4/04/2012

Timelines


A bundle of beautiful timelines posted over at the Dave Rumsey Map Collection. Many of these are featured and discussed in Cartographies of Time, one of my favorite books I read last year.

Making timelines* seems to be one of those things that we can do on computers very easily now, using gestures and drag-and-drop, instead of the nightmare interface of something like this.

I wanted to add some more to this post, so here's some other TIMELINE links that I came across in about 10 minutes of searching. I haven't done in-depth research or anything. Also -- if you're searching for "timeline" on google you'll want to add "-facebook," to filter out a billion mentions of Facebook's (badly designed) timeline feature.

BeeDocs Timeline App
Verite Timeline App (play with the coal industry power play timeline)
SIMILE Timeline Widget
Tiki-Toki
ChronoZoom Project
Wikipedia list of timelines
Hyperhistory (oldstyle, charming)

Add more in comments if you want. There's gotta be some huge, Wikipedia-type timeline somewhere on the web, right? I thought I saw something like that once, but I couldn't find it just now.

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*...and mindmaps, 3D environments, nested documents, etc....

UPDATES:

Here's an interactive timeline thing called "Here is Today."

6 comments:

Kevin Hamilton said...

Have you, I hope, seen this wonderful thing?

Also I've been very enamored of how Virginia Lee Burton's books hint at timelines, maps, and other nested repeating structures. Especially the lesser known "Life Story" and more known "The Little House" and "Katy and the Big Snow." Less so Mike Mulligan but then it's just great anyway.

Kevin H said...

Yes! That geo time spiral is also near to my heart because of the river that runs through it. I just did a image search for "geological time spiral" and that brought up some other varieties.

Dan Z just posted this which is a mix of a timeline and a "Win Expectancy Chart."
http://zettwoch.blogspot.com/2012/04/new-print-world-series-game-6.html

@thalesira tweeted me this link, a review of Cartographies of Time, with more links to follow.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/02/07/cartographies-of-time/

I'd like to think and write and draw about timelines more in-depth down the road. In the meantime, I'll keep adding links.

Jeremy said...

Sorry I don't have my own links. Just wanted to say that I've never seen timelines like this before and I am super in love. Thanks for sharing!

P.S. Was that time spiral referenced in a Ganges issue? Looks a little familiar.

Kevin said...

Also I forgot to mention one of my fav books about timelines (along with Cartographies of Time): Designing Universal Knowledge

Zzzer said...

I guess that you know about this timeline http://www.datavis.ca/milestones/
If you don't kwow it you are going to love me after that

Kevin H said...

http://www.theworldasflatland.net/timeline-designing-universal-knowledge.htm