Histropedia, a new interactive tool to display historical events and described as “a combination of maps, timelines, and trends”, made its public debut at the Wikimania conference this weekend at the Barbican in London.
The site, which is currently running in beta, is the brainchild of Navino Evans and Sean McBirnie, who told a packed room they hoped Histropedia would be a “completely free service for the whole world” and was a way of “playing Lego with history”.
The interactive, which has been developed in conjunction with Geeks ltd, works by pulling data from Wikidata and Wikipedia and plotting events on a timeline which is navigated with simple left and right buttons and a zoom function.
When an event is plotted on the timeline, relatable information – such as YouTube videos, Twitter mentions, and Amazon books of similar subjects – become available to view in a pop-up box.
Below is a demo version of a timeline relating to wars in which Britain has been involved in.
This article includes content hosted on histropedia.uat.co. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.
Evans told his audience that he and McBirnie were around halfway through finishing the project, which at present is only available for English language Wikipedia articles but will be extended across all of Wikipedia’s 267 languages.
Created timelines can be saved, shared and cross-referenced. It is hoped that by the end of development (in about four-to-six months) users will be able to search not just for specific historical events, but also for whole topics.
Below is a demo of a timeline created with the subject “famous artists”.
This article includes content hosted on histropedia.com. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.
Writing in the Wikimania programme, Evans and McBirnie described their “ultimate goal to create the world’s first fully interactive timeline for all of history from the big bang to the present day”.
Of course, the problem with this is that there are many versions of history. How can one timeline hope to represent all disputed historical fact and bias?
When asked about the conflicts that this might present, McBirnie admitted it might be that they were creating a “platform for arguments” but hoped that ultimately the tool would be used as a source to visualise history.
Pullings its data from Wikipedia and Wikidata, Histropedia will be fully editable in the same way. The project is independent from Wikimedia but Evans said they were working collaboratively with the foundation in some instances, and had received support from Magnus Manske, among others.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion