history

The Venice Time Machine is an interesting project underway at the Digital Humanities Lab of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). The team have embarked on a ten year digitisation…

In 2011 the historian David Christian gave a talk at TED in California. His subject was “Big History“, the cross-discipline study of history he began teaching in Australia in the early…

Churches and alehouses are ubiquitous in Britain. The names change from time to time but many of the sites have been occupied for centuries. Back before the advent of GPS and…

Big History chronicles all the major events from the Big Bang to the present day. It attempts to bring together the timelines of written history, archeology, geology and cosmology, and…

A synchronoptic timeline is one in which several timelines are displayed concurrently. The earliest recognised example dates from 1753 and is the work of the French physician Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg. His…

This week marks the 125th anniversary of the adoption of Greenwich as the Prime Meridian of the world. As I’ve mentioned before a meridian is an arbitrary line of longitude…

Apollo 11 boot print image courtesy of NASA If you’re a regular reader then I’m sure you know by now that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. [For the…

Yesterday morning a small crowd gathered in a conference room on the first floor of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. They were there to watch master watchmaker George…

When I came up with the fanciful notion of an interactive timeline that stretches back as far as the Big Bang I thought I was onto something exciting and new.…