Time visualizaion is basically a way to chronologize history events. According to Grafton, people started to do these kinds of things from 500 A.D. (or earlier). This week, I experienced two ways to do time visualization, Time mapper and Time glider.
Grafton introduces that the earilist way to do time visulization is to build a chart, a “time vs. event” chart. Though human beings knew how to build this chart as early as 5th century, nowadays, we basically do the same things. Time mapper and Time glider are also charts. However, they are undeniable evolved versions.
Before talking about evolved versions of simple time chart, I would like to explore simple time charts’ features. It basically contains two columns: “time” and “events”. Without a chart, history can only be represented by paragraphs of words. It is a hard work for researchers to know the most needed information (What, Who and When) from a long article. Simple Time Chart solved this problem by only presenting the most significant information on a time line. It makes the most important part in the history clearer in one hand. But in the other hand, simple time chart makes some parts of history, which are also critical, obscure (How and Where). “What, who and when” construct a history event itself. “How and Where” help us to find out the interactions between different events.
Time glider and Time mapper evolve to different directions. Time mapper solves the problem of representing ‘Where’ while time glider presents ‘how’ by labeling importance levels to all events. By using different ways to represent events, we get some further information campared to a simple chart. For example, Researchers can suppose that an event will more likely interact with another event with the same importance level. In my time glider, the importance level of an event is increasing with its font size. Also, It is reasonable that an event will interact with another adjacent event. Therefore, from my time mapper, we can conclude confidently that Yuan Ming Garden’s construction takes almost no influence to French Indian War. Simple Time Chart, as a simple chronology, can not give us this kinds of “hiding information” about history’s interaction.
Time glider focuses on showing “how” while Time mapper shows “where”. Therefore, Time glider should be used when comparing events happened in a particular area. Time mapper should be used when comparing events with the same importance level.
