Timeline 2
Timeline 3: Map
Timeline 4
Timeline 5: Event Granulation
Wikipedia Front-End
First and foremost, the application ought to be able to function as a search engine for basic, reliable timelines as if one produced them straight from Wikipedia pages (or any encyclopedia generally).Even if the timeline is not literally a front-end for Wikipedia, the design implication is the same: People should always be able to use it to find concisely packaged information - despite the myriad of possibilities for personal expression and customization.
Default Timelines Versus User Timelines
A Universal timeline as a Wikipedia front-end would need to have default narratives categorized as such to differentiate them from user created ones. Users should be able to browse the timeline purely in a consuming manner, to know they are searching a standard of information.Users should be able to clearly know what mode they are in.
- Wiki search mode
- searching through reliable timelines
- timelines that have preset focus to the point of history
- (imagine timelines that group events as if straight from any given Wikipedia page)
- Disassociated search mode
- all events are free from pre-existing stories and narratives as to allow users to group them openly
- user-created search mode
- searching through timelines that others created, as one would search for unprofessional videos on YouTube
- These timelines would be expressions of users who wanted to express something through a timeline
- creation mode
- custom groupings of items on a timeline while searching
- uploading timelines created with additional software
The challenge of creating default timelines is: who groups them, and according to what methods and standards? Who decides what groupings are relevant? The response to this is much the same question of: Who groups Wikipedia articles' information and how do they do it?
(The key difficulty of this idea is the sheer scale of it. Who does the work? Google Maps is something businesses use, and want customers to have. A Universal timeline by comparison is not very business oriented, which is why Wikipedia relies on donations.)
There would need to be a setting that specified whether or not you wanted to look at default narrative timelines. If such a setting is turned off, then all items within the default narrative timelines are simply part of the Universal timeline of all things.
Users would be able to group events in causal links, related events, or simply by temporary association for any reason - to create stories of a time or series of events as desired.
Timeline Features
Parallel Comparison Timelines
Users should be able to place multiple timelines next to each other, whether from separate periods, or otherwise.Users should be able to:
- lock or unlock the time scale between parallel timelines
- lock or unlock the time period, such that a series of events from one time could be compared to a series of events from another time
- search for and insert new timelines adjacent to each other
Layered Timelines
Users should be able to:- layer multiple timelines on top of each other
- select which layers are on top
- toggle the view option on a layer to see it or to not see it
Parallel Scales View
One very expressive feature would be to have multiple timelines in parallel that are on different scales, but all move together, in order to capture large scale differences in a single view.A user might see four timelines, and move only one of them at a time. When the user moves one, then the others move according to their scale. In such a view, timelines at a higher scale would move more slowly while timelines on a smaller scale would move faster.
In this way, larger differences in scale could be communicated through multiple steps in scale, for comparisons that do not work on one single timeline scale.
On such a view, additional scale steps could be added in order to communicate ever larger spans of time.
