Map of Contemporaries - service for the history of "horizontal" way
Forming Web Services / / December 19, 2019
In this article, we will tell you about a new way of visualization of historical data and wonderful project, which now can be used in order to get acquainted with the most important figures in the history of mankind.
Hands up who knows the history?
Well, let's: who knows history of their country? Too sparsely. And all because of that history, in most schools taught not the most rational way. Most often the educational process looks like this: select a region of the world, or even of individual countries and discussed in detail everything that happened there in different periods of time. The next year or next semester go to another region or country, and so on.
This method of training leave in the minds of students porridge of disparate historical facts, dates and people, but does not provide an integrated understanding of the historical processes and the relationships between them. So now all the more prevalent so-called horizontal method for the study of history. In contrast to the vertical method, when we move on dates "from the bottom up," he proposes to consider events taking place in different countries, in different fields of human activity around the same time. Thus, we are able to distract from learning the dates of birth and death of the great figures of war and turmoil and feel the spirit of the time. Read more about "horizontal history" can be read in the English language
article.Of course, at a glance the events taking place in different countries, and even to build a cause-and-effect relationship between them can be very difficult. And here to the aid of new technologies arrive. A remarkable example of how visual and interesting can be "horizontal history", is a project Map of Contemporaries. Its designer, Yuri Bogdanov, did a great job of creating an interactive time of tape, which presents data on almost 10,000 of the great historical figures. Here you can find great politicians, composers, scientists, military leaders, artists and other persons who have left their mark in the history of mankind.
Each of them is shown in the time line color strip, the length of which corresponds to the life expectancy and the color - field of activity. Use the toolbar on the right, you can easily switch between different display modes. For example, to filter out the most famous politicians of the world, or, on the contrary, be limited only to artists certain countries. Click on any colored block this person will open the corresponding article in "Wikipedia".
A careful study of Map of Contemporaries might give inquisitive minds a lot of interesting discoveries to which they are unlikely to be dug in the conventional history books. It turns out that Rembrandt, Stepan Razin and the famous Cardinal Richelieu were contemporaries. Buddha could easily cause a philosophical dispute Pythagoras and Copernicus - ask about his fate Nostradamus.
We got in touch with Yuri, and that's what he told us about his project.
Yuri Bogdanov
The plans of the developer based on the creation of Map of Contemporaries crowdsourcing platform where people can correct mistakes, add content themselves any new visualization. the project is open source, so anyone can connect with Yuri and participate in the development of this project.