated icons and an "under construction" loading gif. Design flaws aside, it's a tentative step in the right direction. If the first link were a kick-ass high schooler, the second link carries its snacks for recess in a muppets lunch box. You give good quality. I adore you. Like a lunatic kitten loves catnip. Or I may be drunk.
The hardest part of this would be getting the data. What number would you say most represents "technological growth"? Has anyone been tracking that number for the past few centuries? Somewhat related, a friend of mine made this graph. He scraped Wikipedia to find what nations were each other's "predecessors" and "successors," and formed a directed graph showing the breaking up and reformation of nations throughout history. Made possible by the human curation provided by Wikipedia. Probably some of this type of data exists on the Internet if you take the time to trawl for it.
I think census data would be a big source. As for "technological growth": this tool would not treat data in that manner, per se. It doesn't have in its databases a column labelled "technological growth". In its database it uses hard data (how many homes have tvs for a given year, who has internet out of the total population, what ruling party was in power, population demographics, who was president, how many cars did people own, how many people rented vs owned, what was the GPO of a given economy for a given year, etc) and only when you query for certain trends does it export those data points and prettifies it into a visual trend, much like the data sheet for an Excel chart does.
