Problem
I wanted to revive the idea from issue #696. I just discovered your project today and have been watching all the tutorials, etc. I'm very impressed. I would really like to use this for a book club that I'm in, and more broadly as a tool for teaching classics. I saw online that timelines are currently made manually, but I think it could be useful to build it into the tool, so here's the use case:
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Arrian all wrote histories that are both beautiful but incredibly complex. They are full of geographical digressions, where new peoples and kingdoms are added to the readers' "mental map". In the meantime, these stories’ main plots often involve a mixture of conquest and intrigue. It can be a lot to keep in a reader’s head.
Doing a manual timelapse for any of these works isn't really feasible, nor would it be desired. The texts themselves are long and read over many weeks or months, so a short timelapse isn't really the right solution, plus they're not really easy to contribute to and build off of. To understand why it helps to say a little about the nature of these texts.
Herodotus covers thousands of years of prehistory, zooming in and out all around the world map, and getting deep into the weeds on Egyptian dynasties, or inter-clan rivalries between the Athenians and Pelasgians. Thucydides covers in excruciating detail the Peloponnesian War over a period of about 20 years broken up into Spring and Fall campaigns for each year. However, single actors are able to completely change events of the war by giving speeches or persuading kings to help their cause. And Arrian chronicles Alexander's campaign through the years. As his empire is growing, his supply lines are thinning and he's building completely new cities everywhere he goes to house wounded soldiers, but he's also firing Satraps who are corrupt or poor performers.
So my point is that it's a lot to take in, and I think a solution that students could contribute to would make an excellent resource for them to translate what they're reading into something that is reconciled on a map. A solution would also just be very useful to have as a resource.
Solution
An ideal solution would be to have the entire state of the world associated with a label that would represent some kind of state change. For example, the map could have some kind of default, starting label, but there could also be transition states like "Spring 413 BCE” or "Battle of Actium".
When you click the label, you go to the updated state of the map. With each state change, the reader can explore the consequences all throughout the map. Additionally, with something like this, I could receive contributions from readers who want to edit changes I've made or add new state changes themselves. The goal would be to create something that would effectively represent the shifting state of history.
Alternatives
One alternative I could imagine working would be using some kind of in-browser git like system which would store a map file, and each commit would represent one of these "state changes" I described in the problem section above. Then maybe this git-system could store just the diffs between commits, and then one would just have to glue buttons to navigate these commits. That's just a broad sketch of something I could see conceptually, but integrating it into the application would be much better.
Thank you for reading.
Problem
I wanted to revive the idea from issue #696. I just discovered your project today and have been watching all the tutorials, etc. I'm very impressed. I would really like to use this for a book club that I'm in, and more broadly as a tool for teaching classics. I saw online that timelines are currently made manually, but I think it could be useful to build it into the tool, so here's the use case:
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Arrian all wrote histories that are both beautiful but incredibly complex. They are full of geographical digressions, where new peoples and kingdoms are added to the readers' "mental map". In the meantime, these stories’ main plots often involve a mixture of conquest and intrigue. It can be a lot to keep in a reader’s head.
Doing a manual timelapse for any of these works isn't really feasible, nor would it be desired. The texts themselves are long and read over many weeks or months, so a short timelapse isn't really the right solution, plus they're not really easy to contribute to and build off of. To understand why it helps to say a little about the nature of these texts.
Herodotus covers thousands of years of prehistory, zooming in and out all around the world map, and getting deep into the weeds on Egyptian dynasties, or inter-clan rivalries between the Athenians and Pelasgians. Thucydides covers in excruciating detail the Peloponnesian War over a period of about 20 years broken up into Spring and Fall campaigns for each year. However, single actors are able to completely change events of the war by giving speeches or persuading kings to help their cause. And Arrian chronicles Alexander's campaign through the years. As his empire is growing, his supply lines are thinning and he's building completely new cities everywhere he goes to house wounded soldiers, but he's also firing Satraps who are corrupt or poor performers.
So my point is that it's a lot to take in, and I think a solution that students could contribute to would make an excellent resource for them to translate what they're reading into something that is reconciled on a map. A solution would also just be very useful to have as a resource.
Solution
An ideal solution would be to have the entire state of the world associated with a label that would represent some kind of state change. For example, the map could have some kind of default, starting label, but there could also be transition states like "Spring 413 BCE” or "Battle of Actium".
When you click the label, you go to the updated state of the map. With each state change, the reader can explore the consequences all throughout the map. Additionally, with something like this, I could receive contributions from readers who want to edit changes I've made or add new state changes themselves. The goal would be to create something that would effectively represent the shifting state of history.
Alternatives
One alternative I could imagine working would be using some kind of in-browser git like system which would store a map file, and each commit would represent one of these "state changes" I described in the problem section above. Then maybe this git-system could store just the diffs between commits, and then one would just have to glue buttons to navigate these commits. That's just a broad sketch of something I could see conceptually, but integrating it into the application would be much better.
Thank you for reading.