Saturday, November 26, 2005
HISTORY SOFTWARE
I’ve been studying history for 40 years. After all that time I still do learn major facts and ideas I didn’t already know. But a lot of what studying history in the fourth decade (and presumably beyond) involves is making connections – seeing how one thing you already knew relates to something else you already knew. Sometimes these connections are spatial, sometimes temporal, sometimes both. By this, I mean that reading a book about the history of one place or time will bring new insights into how things happened in another place or time. This happens because all historiography is necessarily limited – a particular book represents choices the author has made about the slice through time and space she describes and explores. Human attention is limited, so you have to look at some things, rather than all things. But real history isn’t like that. In a real sense “it’s all connected.” It’s those connections – and learning about new ones – that makes history a lively art for one’s whole life.
For years, I’ve imagined a piece of software that would make this process more vivid and instructive. Basically, I’m envisioning a timeline tool that is also a geography tool. Picture a spreadsheet linked to a map or maps via coordinates. Rows represent events, columns hold characteristics of those events; specifically dates and place coordinates. You could sort these rows by date or place and display them on any map that could accept coordinate or coordinate range input. Ideally, there would be some kind of standard for reading the spatial coordinates so a wide variety of maps could be used. You could also make linear timelines with varying scales, and separate them geographically or conceptually. A tool like this would be very useful for seeing how things happening in one place and time relate to other people and events spatially and temporally. You could use this tool at the earliest primary grades for teaching and study, on through college and beyond.
Wouldn’t that be cool? Somebody ought to do it. If you know of such a tool, email me.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:04 AM
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