Timelines
Timeliner
Timeliner is an early-stage project to build a good historical timeline tool. I like learning and have an attraction to overviews of topics. When it comes to history, I prefer to have information about events and periods visually represented. A lot of times I would read a book with historical dates, but it'd be hard to retain the information or make connections to other events happening around the same time. Also, when I think of my own life, I actively think of it in its historical context. I like to ponder its unremarkably short duration as well as its position along societal and geological periods.
History is also a very contested sphere, where historical narrative is famously 'written by the winners'. The manipulation of history is an extremely powerful tool for propaganda. As a counterpoint, education of history is an important tool against manipulation of people through propaganda, and as such, providing educational tools for learning and understanding history could have leverage in improving society.
The Internet offers some other timeline projects, but I haven't found one that would satisfy my requirements, so I'm building one:
- A broad selection of timelines for various perspectives: dates mentioned in books, histories of conflicts, histories of scientific development, personal histories etc.
- User curation of timelines by a system of liking or voting
- Possibility to combine timelines
- Timelines should be on any time scale: cosmological time, civilizational time, recent history and future timelines
- Tree structure for timelines, to show historical inheritance and continuum
- Automatic timeline building, without having to manually place periods
- Aesthetically pleasing
- Possibly a discussion forum for users
Contributions
I'm happy to receive Issues and Pull Requests to Timeliner and Thymeline.js.