Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Software Review - the ChronoZoom Project

A Timeline of Everything - Really, Everything

Here is the information about my software review and links to references about the ChronoZoom (beta) project which is a free and open-source collaboration of Microsoft Research, UC Berkeley, and Moscow University. I will also place my class presentation here a little later.



Project Overview
ChronoZoom is an intuitive on-line tool used to visualize all of time, from the Big Bang to today, using the concept of zooming along the timeline to express distance to highlight the scope of time. 
When you see ChronoZoom zoom from the Industrial Revolution all the way back to the Big Bang, you can visualize time in a new way.  You can browse through history on ChronoZoom to find data in the form of articles, images, video, sound, and other multimedia.   ChronoZoom links a wealth of information from five major regimes that unifies all historical knowledge collectively known as Big History.
The regimes of Big History are:
  • Cosmos
  • Earth
  • Life
  • Human Pre-History
  • Human History.
By drawing upon the latest discoveries from many different disciplines, you can visualize the temporal relationships between events, trends, and themes. Some of the disciplines that contribute information to ChronoZoom include biology, astronomy, geology, climatology, prehistory, archeology, anthropology, economics, cosmology, natural history, and population and environmental studies.
ChronoZoom is a collaborative effort of the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley, Microsoft Research, and originally Microsoft Live Labs.
Detailed Project Description
The last 20 years has seen the emergence of a new discipline invented by the Australian historian, David Christian, called Big History.  The aim of Big History is to unify all knowledge of the past into a single field of study. Big History invites humanistic scholars and historical scientists from fields like geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, astronomy, and cosmology to work together in developing the broadest possible view of the past.
Big History is proving to be an excellent framework for designing undergraduate synthesis courses that attract outstanding students. A serious problem in teaching such courses is conveying the vast stretches of time from the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago to the present, and clarifying the wildly different time scales of cosmic history, Earth and life history, human prehistory, and human history.
Our first conception of ChronoZoom was that it should dramatically convey the scales of history, and the first version does in fact do that. To display the scales of history from a single day to the age of the Universe requires the ability to zoom smoothly by a factor of ~1013, and doing this with raster graphics was a remarkable achievement of the team at Live Labs. The immense zoom range also allows us to embed virtually limitless amounts of text and graphical information
ChronoZoom, by letting us move effortlessly through this enormous wilderness of time, getting used to the differences in scale, should help to break down the time-scale barriers to communication between scholars. 
Timelines of World History
http://timelines.ws/

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/


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