Skip to content

Comment on Histography – Timeline of History

Comments

Beautiful.

If you zoom at the last 100 years, the point form something that looks like a voice recording. I wonder what the history is telling us?

----

Here's a thing I always wanted to see but am too busy to do myself: an explorable map of the world with different overlays you could toggle and a separate temporal scrollbar. Something I could use to see e.g. how the borders changed over time by dragging the scrollbar (and that would be accurate - e.g. took into account that nation-states are a recent invention and borders had a different meaning in e.g. medieval times). Or follow the battles of World War II all over the world. Basically, interactively explorable history of humanity.

----

Here's another, simpler idea, of something that I really would like to get around doing eventually, but maybe someone will beat me to it. There is a power metal band, Sabaton, that is known for writing historically-accurate songs about historical military conflicts[0]. I would love to see all conflicts referred by them in their music plotted on a map, in a way that would let you select one and listen to the song[0], with lyrics displayed on-screen, along with additional historical information about a particular battle/conflict. Explorable chronologically.

[0] - They've covered World War II and later conflicts pretty well, but also did songs on WWI, earlier wars and particularly they had a whole album concerned with the Thirty Years' War and the history of Sweden. The angle varies between songs and albums - sometimes it's about the tragedy of war, other times it's about individual acts of heroism. They often cover aspects not mentioned in schools during history lessons.

[1] - Since you can find good fan-made music videos portraying the events described in the song you could embed them, but the best would be to get the band itself on board and prepare some professional-quality videos. That's not needed for the MVP though.

Here's a thing I always wanted to see but am too busy to do myself: an explorable map of the world with different overlays you could toggle and a separate temporal scrollbar. Something I could use to see e.g. how the borders changed over time by dragging the scrollbar (and that would be accurate - e.g. took into account that nation-states are a recent invention and borders had a different meaning in e.g. medieval times). Or follow the battles of World War II all over the world. Basically, interactively explorable history of humanity.

I too have been wanting something like this for a very long time... I even have a couple of very early prototypes lying around.

I want this for wikipedia.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.