337) History: Time vs. Space

(Mini aside - I feel brain dead and frazzled, two things I do not like feeling. Moving is such a pain in the ass. That's all I'll say, no more whining. Stealing a post from the blog I kept during SXSW.)



I heard a really fascinating talk at SXSW on telling visual stories using time and space, the mapping of which is typically mutually exclusive.

One of the panelists discussed events as a third way to represent historical data. While space and time are abstract concepts, events are real. They are the products of the stories we tell.

A recent example is the Egyptian revolution. If we think about it (especially remotely), there are as many Egyptian revolutions as there are individual stories about the revolution. The large event is made up of singular representations.

The speaker’s point was that the Internet allows us access to richer data models for events. Essentially, we are able to move from a shared experience to a more nuanced history made up of the aggregation/visualization of individual itineraries (via tweets, uploaded photos, etc.).