Big History
Posted on February 25, 02009
Filed Under DaVinci, Development, Flash, Herodotus, Inspiration, Journal, Latham, Projects, Timelines
When I came up with the fanciful notion of an interactive timeline that stretches back as far as the Big Bang I thought I was onto something exciting and new. The problem with new ideas these days though, is that you're only one quick web search away from the realisation that they are anything but.
Although I think the interactive visualisation aspect is still new, it turns out that the unified (multi-disciplinary) approach to history has been around for about 25 years. The study of Big History attempts to combine the timescales of cosmology, geology, paleontology, archeology and history into a single unified timeline. As we have more detailed information about events closer to the present, the result is a naturally logarithmic timeline.
Big History courses have been taught in Australia and the US and David Christian's excellent lecture series is available from the Learning Company. The information and insights contained in these books are going to be invaluable for structuring periodization for Herodotus.
Related Journal Entries
- The project architecture
- Project updates April 2009
- Hacking the Date class for GeoLocation
- A review of Temporal Web Standards
- Projects update March 2009
- Revelation
- The Computus Engine on Google Code
- Google TimeMap
- Calculus and the Archimedes Palimpsest
- AS3 infinite timeline: Proof of concept
- Inside the AS3 Date class: Introduction
- Choosing an AS3 component framework
- Coding practices
- Some thoughts on application architecture
- Choosing an Open Source Licence: II
Comments
Leave a Comment
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
