Briefly Noted: Timetoast; Google Books Settlement; Curators and Wikipedians

Via Mashable, yet another timeline service: Timetoast.

Many readers will have seen this already, but Robert Darton’s February piece in The New York Review of Books is the most readable discussion I have seen of the Google Books settlement.

Fresh + New(er), the Powerhouse Museum’s always interesting blog, describes that museum’s recent open house for local Wikipedians and the common ground they found between expert curators and amateur encyclopedists.

Briefly Noted: Surviving the Downturn; Help with Creative Commons; Yahoo Pipes

The American Association of State and Local History (AASLH) provides cultural heritage professionals with some relevant information on surviving the economic downturn.

JISC provides advice on choosing (or not choosing) a Creative Commons license.

Missed it at the launch? Didn’t see the point? Don’t know where to start? Ars Technica has a nice reintroduction and tutorial for Yahoo Pipes, a visual web content mashup editor. Here’s an example of the kind of thing you can do very easily (20 minutes in this case) with Pipes: an aggregated feed of CHNMers’ tweets displayed on a Dipity timeline.

Briefly Noted for April 8, 2008

Friend of CHNM, Stan Katz provides some perspective on The Emergence of the Digital Humanities in his excellent Chronicle of Higher Education “Brainstorm” column.

Timelines.tv presents 1000 years of British history through a series of film clips organized along three parallel and interlinked timelines, one each for social, political, and national (English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish) history. Very high quality content (originally filmed for the BBC) distributed in a very popular format (the timeline). And a pretty slick website to boot.

Open Source Decade. Ars Technica recalls Tim O’Reilly’s 1998 “Freeware Summit” where “open source” first emerged as a term of choice in the free, open, libre, etc. software movement.

Xtimeline

Xtimeline is a new addition to the growing field of personal timeline builders. Simile Timeline, MIT’s open source offering is still the best of the bunch, but Xtimeline definitely wins in the user-friendly department. In terms of workflow, data management, and data display, the new Chinese offering also bears striking resemblances to our own Flash-based “Timeline Builder” proof of concept. Along with family trees, timelines are perhaps the preferred mode of exploring history and producing history among amateurs, and I’m not surprised to see more offerings in this space.

Previous posts:

Google Timelines

On Monday Dave Lester pointed to the release of Google’s new timeline view of search results. Found History has often commented on the importance of timelines in public understanding of history and amateur historical practice, so this seems like it could be a big development in that space.

Google points out that the timeline view works best for people, places, and other similar searches and suggests Thomas Jefferson as a good example. As Dave points out, the software groups frequencies of events (search results) by decade, and at first glance the results seem pretty encouraging. Jefferson’s timeline, for example, has peaks in the 1770s and 1800s—just where you’d expect them:

Thomas Jefferson timeline

Being somewhat suspicious of the representativeness of Google’s hand-picked example, however, I tried a more obscure search for George Sarton, founder of history of science in America:

George Sarton timeline

To my pleasant surprise, Sarton’s timeline turned out to be nearly as good as Jefferson’s, peaking in the 1910s when Sarton was getting married, finishing his dissertation, founding his journal Isis, and relocating to America.

Nevertheless there are a few pretty significant problems with Google’s new timelines. To start the timelines only display the frequency with which certain dates appear in connection with a given search term rather than tying these dates to actual events in the life of the search subject. We don’t see what Sarton did in the 1910s. We only see that he did something (or more precisely that lots of people on the web have pointed out that he did something). Viewing this kind of timeline—i.e. one without named events—seems to me a little like watching an old time silent movie with your eyes closed. You know something is happening because the music gets louder or quicker, but you don’t know what.

In this regard a Google timeline is at best an activity map of a given historical actor’s life, demonstrating for instance that Jefferson did more and more important things in the 1770s than in the 1740s and 50s. If that’s the case, Google’s new visualization falls victim to Dan Cohen’s “big whoop” (my term, not Dan’s) criticism. Pointing to a visualization of the full text of the New Testament which showed (surprise!) that Jesus sits at the center of the narrative, Dan lamented that too many digital humanities visualizations “merely use computational methods to reveal the obvious in fancy ways.” Google’s Jefferson timeline is another case in point. Is anyone surprised that Jefferson did more in his 20s, 30s, and 40s than as an eight year old?

Despite these problems, however, I do see something new here. Google’s is one of the first projects I can think of that attempts to move beyond using computational means to answer factual historical questions (our H-Bot software has been doing this for a couple years now) and actually tries to provide something approximating historical interpretation, that tries to put factual information into a narrative framework—even if that narrative tells us little more than Sarton was busier in 1910 than in 1940 or that Jefferson did something in 1776 and nothing in 1752. If we all agree that the real work of history isn’t about names and dates, then the real work of digital history has to be more than that as well. Digital historians need to think about computational methods for producing historical narratives not just historical facts, for producing historical knowledge rather than merely uncovering historical information. I guess what I’m talking about is artificial historical intelligence, and although Google’s timelines aren’t that, they’re certainly a gesture in that direction. They’re certainly something to watch.

Tags Over Time

There’s a new trend in online amateur history that digital history scholars would do well to notice. A few months ago I pointed to Yahoo’s Taglines, a Flash visualization of the changing use of Flickr tags over a 16 month period from June 2004 to September 2005. More recently Chirag Mehta, an IT manager living in Florida, developed an open source application to do the same thing with any body of machine readable text. According to Mehta’s website, Tagline Generator is “a simple PHP codebase that lets you generate chronological tag clouds from simple text data sources without manually tagging the data entries.” Mehta’s demonstration piece, the US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud, got a lot of traction on Digg a few weeks ago. Now Todd Bishop, author of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Microsoft Blog, has applied Metha’s code to a body of speeches, articles, and emails written by Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and other key figures at Microsoft over the past 30 years.

Obviously this technology could be extended to other bodies of digital historical text. For example, I can imagine mapping the frequency of terms such as “victim” “terrorist” “Osama” “sad” and “angry” in personal narratives contributed to CHNM’s September 11 Digital Archive between, say, September 2001 and September 2003 as memories faded and events such as the wars in Afganistan and Iraq intervened. Maybe Dan will find time to give it a go as he did with his awesome map of what American’s did on 9/11.

Watchismo

Watchismo is a collector and online dealer of vintage watches, especially digital watches, from the mid-20th century. He describes himself as “devoted to the highly unusual, obscurely rare and advanced modern designs of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s” and focused on the “rarest styles of the space-age.” There are some interesting galleries on the main website, but more interesting is Watchismo’s recently launched blog, where items from the collection are considered in greater detail and placed in narrative context, for example in this week’s “History of LED Calculator Watches”.

Late Update (11/15/06): Watchismo has done it again with a timeline of Bond gadget watches. That’s “Bond” as in “James Bond.”

Computer History Timelines

We have seen before how timelines are a particularly attractive mode of historical production among non-professionals, perhaps especially among those interested in computer history. Here’s another example. French programmer Eric Levenez has assembled an impressive collection of incredibly detailed techie timelines and sets of annotated links. The most recent is his Unix History. The most widely known is his Computer Languages History, which has been reprinted commercially by O’Reilly. Elsewhere Lenevez tackles Windows and NeXT.

Spend five minutes with one of Lenevez’s timelines, and you’ll see these are histories only a geek could love. They are certainly very different from anything a university-trained historian would produce. Yet they are undoubtedly very formidable and important works of historical research. Lenevez’s work won’t be published in Technology and Culture or even the Annals of the History of Computing anytime soon, but it’s hard to imagine how anyone, professional or otherwise, could write a decent history of Unix or Windows or computer programming languages without first having done the kind of backbreaking work Lenevez has already done for us.