Visualize History

Before history can be properly visualized, it must first be clearly defined. There are a lot of definitions of history out there, and those definitions cover a lot of material. My hope is to fit that mass of data, or some reasonable subset, into a formal and simple structure. I’ve drafted a first version of that structure, for now only on the conceptual level.

Before I can get into that, I will need to define some of the language I use. I will often talk about History as a “graph”, by which I mean the traditional computer science definition. If you do not know what that is, it’s a very simple idea. There are objects (“nodes”), and two objects may be related to one another (or they have an “edge” between them). That is the whole graph, G = (V, E). Of course graph theory adds a lot to that definition, but the important concepts are nodes, and connections between nodes. I consider History as such a graph, albeit a very large one.

Nodes

First I will consider the nodes of the graph. I chose several historical topics and, by examining those, have tried to extrapolate potential types of nodes. Here are the fundamental pieces of History, according to my interpretation:

• Event (e.g. “The Civil War” or “The battle of Antietam”)
• Topic (e.g. “Wars” or “The Civil War”)
• Location (e.g. “Antietam Creek, Sharpsburg, MD”)
• Person (e.g. “Robert E. Lee”)

The idea of a “location” or a “person” seems pretty concrete, and pretty essential to history. I will not dwell on explaining those two. The more interesting types of nodes are the “Events” and the “Topics”. By “Event” I mean any happening that would be considered a single entity during study. Battles, proclamations, or treaties are all examples of Events. By “Topic” I mean any issue that has some sub-events. So a topic might be the Cold War, the Cholera Outbreak of 1854 in London, or American Independence.

Notice that “The Civil War” is both an event and a topic. That is, I may be studying conflicts that took place in America, in which case I will consider the Civil War as its own complete entity which should be compared with other entities, for example, the War of Independence. In this situation, the Civil War is an Event. I may instead be studying the Civil War in and of itself, in which case I will be interested in the battles, proclamations, secessions and elections that took place before, during, and possibly after the War. In this case, the Civil War is a Topic. But in both cases, the same things are true of the Civil War, such as its name, its start and its duration.

From now on, I will try not to distinguish between any types of node, and merely discuss nodes. Nodes, based on my research, have the following properties in common:

• title
• type – Event, Topic, Location or Person
• blurb – A short description of the node (one paragraph)
• description – A long description of the node (several paragraphs)
• start date and time
• end date and time
• citations or places for further research

Edges

Now that we have a more formal idea of what a single historical event might be, we can start to consider the truly interesting part of the graph: the edges. Historical events relate to one another in many ways, and even several types of ways. These relationships between nodes have to mesh with what an everyday person considers relevant data.

Many historical events are implicitly related. They may share a time period, a region or participants, even when there is no direct connection. For instance, Robert E. Lee participated in both the Civil War and the Texas Revolution, and those two wars are therefore implicitly connected through him. Another example might be the Great Revolt in Palestine in 1933, and the Great Depression in the United States during the 1930s. Although the two seem entirely unrelated, they do share a time period. Imagine studying the Great revolt, and wondering why the United States (and other powers) seem so conspicuously absent; just pan over to the United States and observe that they had other things on their mind.

Most of the history we teach, though, is about explicit relationships. We would like all of the battles of the Civil War to be somehow related to one another. If each node in our graph is a battle, then two related battles might be connected by an edge. Alternatively, though, all battles would be connected to the node for The Civil War. Either way, the battles now all belong to one grouping.

The majority of Visualize History will focus on these explicit edges, which I plan to input by hand, at least for now. The intuition is that by focusing more on the human-entered data, we can control which sub-section of history to focus at any given time.