Chronographics

PhD studentship - Develop sophisticated digital timelines of cultural data within an academic-industrial partnership

2012-02-08T06:53:00.000-08:00

I have funding to support a PhD student to work on state-of-the-art timelines...

A PhD studentship is available at the Royal College of Art in London, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The funding includes the fees and a living allowance. This is a collaboration with industry, based at System Simulation, a research-led software engineering company in central London with a distinguished record of working with museums and other cultural organisations. The studentship provides a strong base on which to develop an industrial or academic career.

The aim of the research is to reveal new knowledge by visualising diverse large datasets in rich interactive timelines, other chronographic formats and related graphical displays. Our principal aim will be public understanding of historical and other data - making complex patterns visible to the lay viewer at a glance - though the visualisation tools will be adaptable to advanced use by researchers, curators, historians, and others.

The right applicant will have a strong desire to combine in-depth study and practical development. Their experience will include the design and development of interactive software. A software engineer may be the ideal candidate, but others with significant development experience are welcome to apply. They will be enthusiastic (and preferably knowledgeable) about visualisation and visual analytics, and have some understanding of working with large datasets. They will be committed to evaluation as well as making, since it is essential that the products of the research are usable and likeable as well as functioning to a high technical standard. See the documents online for further details.

http://www.rca.ac.uk/Default.aspx?ContentID=161457&GroupID=161452
(scroll down to "EPSRC-funded PhD Studentship")

Closing date 28 February 2012. Studentship to begin as soon as possible after 23 April 2012.

To discuss academic / industrial aspects of the studentship, email stephen.boyd-davis@rca.ac.uk

To discuss administrative / financial aspects, email suzanne.strong@rca.ac.uk

An indication of past work by the academic director of this research can be seen here: http://rca.academia.edu/StephenBoydDavis/Papers

You may also be interested in other funded research opportunities listed at the same URL, including The AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hub: Innovation and Knowledge Exchange in Digital Public Space.

A historical timeline of financial rise and fall

2012-02-03T05:46:00.000-08:00

Tobias Revell is a second-year student on the MA Design Interactions programme at the Royal College of Art (to which I moved in November 2011 since my last post to this blog).

At the recent Work in Progress exhibition, he showed a big timeline representing the vicissitudes of the world financial system from 50 to 2160 AD.

Tobias says about it

In its earliest forms, this was an exercise for myself and the studio audience in understanding the precedents and patterns of how power and finance have interacted throughout history and also as a way to show my research beyond scribbled notes. The idea being that I would then build smaller works off this context. However, I found that it came to be a piece of work in itself, a product of the research that went into it. It's also fulfilled its purpose of inspiring debate perfectly - I spent almost the whole private view talking to people about it with objections, opinions and questions of their own (in particular the assumption that as an artist/designer I was out of place in condoning rampant capitalism, something which I'm not doing nor was trying to show.)

I think that showing the research I'd done in such a graphical and open way allowed people to engage with the subject matter straight away without having to try and get to grips with curious new forms.

Timeline (detail). Tobias Revell 2012. Reproduced with permission.

Go to Tobias's blog.

Republican and other times again

2011-10-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

Speaking of French Republican Time (below), Matthew Shaw tells me of an imminent symposium at the National Maritime Museum.

Matthew is the author of the fascinating thesis I mentioned. He has also published a book, Time and the French Revolution which I have not yet read but hope to soon. See it on Boydell and Brewer's website. They offer a Look Inside facility so you can see part of the book before buying.

French Republican clock

2011-10-11T06:24:00.000-07:00

There are lots of pointless things you can do with Apple's iPad, but I was not expecting to find one so close to my interest in representing Time. It is French Revolutionary Clock by Miller Tinkerhess. It does very little – just displays a photographic image of a clock-face for a 10-hour day with the moving hands telling the correct time in Republican hours, minutes and seconds – but it does it well.

If you have an iPad dock, you can have a nice (expensive) Republican clock on your desk. Though not as expensive as buying a real survivor from the eighteenth century of course.

I mentioned the French Republican Calendar a couple of posts back. I am currently reading a fascinating PhD thesis on the subject, but more on that later.

The iPad clock is here.

The word 'timeline'

2011-09-23T06:43:00.000-07:00

The Oxford English Dictionary defines time-line as:

a certificate of apprenticeship
an undulating line indicating small fractions of a second, by which the time or rate of some process may be measured
a schedule, a deadline

The Dictionary’s earliest citation of a usage where time is arithmetically mapped to a surface or space is William James’ Principles of Psychology (1890). In his case, only one graphical component of the diagram is the time-line, rather than the whole design. Nevertheless it shows the key concept of events marked against a regular ‘clock’ of time, an idea fundamental to most of the examples discussed in my blog posts.

An early use of the word time-line in something like its present sense. The waves of the time-line here represent regular time intervals, while the reaction-line above it shows a pair of events. From p.86 of William James’ Principles of Psychology, Volume 1, 1890. Wellcome Library, London (http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/). Used with permission. Photo: Stephen Boyd Davis.

References
James, W. (1890), The Principles of Psychology. (2vols.) New York: Henry Holt. The whole book is online here: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/index.html. The diagram appears in Chapter 3: On Some General Conditions of Brain-Activity.
Oxford English Dictionary. (2011), ‘Timeline’ Online version June 2011 (Accessed 24 July 2011.) http://www.oed.com/ (subscription required).

French copy of Barbeu-Dubourg now online

2011-09-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

Gallica, an excellent French national online resource, free to access, now has a digitised view of Barbeu-Dubourg's Chronographie, ou Description des tems ; contenant toute la suite des souverains de l'univers et des principaux événemens de chaque siècle... en trente-cinq planches.

You can view it here: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1314025.r=.langEN

Detail of the Bibliothèque Nationale copy of the Chronographie on Gallica.

The file, which can be downloaded as a PDF, comprises both the explanatory booklet and the 35 sheets of the timeline itself. Scrutiny reveals that this is not identical to the edition at Princeton. Clearly the Princeton copy is a slightly later edition: not only have additional entries been made, but some items, eg. Bolingbroke, have been relocated.

Detail of the Princeton copy of the Chronographie (photo Stephen Boyd Davis, used with permission, Princeton University Library Rare Books)

Journal of Visual Culture review of Cartographies of Time

2011-09-21T02:07:00.000-07:00

My review of Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. 272 pp. ISBN: 1-568987633) has been published in the Journal of Visual Culture.

A pre-print version of the review is here: http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/8151/

The published version is here:
Journal of Visual Culture 2011 vol. 10 no. 2. 269-271
http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/10/2/269
DOI: 10.1177/1470412911413187a
(purchase or subscription necessary)

Three issues in mapping Time to a line

2011-09-16T11:18:00.000-07:00

I have just submitted an article to a design journal. It is concerned with just one topic: the mapping of time to a line. It is a plea for designers and others to take more seriously the following issues:

If time is mapped to a line, on which axis of the graphic surface should it lie? And in which direction should later times lie in relation to earlier: what is the direction of travel? Is there a solution to these questions that is the most natural, the best - or simply right?
How does time map to dimension; what model of time does such mapping presuppose? There is an indefinite number of possible mappings but, in practice, the principal options tend to be (1) strict linearity where equal space stands for equal time, (2) mathematically consistent non-linearity such as a logarithmic scale, usually giving more space to most recent time, (3) scaling which divides time into periods, each of which is linear but where the more recent periods are on a larger scale than those more distant. There are also examples of a more pragmatic approach, where the space allotted is adjusted to accommodate the density of events.
Calibration. There are several reasons why different measures of time may be needed. One is to reflect the varied cultures of the users (see figure). Within a single culture there may be rival dating schemes because of differing scholarly opinion. And it may simply be useful to have more than one calibration of a chart, for example dates counted forwards from a point in history to our own time as well as dates counted backwards from the present day.

A bronze cannon cast in France in March/April 1795AD. Rather than using 'our' Gregorian calendar, it bears the French Republican date: month Germinal in Revolutionary Year 3. Neither at present, nor in history, is the Gregorian the only calendar. Photographed at St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, UK, 2008. Photo: Stephen Boyd Davis.

As usual, I argue in the article that current thinking and practice is pretty rudimentary compared with the sophistication of early chronographers in the eighteenth century. Working through evidence that there are no right answers to the questions above, I propose some principles for approaching the questions and offer a research agenda.

If the article is published, it should come out some time next year. I'll put a few snippets from it here in the coming months, including a discussion of Nicole Oresme (c. 1320-5 - July 11, 1382) who may have been the first to draw time as a line.

Link: Wikipedia article on the French Republican Calendar (which also tells you what today's date is in that calendar).

A short article for Joseph Priestley's US home

2011-04-02T15:18:00.001-07:00

I contributed a two-page guest article as a supplement for the newsletter of the Friends of the Joseph Priestley House museum in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. Entitled The Man who Drew Time, it is intended as an introduction to Priestley’s chronographics for those completely unfamiliar with the area.

It can be downloaded from the museum page.
Or this is a direct link to the PDF file.

Priestley left England in 1794 as the authorities became increasing intolerant of his views. Soon after their arrival in Northumberland PA, he and his wife Mary began construction of a house on land overlooking the Susquehanna River. It was intended as the re-creation of a self-contained, English gentleman’s estate. Two years after their arrival in Northumberland, Mary died.

In 1961, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission was appointed to administer and restore many of the property's original features. In 2000, as an enhancement to the site’s historic landscape, the Commission completed reconstruction of outbuildings associated with the property during Priestley’s residency.

Tom Bresenhan, President of the Friends, with whom I have had the pleasure of corresponding, is overseeing the creation of a new exhibit about Priestley’s timelines at the museum.

Three primary texts now available

2011-03-07T02:53:00.000-08:00

I have added another primary text: see new list of these, right.

Texts previously uploaded were:

Priestley, Joseph. 1778. Description of a Chart of Biography (main explanatory text). 7th edn. J. Johnson. London. This PDF file is a rough approximation of the first part of the original book. This file preserves the line-breaks and pagination, and roughly imitates the layout of the original. The original book of 1778 is my own copy.

Barbeu-Dubourg, Jacques. 1753. Chronography or Depiction of Time. Paris. Explanatory booklet for Chart. Original French (images only) and translation by Stephen Boyd Davis, assisted by Christine North, October 2009. From a photocopy in the Rare Books Collection, Princeton University Library (Call number: D11 .B372 1753a), taken from an original of the explanatory booklet held by the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

The new text is:

Priestley, Joseph. 1764 and 1778. Description of a Chart of Biography (list of the c2000 names in the chart). 1st and 7th edn. J. Johnson. London. This PDF file is a rough approximation of the second part of Priestley’s Description (the first edition of 1764). It is an index to the 2000 individuals in the Chart of Biography itself. Annotations in grey within [square brackets] indicate differences between the 1764 and 1778 editions. They also indicate names which were in the 1764 addenda called Names omitted in the Catalogue. Each name is followed by a date – usually either d. (died) or fl. (flourished) – and one or more alphabetic indicators of the role of the individual. I will add Priestley’s introduction and explanation of these when I have time. Many entries take this form: Charles the Bald. d. 876. 53 – meaning that Charles the Bald died in 876 at the age of 53.

Johnson and Priestley

2011-02-21T03:29:00.000-08:00

The fact that Joseph Johnson is featured on Wikipedia today prompts me to post a snippet that reflects Joseph Priestley’s optimism – sometimes verging on Dr Pangloss’s best of all possible worlds. Even the fire at Johnson’s works (see Wikipedia article) is turned into a benefit. In the later editions of his Description of a Chart of Biography, Priestley remarks:

“The plates in which the first copy of this chart was engraved having been melted down, in the fire at Mr. Johnson’s, A.D. 1769, it is now re-engraved, with considerable improvements ; and particularly, care has been taken to mark the terminations of the lines from the dates, upon the plate itself, without any intervening drawing ; by which means it is now much more accurately finished, than it was possible to do it, in the manner in which it was first done.”

Words over time

2010-12-19T10:23:00.000-08:00

Google Labs have a tool that exploits the large corpus of words they have built up through digitising all those Google Books.

A chart of the percentage occurrence of the words "art", "design" and "science" from 1810 to 2000. See it live here.

It is worth bearing in mind that none of the example words ("art", "design" and "science") continued to mean the same thing throughout that period.

Something fifhy going on
All visualisations depend on the quality of the underlying data and this is where this tool falls down.

I thought I would check for occurrences of a word which is unlikely to be much affected by fashion, from 1700 to 2000: I tried "fish". This produced some highly suspect results with very low occurrences before 1800 and a dramatic rise at that time:

A chart of the percentage occurrence of the word "fish" from 1700 to 2000. See it live here.

And then I realised what is going on.

Google have not corrected the long-tailed s's which the scanning software thinks are f's. If you chart the nonexistent word "fifh" you find a steady climb which dramatically drops during 1780-1800 when the long s was replaced by the one we use now. Charting "fish,fifh" shows both. Together they make a more sensible picture:

A chart of the percentage occurrence of the word "fish" and "fifh" from 1700 to 2000. See it live here.

Charting "defign,design" shows a similar pattern, as does "fcience,science".

This is idleness on Google's part and undermines the usefulness of the tool. I am sure it would be perfectly possible to make their Optical Character Recognition software tell the difference between a long-tailed s and an f, since they are not the same glyph:

Different glyphs for f and long s. From Joseph Priestley, 1764, A Description of a Chart of Biography on Google Books.

The crossbar of a long tailed s extends only to the left, as in "science" in the first line here, whereas the crossbar of an f extends both sides, as in "therefore" in line one/two.

A tool to use with care, indeed suspicion.

Ben Fry's watching the evolution of the Origin of Species

2010-12-17T09:05:00.000-08:00

Ben Fry, co-inventor of Processing, has created an intriguing visualisation of the chapters of Darwin’s Origin of Species, showing how they alter between each of the six editions that Darwin produced between 1859 and 1876.

Ben Fry. 2010. On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces.
Used with permission.

These are not representations of time as such, but representations of change. Ben writes:

The idea that we can actually see change over time in a person’s thinking is fascinating. Darwin scholars are of course familiar with this story, but here we can view it directly, both on a macro-level as it animates, or word-by-word as we examine pieces of the text more closely.

This is where the hidden depths of the project lie. At first sight ‘just’ a visualisation, this is actually an interface to the full text of all the editions, based on van Wyhe et al.’s Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.

Ben has written a book for O'Reilly Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment based on his 2004 PhD dissertation at the MIT Media Lab Computational Information Design [PDF].

Tracking 18th-century "social network" through letters

2010-11-19T11:03:00.000-08:00

Researchers at Stanford have mapped thousands of letters exchanged in the 18th century's "Republic of Letters" and produced a visualisation (partly time-based) of the flow of knowledge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nw0oS-AOIPE

Paper for Computers and the History of Art 2010

2010-09-26T15:27:00.000-07:00

The Computers and the History of Art (CHArt) conference this year is concerned with Technology and ‘the death of Art History’.

My paper is again based principally on the work of Barbeu-Dubourg and Priestley, but looking at new aspects. Among these I discuss for the first time the spatialisation of knowledge in Priestley’s Harmony of the Evangelists. The most striking feature is the visual gaps, the empty spaces, at times resembling the famous empty page in Tristram Shandy by Priestley’s older contemporary Sterne (1713-1768). He describes his method: ‘If I should be thought to have succeeded in this work better than the generality of my predecessors, I shall attribute it chiefly to the mechanical methods I made use of’ (Harmony pxvi original emphasis). He goes on to explain how he cut up two copies of the gospels and rearranged them. The physical, mechanical nature of the process was of help to him as well as to his readers: he was able to move the elements about as his ideas changed, before fixing them just prior to going to print (pxvii).

Pages 19 and 207 of Priestley’s Harmony of the Evangelists of 1780. Aligning the four Gospel accounts according to time, using between one and four columns per page. Chetham’s Library, Manchester. Used with permission.

The abstracts for my paper says:

The paper is concerned with the use of computers to represent historical time visually, typically as ‘timelines’. Research into the sophisticated practice and theory of early modern paper timelines in the eighteenth century reveals the weakness of current practice, especially on the Web. Behind the work of the early pioneers lay a vision of mechanising knowledge. At that time, this proved a productive metaphor, but in our own time the mechanistic properties of computers have tended to encourage an approach to visualising history that excludes all but the crudest aspects. Solutions are needed which use computing in ways that do justice to the demands of historiography.

CHArt 2010 takes place Wednesday 10 - Thursday 11 November 2010 at The British Computer Society, First Floor, Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA. In the draft programme my paper is on the Thursday afternoon.

View The British Computer Society, Southampton Street, London in a larger map

3D timelines

2010-07-28T03:57:00.000-07:00

I discussed in March the use of the depthwise axis to represent the time dimension, highlighting a BBC project that unusually placed most recent time furthest away into the depths of the screen. As you travelled forward into the space you were travelling forward in time. I shall come back on a future occasion to these spatial metaphors of time, epitomised in English by phrases like ‘I look forward to seeing you.’

Another BBC timeline is embedded in a data visualisation created in conjunction with the University of Westminster, 3D Documentary Explorer [external link].

3D Documentary Explorer by BBC and University of Westminster in an AHRC-funded collaboration.

In 1996, Robin Kullberg, a postgraduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory, created a ‘Dynamic Timeline’ using full 3D. She wrote a short paper about it, accessible as a web page [external link], and her video of the system can be seen (and even downloaded) at the University of Maryland Open Video site [external link]. There are several weaknesses in the thinking behind the project – not least that the assumed advantages of 3D over 2D are not really discussed – but it is a remarkable piece of work.

Robin Kullberg: Dynamic Timelines: visualising the history of photography. MIT Media Lab 1996.

Paper at Electronic Visualisation and the Arts 2010 now online

2010-07-06T03:59:00.000-07:00

The paper I wrote for EVA2010 [external link] with Emma Bevan and Aleksei Kudikov is now online on the BCS website [external link].

The presentation (to be delivered tomorrow, Wednesday 7 July) illustrates the range of ingenious graphical solutions, such as this...

Part of Stream of Time - Chart of Universal History from the German of Strass published by C Smith 1855

... that have been used to represent time.

We focus on the issue of the Shape of Time, looking at the historic roots of the idea that time is a uniform container for events – Descartes, Newton etc, leading via Helvicus into the pioneering visualisations by Barbeu-Dubourg and Priestley discussed in other parts of this blog.

This leads into a discussion of the rationale for our own Historical Interactive Timeline.

Change over time: Antarctic

2010-05-30T09:50:00.000-07:00

In my work on the visualisation of time, I am above all interested in explicitly representing time graphically and spatially – as calendars, clocks and timelines do. But sometimes it is hard to resist appealing examples that implicitly represent time by showing change.

Nicholas Hutcheson has put online a series of short experiments using time-lapse drawings of the Antarctic Landscape. They can be viewed here in Vimeo.

Nicholas explains:

In 2008 I spent 8 weeks as an Artist in Residence for the Australian Antarctic Division drawing frantically as I journeyed in and around the continent. On my return, the challenge has been to try and capture some of the Antarctica I experienced. Out there, you have a constant awareness of movement and time. Some of it is so slow - gigantic icesheets flowing towards the sea at seemingly imperceptible rates – but then, you can also watch the sea water become ice, and weather fronts moving across the horizon. And the majority of what makes up the landscape is frozen water. It’s defined by this ever-creeping whiteness – in compositional terms, a mass of negative space. How to deal with this in the drawings I was making?

At the start of the year, in response to this dilemma, I began to play with making very short animations, sort of time-lapse drawings of the landscape.

A page about his drawings is here.

Jacques Bertin (1918-2010)

2010-05-19T12:14:00.000-07:00

I learned today of the death, in Paris on 6th May, of Jacques Bertin. He pioneered an analytic approach to the use of graphic elements to convey meaning. Some of his pronouncements were distinctly strange: for example in his monumental publication Semiologie Graphique: diagrammes, réseaux, cartographie Bertin insists on separating the retinal from the spatial. This becomes very odd when he discusses the difference between the use of lengths and areas to represent quantities, since it involves declaring length as spatial but area as not.

Bertin is ironically at his best – not in his attempt to systematise through textual rules which becomes intimidatingly prescriptive – but in his opposite, graphical, tendency to offer numerous solutions to a single data visualisation task. Even within the narrow domain of a chart of four quantities, Bertin is able to show twenty different representations – an object lesson in not just plumping for the first idea that comes along.

Bertin in Wikipedia
Principe de l'information cartographique – some illustrations and discussion of Bertin’s ideas (en Français)
An interview with Bertin in Inf@Vis! – the digital magazine of InfoVis.net

His Semiologie Graphique: diagrammes, réseaux, cartographie is being republished in English (as Semiology of Graphics) this autumn. I cannot easily find out the publisher, but it appears on Amazon.

An indexical chronographic

2010-05-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

Justin Quinnell makes very long exposure photographs using a pinhole camera.

One of Justin Quinnell’s long-exposure photographs, from his pinhole photography site.

This one shows the tracks of the sun over the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, UK during a six-month exposure from 19 December 2007 to 21 June 2008.

Apparently the pinhole camera was made from an empty drinks can with a 0.25mm aperture, strapped to a telephone pole overlooking the Gorge.

Dotted lines of light are the result of overcast days when the sun was less consistently visible.

HiT: Historical Interactive Timeline MA project at Lansdown Centre

2010-04-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

Emma Bevan and Aleksei Kudikov who studied on the MA Design for Interactive Media at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts created an interactive timeline which will feature in a presentation at EVA 2010, the conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, in London on 5-7 July 2010.

Just in Time: defining historical chronographics by Stephen Boyd Davis, Emma Bevan and Aleksei Kudikov is historical in two respects, both concerned with visual representations of past time.

The paper’s first purpose is to enquire how visual representations of historical time can be used to bring out patterns in a museum collection. A case study is presented of the visualisation of data with sufficient subtlety to be useful to historians and curators. Such a visual analytics approach raises questions about the proper representation of time and of objects and events within it. It is argued that such chronographics can support both an externalised, objectivising point of view from ‘outside’ time and one which is immersive and gives a sense of the historic moment. These modes are set in their own historical context through original historical research, highlighting the shift to an Enlightenment view of time as a uniform container for events. This in turn prompts new ways of thinking about chronological visualisation, in particular the separation of the ‘ideal’ image of time from contingent, temporary rendered views.

A prototype of HiT can be seen here. Special features of the timeline include that it represents uncertainty – no date is marked as a point, as though it were of infinite precision, but as a line – and that multiple searches can be combined. The prototype uses a subset of the collection housed at MoDA, the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture. We are very grateful to Zoe Hendon, Senior Curator of the museum, and to System Simulation Limited for their help and support.

To see thumbnails of the items in the collection, choose Images On/Off at the top left of the display.

Use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll through the timeline.

Cartographies of Time reviewed

2010-04-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

Cartographies of Time
Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton

ISBN 9781568987637
8.5 x 10.5 inches (21.6 x 26.7 cm), Hardcover, 272 pages
268 color illustrations ; 40 b/w illustrations

[see the book on the publisher’s site]

Cartographies of Time is a milestone book. It makes a cogent claim for the importance of chronography as a neglected aspect of past historiography and as an important cultural form for the present. The most significant recent work in this area is that of the authors themselves, such as Rosenberg’s 2007 article on Joseph Priestley’s ‘graphic invention of modern time’, and Grafton’s two-volume study of Joseph Scaliger of 1983 and 1993, so it is ideal that these two should have come together to create this new book.

As the authors point out, there is a tendency to regard chronology as primitive or incomplete history writing, yet it is the scaffolding on which history as we now understand it relies. As late as the 18th century, the word ‘history’ had connotations of narrative and story to which chronology was seen to give rigour: it brought (various authors argued) meaning, vividness, memorability, an evidential basis, and a unifying framework. Locke argued that chronology’s ability to give history form made it both more memorable and more productive of moral lessons.

Feeney notes in his Caesar’s Calendar of 2007 the near-impossibility of recovering in imagination the character of events before we had a standardised numerical grid for history, and emphasises the recency of its invention. Rosenberg and Grafton’s main theme is similarly the way in which the line, visible or implied as a metaphor for time, is a product of only the last 250 years. They document a series of key influences on chronology and chronography: the explosion of conflicting sources faced by Renaissance scholars, the realisation that astronomical records might be used as a historical clock to correct dates corrupted or lost, the eschatological motive (many chronologies and chronographics mapped the past in order to predict the future), and the distressing difficulties experienced by Christian chronologers as evidence accumulated – in the form of reliable records from other cultures and the growth of deep time through geological investigation – that the Bible could no longer be treated as history.

Profoundly knowledgeable in historiography, the authors write sensitively about the visual, and effortlessly connect the two. For them the graphical is not a childish substitute for the sophistication of words but an essential counterpart. An admirable feature of the book is the synergy of the text and illustrations. The figures are printed close to the relevant text, the captions are informative, and in the text the authors draw out with verve the features they want the reader to notice.

The work of Joseph Priestley, preacher, scientist and radical, is pivotal. The authors give a good account of the ‘crucial transition in the history of chronographic representation’ offered by his Chart of Biography 1765 and New Chart of History 1769. While many of the charts in the book are rich in graphical conceits such as trees, rivers, streams, chains and wheels of time, Priestley’s are wonderfully minimal and egalitarian with their spread of two thousand undifferentiated named lifelines, an arithmetical presentation appropriate to Priestley’s scientific and Dissenting philosophy. Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg gets rather less generous treatment than Priestley, despite his 16.5 metre chart of history having preceded Priestley in using for the first time, as the authors acknowledge, a truly arithmetic scale for time. It is true that Barbeu-Dubourg is a rather simple soul compared with Priestley: his argument for his own pioneering timeline is full of the sort of claims about effortless learning that would be made again about multimedia in the 1980s.

Perhaps the account of Priestley’s achievement could have emphasised another of his vital innovations: the visual representation of uncertainty [see Representing Uncertainty].

The nineteenth century brings chronographical games, mostly intended to be educational. Though occasionally ingenious, these represent in some ways a nadir of chronography, essentially childish and not a tool for investigation or serious thought. Nevertheless, it is nice to learn that a chronographic game was explicitly designed by Mark Twain to be winnable by any player knowing a lot of ‘minor events’ as well as the player who knows the dates of monarchs and battles.

The closing chapters of the book are somewhat cursory, touching on public monumental timelines and timelines as art, including Maciunas’ chart of time and space-based art for Fluxus, John Cage’s graphical scores, and Shapolsky et al’s Manhattan Real Estate Holdings cancelled from the Guggenheim’s schedule for being too political. Some exclusions from the book are a little surprising: Marey’s chronophotography is in, but the comic strip and the film storyboard are out; the exhibition timelines of Charles and Ray Eames, the richest of which mounted physical historic objects onto extended graphical representations of time, do not appear. It is a shame that the work of Michael Twyman in the history of chronographics is not acknowledged, nor Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle with its important discussion of the conflicting metaphors of the line and the circle as models of time; and one might have expected more on the groundwork for visualising number as line laid down by Descartes and the crucial proposal by Newton that time is a measure which can be treated as analogous to space. But these are quibbles about a book whose historical depth is its finest feature. Even in the middle of discussing modern grand timelines in museums and public spaces, the authors remind us of Augustus’s carved fasti consulares of the first century BCE; a silly timeline on a folding ruler is juxtaposed with Dürer, Sarah Fanelli’s Tate Artist Timeline with Piranesi.

Credit is also due to Jan Haux, the designer. Though some of the illustrations are smaller than they need to be, this is a beautiful book perhaps inspired by the classic publications of Edward Tufte. As a record of achievement during centuries of chronographic invention it should make most modern designers ashamed, and lays the foundation for the future study of chronographics.

Cartographies of Time: the book is out now

2010-04-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton’s book Cartographies of Time is out now: my pre-ordered copy from Amazon is in front of me as I write. It looks beautiful and is lavishly illustrated. I’ll be reviewing it here soon.

See the book on the publisher’s site.

That other axis, in a BBC timeline

2010-03-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

BBC History of the World. A timeline where time is in the depth (z) axis. From BBC History of the World website.

Which way should time go?
The screen, like a piece of paper, has only two dimensions. Illusions of depth, along a dimension orthogonal to the two real dimensions, can be created using a variety of visual cues – J.J. Gibson counted thirteen cues that our perceptual/cognitive system seems to use to infer depth, many of which can be used pictorially to fake depth on a two-dimensional surface (discussed in Chapter 3 of my 2002 PhD [download 6.5MB PDF file]).

This BBC example is a timeline based on things: it is a history of the world told through objects. Time is represented by the illusory third dimension with, rather unusually, the most distant time being shown as nearest to the viewer. At any given date, contemporaneous objects arrange themselves in a circle around the centre-point.

A nice feature is that information on users’ objects can be uploaded and is fully integrated with the original set of objects contributed by museums and other organisations. I have uploaded a picture of my copy of Priestley’s Description of a Chart of Biography. It seemed right to put a pioneering historical timeline in the timeline of historic objects.

A small technology timeline

2010-02-07T08:36:00.000-08:00

This timeline developed by Mark Light (a graduate of the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University) has a couple of interesting features.

The timescale with slider at the bottom is non-linear, using different horizontal intervals of space for a given interval of time. This is common and generally necessary when dealing with a long historical aera since there is far more data for recent times than for the more distant past. But here this is flagged using colour. The user is alerted to the three different scales - a horizontal unit may represent 1000, 500 or 100 years - using shades of blue. Often designers in the interests of tidy uniformity obscure the different scales they use.
Items in time have a relation to others. These relationships are made explicit using serpentine arcs inscribed between the nodes. There is a potential problem, visible in the illustration here, that where one arc touches or crosses another, it is not possible to discern which line belongs to which node. However, as used here, the arcs all convey roughly the same kind of relationship, so there is little need to see which line is which.

Like many modern timelines and other interactive diagrams this one makes transitions between different states of the diagram as fluid as possible. In part this is just a current aesthetic, but it also seems to assist in maintaining the frame of reference so that the user sees newly displayed information in the context of what was on screen before.
The timeline is not a dead end. It is an interface to further information which appears below the timeline display and which the user can edit.

The timeline itself

Continuum: an interesting and complex timeline tool

2010-01-09T10:01:00.000-08:00

I’ve just come across an unusually subtle timeline developed at Southampton University, UK, by Paul André, Max Wilson, Alistair Russell, Daniel Smith, Alisdair Owens and m schraefel.

Continuum, a Web2.0 application for visualising faceted temporal data, by Paul André, Max Wilson, Alistair Russell, Daniel Smith, Alisdair Owens and m schraefel of Southampton University.

Among its many points of interest, sections of a timeline can be brought into close proximity so that relationships can be conveniently mapped, omitting the intervening time. In the illustration above, works by Bach are connected to performances by Glenn Gould.

On the right of the illustration can be seen sliders which control the level of detail of different facets of the data independently of one another.

A video of the work can be seen here:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13818/2/uist2007-continuum.mov

A paper about it is here:
Continuum: designing timelines for hierarchies, relationships and scale (2007)
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13818/01/continuum-rev.pdf

André, P., Wilson, M. L., Russell, A., Smith, D. A., Owens, A., and schraefel, m. 2007. Continuum: designing timelines for hierarchies, relationships and scale. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Newport, Rhode Island, USA, October 07 - 10, 2007). UIST '07. ACM, New York, NY, 101-110.

Uniformity

2010-01-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

Barbeu-Dubourg in 1753 and Joseph Priestley in 1765 both extolled the merits of uniform timescales for chronographics (which they effectively invented). In fact they presented one-sided arguments for this solution.

A number of aspects of eighteenth century culture reflect this commitment to uniformity.

Jethro Tull and the seed drill

A modern field sown with a seed drill. Uniform parallel rows stretch to the horizon. Copyright Tony Atkin and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence.

By this means also the Rows of the whole Field may be kept equidistant, and parallel to one another. Tull 1762: 374

Jethro Tull was a pioneer of agricultural improvement. In 1701, he developed an improved design of horse-powered seed drill that planted seeds in parallel rows, and in 1714 a horse-drawn hoe for tending such crops. In 1731, he published Horse Hoeing Husbandry which promoted his new farming ideas. During the following century and a half, the seed drill was gradually adopted so that broadcast seed, thrown to the ground by hand, was replaced by regular lines of plants. It must have been extraordinary to see the natural random patterns of seedlings succeeded by uniform parallel rows.

Buildings and pavements

The Royal Crescent in Bath, UK, July 2006. Photo by David Iliff, from Wikipedia.

The eighteenth century saw a flowering of the urban terrace in cities such as Bath and Edinburgh. Though sometimes embellished with central porticoes and other architectural features, they were distinctive for their use of simple repetition and the equality of every unit in the façade. They emphasised the neo-classical ideals of ‘order, regularity, restraint, proportion and reason’ (Lee and Kelley, 1996: 48), though it has been suggested that ‘simplicity, austerity and regularity were as much solutions to economic problems as a selfconscious search for aesthetic effect’ (Ashworth 2005: 43).

Stone paving, perhaps laid in the eighteenth century, in Pearse Street, Dublin. Uniform paving was an eighteenth century innovation. From http://www.archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4516

Until the mid eighteenth-century in Britain it was the responsibility of individual householders to maintain the pavements in front of their property. Pavements were therefore of different heights, materials and quality. At the same period that Barbeu-Dubourg and Priestley were advocating a uniform scale to represent time, there was a shift to uniform paving funded through local taxation. For the first time, the pavement would have been the same along a single street (Cockayne 2007: 202-204).

The uniformity of time
The very idea of time that we now take for granted – a uniform empty structure which contains events – is of course a cultural construct. Newton, whom Priestley and many of his contemporaries revered, was an early advocate of such a model:

Absolute, True, and Mathematical Time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external... Newton 1687

Poole describes the shifting conception in this way:

The term ‘calendar’ became less likely to signify the whole cultural edifice and more likely to refer simply to the chronometrical framework. Poole 1995: 100

This contrasts with the earlier ‘lumpish quality of time’ (Poole 1998: 23) in which ‘time was an uneven succession of periods of different qualities, a cluster of high points and low, rather than a steady stream of being’ (op cit: 21).

Gell (1992: 23 passim) warns that to even refer to a culture’s ‘model of time’ is to beg the question. A society may have a model of the relationship between events, between now and the past, the past and the future, etc., but not necessarily have a model of time per se.

References

Ashworth, Gregory J. 2005. The Georgian City: the Compact City as Idealised Past or Future Ideal. Global Built Environment Review 4(3). http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/gber/Vol4Issue3.htm. 40-53.

Cockayne, Emily. 2007. Hubbub: filth, noise & stench in England 1600-1770. Yale University Press.

Gell, Alfred. 1992. The Anthropology of Time: cultural constructions of temporal maps and images. Berg, Oxford
Newton, Isaac. 1687. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Book 1. Scholium.

Lee, D. and Kelly, R. 1996. Georgian Limerick. FAS/ Limerick, Civic Trust.

Poole, Robert. 1995. ‘Give us our eleven days!’: calendar reform in eighteenth-century England. Past & Present 149(1). 95-139
Poole, Robert. 1998. Time’s Alteration: calendar reform in early modern England. London: UCL Press/Taylor & Francis. p23.

Tull, Jethro. 1762. Horse-Hoeing Husbandry or, an Essay on the Principles of Vegetation and Tillage. 4th edn. Millar, London. Available as PDF at http://www.archive.org/details/horsehoeinghusba00tull

Immersion in history - 1

2009-12-22T12:41:00.000-08:00

One obvious aspect of chronographics is that they are designed to provide overview or perspective – to produce an objectivising effect. Priestley wrote:

TIME is continually suggested to us, by the view of this chart, under the idea of a river, flowing uniformly on, without beginning or end. [...] IF we compare the lives of men with that portion of it which this chart represents, they are little more than so many small straws swimming on the surface of this immense river, strongly expressing the admirable propriety of those lines of Dr. Watts, concerning the eternity of GOD.
While, like a tide, our minutes flow,
The present and the past ;
HE fills his own eternal NOW.
And sees our ages waste.
Priestley, Joseph. 1764. Description of a Chart of Biography. J. Johnson, London. p26.

A less obvious potentiality is to create a sense of immersion in the moment. Priestley described it like this:

IT is a peculiar kind of pleasure we receive, from such a view as this chart exhibits, of a great man, such as Sir Isaac Newton, seated, as it were, in the circle of his friends and illustrious cotemporaries. We see at once with whom he was capable of holding conversation, and in a manner (from the distinct view of their respective ages) upon what terms they might converse.
Op cit. p24.

This is one of the strongest features of the Machine Chronographique of Barbeu-Dubourg. He writes of his invention as...

...a moving, living tableau, through which pass in review all the ages of the world, where each famous figure steps forth in his rank with the attributes belonging to him, where each Prince is surrounded by his contemporaries and occupies the scene for more or less time according to the duration of his role, where the rise and fall of Empires are acted out in visible form...
Barbeu-Dubourg, Jacques. 1753. Chronographie, ou description des temps…. Paris. Photocopy in the Rare Books Collection, Princeton University Library, from an original of the explanatory booklet for the chart (q.v.) in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Princeton University Library call number: D11 .B372 1753a. p8

And again...

Do you wish to look next through the entire Chart? First you find God alone before all time; then you see Adam appear, and at once the sequence of the centuries, in which all the years are marked out...
Op cit. p13

Here the sense of history as immersive experience is uppermost. More on this in future posts.

Representing uncertainty

2009-12-22T10:29:00.000-08:00

One of the weaknesses of most chronographics is that they conceal uncertainty. This was the case with the first modern timeline, the Carte Chronographique of Barbeu-Dubourg, but not the second, Priestley’s Chart of Biography. Priestley wrote:

It is an imperfection which must necessarily attend every chart of this nature, that the time of the death but more especially the time of the birth of eminent men cannot always be found. In this case the compiler must content himself with placing his line as near as he can conjecture from history where his true place was, leaving marks to express the uncertainty there is attending it.

Priestley, Joseph. 1764. Description of a Chart of Biography. J. Johnson, London. p11.

Priestley’s references to uncertainty can be seen in the copy of his Description on Google Books.

It is increasingly recognised that visualisations need to represent uncertainty effectively.

Scientific data from instruments, numerical models, or interpolation schemes almost invariably contain some degree of error or uncertainty. Display of such scientific data without uncertainty information is incomplete and may lead to erroneous conclusions. Visualization of data with uncertainty information allows more accurate and effective interpretation.

Wittenbrink, C.M., Pang, A.T. and Lodha, S.K. 1996. Glyphs for Visualizing Uncertainty in Vector Fields. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 2(3). September 1996.

Priestley, Joseph. 1765. A Chart of Biography. Photo: Stephen Boyd Davis. With the permission of Chetham's Library, Manchester.

Priestley not only recognised the problem but devised an effective solution within the limits of the available technology. Minor uncertainty is expressed by a dot underneath the end of the lifeline in question. Increasing levels of uncertainty are expressed by replacing the end of the lifeline with between one and three dots. The illustration above includes three examples which are all dots.

Based on a classification of forms of uncertainty suggested by Pham, Streit and Brown (2009), I have itemised some of the uncertainties that might need to be represented in a timeline for today:

Range of precision: might range from centuries to seconds.
Dates which are unknown.
Dates which are uncertain with various levels of uncertainty.
Dates of inherently fuzzy events such as movements, trends, ‘-isms’ etc.
Multiple sources: conflicting evidence of dates
Multiple models: conflicting calendars (Julian, Gregorian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist etc).
Membership of sets prone to views of different experts. Dispute over categories.
Sets worthy of modelling contested (Priestley acknowledged that his set is dominated by the English and that it would have been different if designed for a different public).
Need to be able to import existing datasets which may be inadequate in many, perhaps unpredictable, ways.

References

Pham, B., Streit, A. and Brown, R. Visualisation of Information Uncertainty: Progress and Challenges. In: Zudilova-Seinstra, E., Adriaansen, T. and van Liere, R. (eds.) Trends in Interactive Visualization. Springer, London. 2009. 19-48
Priestley, Joseph. 1764. Description of a Chart of Biography. J. Johnson, London.
Wittenbrink, C.M., Pang, A.T. and Lodha, S.K. 1996. Glyphs for Visualizing Uncertainty in Vector Fields. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 2(3). September 1996.

Lorenzo da Ponte, ungleichzeitigkeit, chronographics

2009-12-21T10:49:00.000-08:00

Some possible translations of the German ungleichzeitigkeit include:
    not-happening-synchronously-ness
    asynchronicity
    nonsynchronism
    temporal disphasure
    historical misalignment
    temporal asymmetry

According to the article in the German version of Wikipedia – here freely translated – ‘Ungleichzeitigkeit is a term coined by the philosopher Ernst Bloch in Heritage of our Times (Zurich, 1935) which in the social sciences and history is associated with classical modernism of the 19th and 20th Century.’

Portrait of Lorenzo da Ponte by Samuel B Morse. From http://www.schillerinstitute.org/educ/hist/daponte.html

In that book, Bloch begins the chapter translated by Ritter as Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics with the statement ‘Not all people exist in the same Now.’ From a political stance, he identifies the way in which groups in society belong to cultural clusters which do not share a single zeitgeist.

The term has been adopted by some to denote the more general sense of an apparent misalignment of events belonging to contemporaneous cultural groups. For example in In Search of a Nineteenth Century, Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz refers to ‘minor and major, personal and structural survivals and Ungleichzeitigkeiten, made visible by historical cross-sectioning.’ At this point I hope the relevance to chronographics – and especially synchronographics, which aim to show synchronous events across cultures, countries and categories – becomes clear. Osterhammel suggests that ‘Cutting through the tissue of history at any given time allows startling insights into the much-quoted “simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous”.’

Osterhammel gives as an example his investigation of the year 1837 (‘Year One of the Victorian Age’) in which he found Samuel Morse taking out a patent on the telegraph while at the same time Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist, was still alive and well and living in New York. Remarkably, Osterhammel does not note that there is a portrait which encapsulates this particular ungleichzeitigkeit, a painting of da Ponte, by Morse - who was more an artist than he was an inventor, with a self-appointed mission to introduce European culture to the States (see Gere 2006: Chapter 2). The existence of the painting is noted in Susan W. Bowen’s review of a book by Rodney Bolt published in 2006, and earlier in an article in 2000 by Jeremy Sams in the Independent newspaper.

The painting was first brought to my attention by the artist Nat Goodden when he was a postgraduate student at the Lansdown Centre in 1993-95. He showed me a photocopy of the portrait and asked me what it was – I was astonished. Nat has continued to pursue these themes, including in a prototype website to explore such cross-connections: http://culturalcartography.net/what. There he writes ‘what took my breath away was to realise that this early pioneer of the digital age had crossed paths with the man who wrote the words for The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosí Fan Tutte: I’d have thought of them as belonging to two entirely different times, places and cultural milieux.‘ I believe I can trace my own obsession with chronographics to that conversation – thank you, Nat.

References
Bowen, Susan W. 2006. Anathema of Venice: Lorenzo Da Ponte: Mozart’s American Librettist a review of Bolt, Rodney. 2006. The Librettist of Venice; The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte; Mozart’s Poet, Casanova’s Friend, and Italian Opera’s Impresario in America.

Bloch, Ernst. 1977. (trans. Mark Ritter) Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics. New German Critique 11 (Spring, 1977). 22-38. Available as a PDF file (400K).

Gere, Charlie. 2006. Art, Time and Technology. Berg, Oxford.

Heartz, Daniel. 1995. Mozart and Da Ponte. The Musical Quarterly 79(4) (Winter, 1995). 700-718. Available through JSTOR: subscription required.

Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2002. In Search of a Nineteenth Century. Sixteenth Annual Lecture of the German Historical Institute, 14 November 2002. Available as a PDF file (112K).

Sams, Jeremy. Lorenzo the magnificent. The Independent. Tuesday 16 May 2000.

Important new book

2009-12-04T14:01:00.000-08:00

An important book is about to come out on the history of timelines by two key authorities in the field. The publishers say:

Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns.

See the book on the publisher’s site.

Natural chronographics

2009-10-21T14:08:00.000-07:00

Some natural processes produce a sort of chronographic display of their own – for example, the rings in sawn tree trunks represent the history of its growth, and geological strata represent the history of a landscape.

Tree rings can be crossdated to establish specific years in the tree’s history.
Image from Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona.

Tree rings
As a page from the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona explains:

Many trees in temperate regions (those with a strong seasonal climate) produce annual growth layers that appear as rings in a cross sectional view of a tree stem. Variations in growing conditions from year-to-year produce a sequence of wide, narrow, and average ring widths. Over time the sequence forms a unique pattern that can be used like a fingerprint to determine the calendar year in which each ring was produced. [...]
Events in a tree’s life that have a recognizable impact on its growth may also be dated once the dates of the annual rings are known. Low to moderate intensity fires that burned through a forest may injure or scar surviving trees, leaving a clear record of their passage.

Strata
In at least one case the realisation that naturally occurring visual forms represent past time dawned during the same period as the early paper visualisations such as those of Barbeu-Dubourg and Priestley. This is the case with Hutton’s work on the formation of the earth.

Strata in rock caused by deposition over centuries.
Lake Bolsena, Italy. Photo: Stephen Boyd Davis.

James Hutton (1726-1797) sought to explain rock formations. His Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe and Concerning the System of the Earth, its Duration and Stability put forward the idea that the layers to be seen where rock is exposed represent ancient depositions such as occur under water, and that places where the layers are uptilted or broken record violent subsequent upheavals.

An ironic outcome of the work in geology was to move the goalposts – at least at one end of the pitch. The beginning of time moved away to an almost ungraspable distance rather than the relatively comfortable proximity of, say, 4004BC calculated by Archbishop Ussher. The many universal chronologies and chronographies which contained all history from the beginning of all things to the present day within roughly 6000 years would become increasingly out of step with the realisation of the real extent of the past.

Event-based and time-based
These natural chronographics record time unequally: sedimentary deposit during one century may produce a thick layer of rock while that of another century ends up as only a narrow band. A year of strong growth produces a broad tree ring while one of poor growth makes a narrow one. These are effectively event-based representations. A time-based representation, on the other hand, uses what we might call Newtonian time – a regular, uniform, clock-like scale, in which events appear.

Further reading on the Web:

A page on James Hutton, the ‘father of modern geology’.
A Wikipedia article on the age of the earth.

More on Helvicus and the arithmetic scale for time

2009-10-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

On 1 September I noted that, while trumpeting the advantages of using equal space to represent equal time, Helvicus credited his predecessor, the renowned chronologer Scaliger, with inventing the idea.

But I was wrong.

Fooled by the translation in an English edition of 1687, I spent half a day in the British Library on a wild goose chase. I was looking at five works by Scaliger - the De Emendatione Temporum of 1583, 1598 and 1629 and the Thesaurus Temporum of 1606 and 1658 - without being able to find any of evidence of this arithmetic scale for time. I was hampered by having almost no Latin and no Greek, but still expected to identify this key aspect of the layout. I managed to find the Peloponnesian War at DCCCCXLVI (on p99) in Eusebius Chronicorum Liber Posterior within the Thesaurus Temporum but the corresponding part of the next page certainly did not contain the item of 100 years later as Helvicus had seemed to describe. Like most chronologies, Scaliger’s simply uses as much space as he needs to record and describe each event, not allocating equal space to equal time at all.

A part of the page in the English translation of Helvicus which appears to say that Scaliger preceded Helvicus in using equal space for equal time in laying out his chronologies.

Helwig [Helvicus], Christopher. 1687. The Historical and Chronological Theatre.
From the collection of Prof Michael Twyman. Photo: Stephen Boyd Davis.

But it seems the problem is in the translation! Apparently in the first edition of his work, in Latin, in 1609, Helvicus definitely claims the credit for himself: ‘the main goal I aimed at in this treatment is an equal distribution of years between the creation and our time in intervals of 100 and 10 years, because that is so useful’ (Praecipuum, quod in hoc Systemate spectavi, est annorum a Mundo condito ad nostra tempora usque per aequalia Centenariorum et Decadum spacia distributio, ob eximium usum, qui inde resultat). The translator seems to have thought that Helvicus was crediting Scaliger and inserted the name himself – hence his use of brackets around Scaliger’s name indicating that the name as such was not in the original. My thanks to Prof. Anthony Grafton of Princeton University for unravelling this for me.

Incidentally Prof. Grafton has an important book coming out in this area next year. More on this later.

Franklin

2009-09-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

Another hand-written addition to Barbeu-Dubourg’s timeline, which adds credence to the idea that the additions were written by the original author himself, is in 1752, ‘orages demontrés electrique’ - storms shown to be electrical.

In 1750, Benjamin Franklin had published a proposal for an experiment to prove that lightning was electricity by flying a kite in a storm, and such an experiment had been carried out by others in 1752. Franklin and Barbeu-Dubourg became friends and corresponded frequently. The correspondence can be seen here. Barbeu-Dubourg translated many of Franklin’s works into French (Aldridge 1951).

Franklin was also a friend of the other pioneer of the arithmetic timeline, Joseph Priestley. In Barbeu-Dubourg’s very first letter to Franklin, he acknowledges receiving a copy of Priestley’s own timeline, and tactfully emphasises his own priority in invention while assuring Franklin that he won’t make an issue of it:

J’ai reçu avec reconnoissance et vu avec plaisir la carte biographique de M. Priestley qui est effectivement construite presque sur les memes principes que la mienne, sans plagiat de part ni d’autre, car je ne pretens point me prevaloir de la date.

I have received with gratitude and viewed with pleasure the biographical chart of Mr. Priestley which is in truth made on almost the same principles as my own, without plagiarism on either side, as I in no way claim primacy on account of the date.

References
Aldridge, Alfred Owen. 1951. Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, a French disciple of Benjamin Franklin. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 95(4). 331-392.

Herculaneum

2009-09-18T02:42:00.000-07:00

In the copy of Barbeu-Dubourg’s Carte Chronographique held at Princeton, there are hand-written additions to the printed entries, four of them in the then recent past. Stephen Ferguson speculates that they were made by Barbeu-Dubourg himself (Ferguson 1991).

The discovery of Herculaneum added by hand to the Carte Chronographique of Barbeu-Dubourg at Princeton. Image: Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Some of them represent the emergence of significant new knowledge. The one I want to highlight here is the added entry for 1747: ‘ville de Herculane trouvée sous terre’ - the town of Herculaneum discovered underground. Herculaneum had been buried by volcanic deposits, along with Pompeii, Stabiae and Oplontis, in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Just to read the addition in its hand-written form produces a frisson of presence, sharing the excitement they must have felt when it was rediscovered. By lucky chance I was able to visit Herculaneum just a few days after being in Princeton.

Herculaneum in 2009. The full height of buildings was encased by lava flows within hours and preserved until the 18th Century when excavation began to both reveal and destroy the remains. Photo: Stephen Boyd Davis.

Herculaneum and sites like it are special in relation to chronology and chronographics because they do not have an obvious natural visual chronology, making them quite unlike normal archaeological excavations. Normally a dig will cut down progressively through quite thin layers of material, each representing the crushed debris of a quite extended period. See Harris’ Laws of Archaeological Stratigraphy in the Wikipedia article on the Harris Matrix. A vertically cut cross-section will therefore show layers or bands in a kind of natural chronographic representing hundreds or thousands of years. But at Herculaneum the deposits many metres thick represent not years but days or even hours. The pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius swamped the town, even filling internal spaces within buildings so preventing them collapsing as more and more material fell from above. Digging up the town therefore reveals an archaeological snapshot rather than the usual extended duration.

Foreground, a well-preserved building at Herculaneum. Background, part of the excavation wall showing the solid mass of tufa deposited in hours through pyroclastic flow. Normally such depth present a succession of visual layers representing deposition over centuries. Photo: Stephen Boyd Davis.

References
Ferguson, Stephen. 1991. The 1753 Carte chronographique of Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg. Princeton University Library Chronicle (Winter 1991).

Arithmetic scale - Blair's point of view

2009-09-02T02:52:00.000-07:00

John Blair published a Chronology and History of the World, from the Creation to the Year of Christ 1753, which appeared in many subsequent editions and was widely used as a source, including by Priestley for his Chart of Biography of 1765.

Title page of Blair’s Chronology (1779 edition).

Collection of Stephen Boyd Davis. Photo: Stephen Boyd Davis

Blair praised Helvicus’ approach (see previous post), which used equal intervals of space for equal intervals of time, contrasting it with those whose ‘chief Aim seems to have been pointed, to the contracting History into a little Room as they could’.

The Tables of Helvicus, which were publish’d in 1629, are what approach the nearest to the Plan of the present Work, and have been generally preferr’d by Men of Learning to all the rest; because they give a more united View of the Collateral Succession of different Kingdoms. Whereas the more Modern Tables of Talent, Marshal, Fresnoy, and those composed by an Anonymous Author from Petavius, have all of them made one great and fundamental Mistake. For their chief Aim seems to have been pointed, to the contracting History into a little Room as they could, by which they have lost the true Connection and Union of its Parts, which can never be preserved, without expanding them, according to the Series of single Years; and we therefore venture to affirm, that this Principle is the most essential, in the Texture of a Chronological Table. For it is in Chronology as in Musick, where the Harmony does not arise, from any single Note, or from any Number of Notes, but from their properly proportioned and tuned to each other; where, without the exact Disposition of Time and Place, the true Union of Concert is broken, and the best Musick may become Discord.

Although Blair’s Chronology is a Table rather than a true Chronographic, his idea of the value of ‘a more united View of the Collateral Succession of different Kingdoms’ is important for future developments. It emphasises the idea of a visual whole in which the synchronisation of events may be directly seen.

Double page of Blair’s Chronology (1779 edition).

Collection of Stephen Boyd Davis. Photo: Stephen Boyd Davis

Detail of Blair’s Chronology (1779 edition).

The tables are engraved, rather than letterpress. Near the centre of this view is the death of Alexander Pope.

Collection of Stephen Boyd Davis. Photo: Stephen Boyd Davis

Arithmetic scale for time

2009-09-01T15:28:00.000-07:00

Making a list of historic events tends to produce a dense block of information with no wasted space between items. The focus is on the events, rather than on the time that they occupy. Periods with a lot of events take a lot of space, while those with few take less. This clearly has benefits in terms of economy of materials, and means that the user need not, for instance, turn a dozen almost empty pages in order to find an isolated incident. However this ‘packed array’ approach makes it difficult to see temporal patterns in the data, such as interesting alignments, gaps and clusters.

Here is a simple example of a time list which makes no use of empty space and simply puts one event after another: BBC timeline of Nepal

A slightly more sophisticated use of time-space is to have empty rows or columns for years (or other units of time) when nothing happened. This tends to also produce the result that each page or section represents the same amount of time. This approach goes back quite a long way.

Title page of Helwig [Helvicus], Christopher. 1687. The Historical and Chronological Theatre.

From the collection of Prof Michael Twyman. Photo: Stephen Boyd Davis.

In Helvicus’ Historical and Chronological Theatre, the case is made for spacing chronology in equal intervals. But Helvicus credits his predecessor, Scaliger, one of the most famous chronologers (about whom more another time) with introducing the practice. In the introductory note Of the equal Intervals of Centenaries and Denaries, i.e. Hundreds and Tens of Years he says:

What our Author (Scaliger) chiefly aim’d at, in his first contrivance of this Systeme, was a distribution of Years, from the beginning of the World down to our own times, into equal spaces or distances of Centenaries of Decads (viz. Hundreds and Tens of years) by reason of the singular use or advantage which therefrom result. For thus, the Reader cannot chuse but remember and declare, by the year of the World, or of Christ, wherein every Exploit or History happen’d, how many years the one was from the other; provided he make himself well acquainted with the Order and Continuation of the principal Governments of each Monarchy, by which guidance the Series of History will easily be retain’d in Memory. For every Page of his did contain one Hundred entire years; so it must on necessity fall out, that the correspondent Number of the next Page over against it should differ therefrom a Centenary of years. As for Example: the Peloponnesian War (which happened in the year of the World 3519) was placed in the end of the second Cell, (Area) or Denary: Opposite thereto, in the same part of the following Page, was set down the Battel at Arbela, wherein Darius was subdued, and the Power was invested in Alexander; whence it appear’d, that there was the space of One Hundred years between the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, and the time wherein the Grecian Monarchy began.

So he is arguing that this design produces benefits in terms of:

remembering sequences, including how long events lasted (the Order and Continuation of the principal Gorvernments);
the estimation of intervals between events.

The First Modern Timeline?

2009-08-31T15:07:00.000-07:00

Joseph Priestley's Chart of Biography was not the first modern timeline to be published.

In 1753 appeared the first – the only – chronographic publication of Frenchman Jacques Barbeu Du Bourg. By gluing multiple sheets of paper together edge to edge, he produced a continuous engraved chart 16.5 metres (54 feet) long. This originally cost 12 livres. Princeton University library has a rare, perhaps unique, superior version of the chart, which is mounted on rollers in a wood and papier mache case and can be scrolled back and forth, allowing the user to see all of history since the beginning of time down to 1760. This cost 15 or 18 livres - presumably there was a standard and a de luxe case.

Barbeu Du Bourg was not alone at that time in envying the visual appeal of Geography, which was contrasted with the dryness of dates and names in chronology. In proposing his Carte Chronographique, he wrote:

Geography has as its object the extent of the earth; Chronology has as its object the succession of time. May not duration be imitated and represented as effectively to the senses, as distinctly as space, and may not intervals of time be as easily counted in degrees? What impediment is there: it is quite as easy to measure years as to measure places, in fact simpler and more easily done in several respects.

Chronographie, ou, Description des tems. Paris : Barbeu Dubourg, Lamote, Fleury, 1753. My translation.

A digitised rather rough photocopy of the descriptive booklet can be found here (PDF file, 1.3MB).

A good article on this timeline, written by Stephen Ferguson, Curator of Rare Books at Princeton, is here (PDF file, 4MB).

A high resolution image of the case containing the timeline is here (JPG file, 13.5MB).

Images: Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Full versions of these images can be found under the entry for Call No. D11 .B37 1753 on the Princeton library site here.

Chronographics

2009-08-31T09:44:00.000-07:00

Chronographics is defined here as the visual representation of time. I will be concentrating on historic time, rather than, say, time in project planning, time in media construction (such as for movies), or time-recording in scientific experiments.

Chronologies, various ways of listing events in time order, have existed since history was recorded. In fact arguably the first histories were chronologies only, offering no other information than dates and events. In some senses even these lists, when written down, were a form of chronographics, but I will be using the term to refer to visual structures which place more emphasis on the graphic properties of space, and less on the raw content.

One of the commonest forms of chronographic design is the timeline. This word has been widely used recently to mean any form of chronology, but I shall only use it to refer to graphics where the duration of events is represented by lengths of lines.

One of the earliest examples of such a timeline was created by Joseph Priestley (wikipedia article) in 1765.

Detail of Priestley's Chart of Biography 1765.

Original at Chetham's Library, Manchester, UK. Used with permission.