History on the Line: Time as Dimension Stephen Boyd Davis 1 Stephen Ferguson, “The 1753 Introduction Carte Chronographique of Jacques In 1753, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg wrote a pamphlet accompanying Barbeu-Dubourg,” Princeton University a timeline of history, his Chronography or Depiction of Time.1 In it he Library Chronicle (Winter 1991). compared the visualization of past time unfavorably with the visu- http://www.princeton.edu/~ferguson/ PULC_1991_duBourg.pdf (accessed alization of distant countries. Geography he found easy, attractive, December 17, 2011). and highly memorable while chronology was “laborious, unforgiv- 2 Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, Chronographie, ing, offering nothing to the mind but repellent dates.”2 A solution ou Description des Tems [Chronography, seemed to present itself: or Depiction of Time], trans. Stephen Boyd Davis (Paris, 1753 [2009]), 5. Geography has as its object the extent of the earth; http://goo.gl/vNhN (accessed December Chronology has as its object the succession of time. May 17, 2011). not duration be imitated and represented as effectively 3 Ibid. to the senses as distinctly as space, and may not intervals 4 Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, Chronographie of time be as easily counted in degrees?3 Universelle & Détails qui en Dépendent pour la Chronologie & les Généalogies (Paris: Barbeu-Dubourg, Lamote, Fleury, In this way Barbeu-Dubourg offered his rationale for one of the 1753). Princeton University Library Rare earliest timelines: a representation mapping time arithmetically to Books: D11 .B37 1753. graphical space rather than presenting events in a list or table 5 Joseph Priestley, A Chart of Biography (see Figure 1).4 His publication was followed in 1765 by Joseph (London, 1765). British Library: 611.l.19. 5 6 The two inventors shared a connection: Priestley’s Chart of Biography (see Figure 2). One of Priestley’s inno- Benjamin Franklin was a mutual vations was the use of actual graphic lines to represent the life friend and sent Barbeu-Dubourg a duration of individuals.6 copy of Priestley’s timeline, to which In some ways, little has changed since Barbeu-Dubourg Barbeu-Dubourg responded with the contrasted the state of the art in geographic and temporal visual- gracious remark, “I have received with gratitude and viewed with pleasure the ization. Admittedly, many charts—some of them sophisticated— biographical chart of Mr. Priestley which have mapped quantities against time: Quantitative visualization is in truth made on almost the same prin- took off shortly after Barbeu-Dubourg and Priestley’s innovations ciples as my own, without plagiarism on and was partly based on their work. But the visualization of his- either side, as I in no way claim primacy on account of the date.” He may have toric lives, events, and artifacts and the relations between them— known from Franklin that Priestley had of categorical rather than quantitative information about the been making charts for some time to past—is rarely given serious consideration as either a design or assist in his teaching at the Warrington historiographic problem. As a result of long and intense research Dissenting Academy before he began to and development, geographic maps do their job well, and a wealth publish them. (Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg to Benjamin Franklin, May 8, 1768, in of experience is applied to their design, supported in these The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, days by significant innovations arising from digital capabilities. http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/yale?vo Controversy rages over the respective merits of the Mercator, l=15&page=112a&ssn=001-78-0029 Gall-Peters, and other projections, with a clear understanding (accessed December 21, 2011). © 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4 DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 4 Autumn 2012 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00171 by guest on 02 October 2021 Figure 1 Detail of Barbeu-Dubourg’s 1753 Carte Chronographique. Time runs from left to right. The other axis is used for states and king- doms, with two bands near the bottom edge for notable events and individuals. This detail shows the lowest band for the period from about 1693AD to 1728AD. Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Reproduced with permission. Figure 2 Priestley’s 1765 Chart of Biography (detail). Time extends from left to right. This detail shows the period 1300AD to 1800AD. The other axis is divided into horizontal bands, here Mathematicians and Physicians. Reproduced with the permission of Chetham’s Library, Manchester. 7 See Denis Wood and John Krygier, that each presents a different world view and that these differ- “Critical Cartography,” in International ences matter.7 The mapping of time, by contrast, has made only Encyclopedia of Human Geography, eds. modest intellectual progress since it was invented 250 years ago: Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (Amsterdam: The choices to be made by the designer are assumed to be straight- Elsevier, 2009), 340-44. 8 See Michael Twyman, “Articulating forward and incite no debate. Twyman has pioneered timeline Graphic Language: A Historical scholarship from a typographic and graphical point of view, while Perspective,” in Towards a New the recent survey by Rosenberg and Grafton is scholarly, compre- Understanding of Literacy, eds. hensive, and highly visual.8 Rosenberg’s extensive article on the Merald E. Wrolstad and Dennis Fisher timelines of Joseph Priestley is also a major contribution to the (New York: Praeger, 1986), 188–251; 9 Michael Twyman, “Textbook Design: subject. However, this fine scholarship has been applied to recov- Chronological Tables and the Use of ering the lost history of chronographics rather than to extracting Typographic Cueing,” Paradigm 4 key principles that might help us design new ones. I hope to make (December 1990); and Daniel Rosenberg the latter contribution in this article. Doing so involves asking and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies what we are mapping and how. I draw on psychological and of Time: A History of the Timeline anthropological sources and on my own historical investigations (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). into early timelines and their authors. Crudely, one could say that 9 Daniel Rosenberg, “Joseph Priestley and the eighteenth-century pioneers had subtle ideas but not the tech- the Graphic Invention of Modern Time,” nology to implement them, while now we have technologies that Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 36 they sorely needed but less critical thought. Apart from imaging no. 1 (2007): 59. DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 4 Autumn 2012 5 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00171 by guest on 02 October 2021 the past, timelines are an important component of many digital tools for planning projects—for creating music, animations, mov- ies, and multimedia—and for representing processes at a range of scales from nanoseconds to the geological and cosmological. If we can think intelligently about mapping time to graphical space in the domain of history, this capacity will benefit other fields as well. Time as Dimension This article focuses on one issue—the orientation and direction of the time axis—to the exclusion of many others; for example, it touches only briefly on the closely related questions of scale and calibration. In addition, even the earliest chronologies showed a strong awareness of the usefulness of being able to look at simulta- neous events, “across” time, as well as to displaying their date order, but the design and use of these non-time axes is a topic for another day. What follows is also confined to mapping time to a straight line. This model is of course just one possibility, often contrasted with cyclic or circular models allegedly held by, for example, Greek, Asian, or any non-Judaeo-Christian cultures. Such binary contrasts have been rejected as simplistic by Feeney, Goody, and Gould.10 In fact, in any culture we seem to operate comfortably with switchable concepts of time. In the words of Möller and 10 See Denis Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Luraghi, “most people perceive time in different ways according to Ancient Time and the Beginnings of their context or situation, with the result that any one culture is History (Berkeley: University of California 11 Press, 2007), 3; Jack Goody, The Theft of characterised by a range of different perceptions of time.” History (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 18; and Stephen The Uses of Timelines Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: We cannot begin to look at the form of the timeline without con- Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of sidering its purpose. What is the objective when historical time is Geological Time (Cambridge, MA: mapped on a surface—whether page, exhibition board, or digital Harvard University Press, 1987). 11 Astrid Möller and Nino Luraghi, “Time in display? What are such maps of time meant to achieve? Potentially, the Writing of History: Perceptions and they share the benefits of any well-designed data visualization, Structures,” Storia della Storiografia 28 enabling users to spot patterns, trends, clusters, gaps, and outli- (1995), 7. ers—in short, to make sense of data.12 Visualizations are not only 12 For a useful synthesis of the literature, for the benefit of other people; authors themselves might also ben- see Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman, eds., Readings efit. These representations serve the social reproduction of knowl- 13 in Information Visualization: Using Vision edge and they constitute tools for thinking. When applied to to Think (San Francisco: Morgan historic data, specific insights include spotting connections Kaufmann, 1999), 16. through and across time, identifying clusters and lacunae, and 13 Matthias Schemmel, “Medieval understanding the context of individual events, actions, and arti- Representations of Change and Their facts. Such benefits have been claimed from the earliest days of Early Modern Application,” Preprint 402.