Visualize History

I’m calling it quits on this here side project of mine.  If you didn’t see this coming, you were looking the other way, with your pants down, and your eyes closed.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing up all the information I had jotted down.  I figure the least I can do is share what I’ve gathered and thought.  If you are looking for an explanation, I have about 50.  The easiest ones to explain are: my job is getting really serious, and I’m loving every second, which means I will be spending a lot more seconds on it.  That, and by the time I get home, I don’t want to write any more code.  To do this project right I would need to devote a lot more time than I have.  Making little stabs does not satisfy me anymore, so slow and steady lost this race, I guess.

The straw that broke my back would have to be World History.com, which I wrote up a couple of days ago.  They are attacking the same problem, and they are actually attacking it.  It can’t be a hobby for me and a job for them, unless I want it to suck (in my own head).

So here I go.  I will probably keep posting to the blog when I see cool stuff, but, since I’m stopping development, I will stop posting about developing.

So long all.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a new site called World History.  They make a pretty bold claim: “we connect the dots of history, connect you to history. We want to compile the entire history of the world on one fun and interactive website.”

Uh oh.  That should sound pretty familiar to you regular readers, and it certainly sounded familiar to me.  I had to check it out.

The site is in private beta so I added my email to their list, and, soon enough, was invited to give it a go.  Right off the bat I could see some glaring similarities between the interface I dreamt of 18 months ago and the one they had implemented.  Their demos are pretty thorough so I won’t go into functionality too much.  If you do watch the videos, you’ll notice they have a simpler version of the slider that I’ve written extensively about, and that you can navigate their map of historical events in the same ways that I envisioned (and implemented) for Visualize History.  I really like their site.  It’s snappy and from the looks of things, the data and the map are well connected. 

But that’s sort of the problem.  Here is a real company, presumably with funding and time, or at least more than I have (0 and 0, respectively).  They have actual code that actual people are using.  And talking about, too.  Tech Crunch wrote them up, which led to some teachers, authors, historians, and consultants to do the same.  It has also attracted a few people interested in genealogy, which, if you recall, I predicted would happen. 

So they got the interface, the press, the data.  What could they do better?  Glad you asked.  I have a few issues with their site, some subtle and some less subtle.  I’d be interested to know why thy chose to put ads where they did.  I think they are distracting and make the site look ugly (like all ads), but to the point where I would be less inclined to use the site or share it.  I’m not sure why, but it reminds me of sites whose sole purpose is to attract traffic and turn it into clicks on ads, in a sleazy way.  I don’t mean to say that it’s a sleazy site.  Rather, it feels like it was designed by programmers.  The ads make it look like experts-exchange, and the options on the left make me feel like I’m using Microsoft Access, not some snappy Web 2.0 AJAXy site. 

As long as we’re on the subject of layout, I feel that the map got the short end of the stick, so to speak.  For me, the map always deserved the most prominent role, since that was the main point of interaction for the user.  Worldhistory.com seems to want to emphasize the content more, by giving it as much space as they gave the map.  As a result, the map is cramped and too narrow in its focus.  Perhaps the relative size of the map shows that we differ more fundamentally.

I would have never thought a person would want to pick a point on a map and then scroll through that point’s history.  That’s rarely how we learn history, and the great advantage gained by displaying history visually starts with the graphical relations that can be displayed.  Although they do have tagging functionality, it seems that the ability to link historical events together is still very limited on the site.  It’s not an easy problem, and I hope that’s in their presumably long list of features to implement.  I will be interested to see how many people like to interact with the map this way.

All that being said, I clearly love this idea.  I’ve worked on something sort of similar for a long time, and completely believe that demand for an app like this will rapidly grow.  I wish the best of luck to those guys, and hope the features keep on coming.

When I started this project, I had no intention of making money.  I was pretty thrilled when it got approved as my senior project, and I certainly didn’t think of it as a business.  But as graduation loomed, and I realized I would need to start paying rent and such things, I started to think about Visualize History as a potential for business.

Two types of business models occurred to me.  Really they are the two most prevalent options for web apps these days.  My first thought would be to charge people for the data.  That is, let’s say a classroom wanted to use US data.  Then they would pay a fee for the privilege to view that data.  I thought of a lot of variations on the pay-for-data model, but those aren’t that interesting to other people.  Also advertising to school age children kind of grosses me out so I don’t want to write it down.

The other business model that has become the default is advertising.  On the web these days, traffic basically earns revenue.  In the most common of the web 2.0 business models, more traffic means more ads displayed, which hopefully means more ads clicked on, which means dollars.  So all I had to do was attract traffic.

I’ve kept an idea out for topics that could fit my idea of the perfect visual user interface.  I adopted the advice of 37 Signals’ book Getting Real, which suggests not keeping a list of features to implement.  They feel that the most requested features will stick in your heads by nature.  I paid attention to the most frequently talked about topics that fit my model, and found 3 that I thought would attract users.

Family histories

A lot of people put a lot of effort into maintaining their families’ histories.  All the intricacies fascinate people, and a big part of a new generation’s job is to learn the family.  My Grandfather ran a museum for my Mom’s side of the family, which turned out to be pretty popular. and I know my favorite assignment in grade school was to interview my other Grandfather about his parents and relatives, whom I had never met.  I knew that a lot of resources existed already, including a file standard (making it easier to read family data) and large repositories, run by the Mormon church (who knows everything about you, whether you know it or not).

Trips

I went on a road trip this summer and I wrote it up online, including pictures.  Based on my web traffic stuff, it seems a lot of people liked following along.  It would have been even cooler if they could have animated that, moving forward and backward in time, and, as they did, having pictures and videos from the trip come to the forefront.  People love playing with stuff like that, whether to show a trip to friends are to plan a trip of their own.  It’s easy to see how trips naturally align with history, as well.  Maybe a trip would be all the civil war battlefields, in order, or to recreate a famous march, etc.

Politics

My last idea probably had a lot to with it being an election year.  I watched people watch the CNN Wall.  Everyone thought it was pretty cool that Anderson Cooper could manipulate the screen like that, demonstrating how previous elections had gone by county or state.  So much of politics is based on history that it felt like a natural fit.

When I was in Elementary School, the web wasn’t what it is today.  It barely existed, actually.  But my friends are the next generation of teachers, and we’ve all been facebooking for ages.  We all have laptops, and are familiar with the basics of the internet, and with computers.  Of course that doesn’t mean a lot for the immediate future, since my peers are young and uninfluential. Rather than discuss the way things will be, I wanted to share a few things I’ve found out about the way things are.

The web for traditional schools

Many of the ways the web is used in schools are fairly obvious.  Sites have arisen to fill common tasks, made easier by the web.  Digication provides e-Portfolios or places for students to congregate and interact.  More education famous software includes Blackboard, or maybe it’s open source counterpart, Moodle. 

Teachers also find rich resources online.  Houghton Mifflin’s premade Powerpoint slides and MicroModules from 21st Century Information Fluency exemplify the type of specific resources available.  Teachers also use portals like Awesome Library or Teachers.net to make their teaching lives easier.

Strategies that have been around have migrated to the web.  Education board games can now be moved online, like the site childtopia.  Games have always been a great way to engage children, and the web can make that much cheaper and more accessible.

Innovative education and the web

But traditional schools and the web as a resource don’t interest me that much.  Instead, I’m fascinated by all the stuff I’ve found out about new strategies that the web enables.  The first new idea that I encountered was the idea of online school, often called distance learning.  During the pre-election craziness, I saw a lot of ads for Insight schools of WA, which teach the same material as a traditional school, just online.  Once I became interested in the idea of online schooling, I started noticing references to it everywhere.  I found the Connections Academy, Insight schools, the virtual school of Florida, and many more.  It is not clear whether online schools can be effective, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.  Still, even the idea that a class can be remote differs greatly with our common idea of elementary education.

Even more innovative, and even more complex, is the idea of distributed learning.  Rather than have a professional teacher, sites allow their users to teach each other.  I have heard that Live Mocha is a great way to learn a language, for example.  For more general teaching and learning, try Teach Mate.  Edu2.0 tries an even more explicit teaching model, where you can teach or volunteer in a traditional or public class, online. 

Since I’m not a teacher, I can’t evaluate these specific sites, and that’s not really the point.  Instead, what I find amazing is the way the web can connect people.  Sure, not a lot of people in rural Minnesota speak Chinese and English well enough to teach both, but you can rest assured that someone on the internet knows both, and wants to teach.  The trick is finding that person.

Even though I’m a huge proponent of the web, I’m not sure about these new fangled ways of teaching.  Lisa addresses the issue of using technology in the classroom much better than I could.  I don’t and can’t really have a position, but I did want to share what I had learned about the new world of education.

One of the earliest problems the project face was a lack of historical data.  There are a on of sites with history on them, and it seems like I don’t go a day with out getting sent another.  That’s deceptive, though.  Mostly, the sites deal with a very specific event or period, and their is no separation between their data, which is of value, and their presentation of that data, which is of no value to my project. 

I still face the problem of a lack of data, but a few sources have cropped up.  Amazon has some public data that I think is aimed at bringing people to their web services platform.  The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) also looked like a potential source, especially their section on statistical data.  Read Write Web also has a pretty comprehensive list of good places to look for data, which I have not yet taken a good look at.

More gradually, and probably more importantly, is the adoption of KML, Google’s markup language, originally for Google Earth, which has now become an open standard.  A year ago, when I first wrote about KML, the time-related tags of KML has just come into existence. Now they are commonplace, and finding KML files with time-related data is pretty trivial.  Of course finding relevant files, that is history-related KML files, can still be pretty tricky.  But once the file is found, it is trivial to parse.

The big news though came today, after I started writing this post.  Google has announced that the newest version of Google Earth includes Historical Imagery.  They have updated KML to allow finer control of their Time Slider, and while the main differences between my project and Google Earth remain, it is very cool to see them taking on a similar task.  Also, you know that if Google does something, that something will get a whole lot more attention, not to mention the extra content that will surely be created.

I also have signed up for a private beta of an API that claims to solve exactly the problem I hope to solve:

We have built a simple to use and robust API that can get all the important data, content, and vital information you need to use on your website or application. We have information on people, events, places and genealogy. Most importantly all of this information is geolocated.

In other words, it is perfect.  The actual data the site has is a little lacking, but I will keep an eye out. 

As more and more sites make similar projects, the problem of finding and parsing data will, I expect, largely disappear.  But not yet.