That other axis, in a BBC timeline

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

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

1. 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.
2. 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

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

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

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

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

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.