Seeing Centuries, Part 2 | Hacker News Reader

Seeing Centuries, Part 2

charts.substack.com

36 pointsdiodorus5 comments

The (completely understandable!) concentration of detail within the first few ramps reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave... ...

Oral traditions are fragile. Writing is more durable, but only as durable as the medium it uses. We're lucky we know as much about the past as we do.

I years ago went looking for day-by-day scanned newspapers to link to. The 1800's and much of 1900's were rich with candidates (Library of Congress and Google Books), the 1700's were disappearing as collections were privatized and paywalled, and the 1600's and 2000's were sparse. So a bump rather than exponential. "To fully see 9th Ave, activate your Meta VR Comcast NYC account".

I love this, and my lottery dream consists of funding a scalable, interactive, tag-based version that allows layering of different topics. As a schoolteacher, the woolly mammoths/pyramids moments are great for my 12/13 year old students. Revolutions, wars, social movements, the arts, sports, science, etc could all be toggled, with links to Wikipedia or potentially other sources for each entry. Potentially crowd-sourced with moderation. I also dream of having a classroom tool version that students could build.

I'm reminded of Grun's The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events[1]. It's a giant table of line-or-paragraph brief entries, arranged by year rows and column topics (Politics, Literature, Religion, Art, Music, SciTech, DailyLife).

For a web interactive sketch, where every day was a dot (a year across, centuries fit on a screen, mouseover gives newspaper links etc), I mined Wikipedia links from their event lists[2]. A bit limited as source material, but even a limited LLM might tag them. Hmm, and a limited LLM is giving interesting answers to "List events in Topic from between 700 BC and 600 BC." (usual caveats, and other tooling needed for links).

[1] example page images on https://www.ebay.com/itm/403249650410 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_3

Reply on news.ycombinator.com