Sunrise on Phu Chi Fa By Tom BKK

ChronoZoom is an extremely bold project intended to make history accessible through a visual timeline. The project is jointly shared between Microsoft Research and Roland Saekow and Walter Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley and recently had a major upgrade making it a lot easier to play around with. To say this project is bold is an understatement: How do you compile millions of years of BIAS-FREE history? It will be interesting to see how this develops. This is definitely something worth playing around with.

Below is a snippet forwarded to me by one of the project managers.

ChronoZoom:

Background: There are thousands of digital collections, libraries, archives, repositories that are hard to find, hard to consume and hard to pull together to ask big research questions. In addition, many researchers have their data on their individual computers and servers and don’t have an ability to easily share their information with others.  There is much more collaboration between the sciences and humanities today but they are still taught and researched in silos.  What if you could have a tool that could bring this all together.  That could put vast amounts of data in a consumable fashion on a timeline that included the history of everything.    ChronoZoom helps to do that using the story of Big History to make consuming vast amounts of data understandable.

Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity. Envisioned as a new discipline launched 25 years ago by Dr. David Christian at Macquarie University, Australia.  Big History invites scholars of the humanities and scientists from fields like geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, astronomy, and cosmology to work together in developing the broadest possible view of the past. However, incorporating everything we know about the past into Big History greatly increases the amount of data to be dealt with.  A serious problem in teaching Big History courses is conveying the vast stretches of time from the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, to the present, and clarifying the immensely distinct time scales of cosmic history, Earth and life history, human prehistory, and human history. A traditional linear timeline is ill equipped to convey the vast differences in time scales. Furthermore, incorporating the plethora of data from so many fields and disciplines into a single, comprehensive view has proven difficult. To present Big History properly, a completely new kind of tool had to be developed. Continued…