Twenty-Third International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Time is a complicated phenomenon, yet in many respects, even designers have been inclined to simplify it for practical purposes into an arrow of causation leading in one direction at regular intervals. Add some points for events, and this understanding can be represented as a conventional visual timeline. Yet to study and understand time, especially our subjective perception of it, this simple approach can benefit from a variety of new forms of visualization. We have identified the following ways in which a conventional timeline does not function in an optimal way for representing specific tasks: 1. Connections between events; 2. Conflicting witnesses (i.e. showing disagreements among historians); 3. Complex narratives with missing pieces; 4. Uncertainty about when events started, ended, or both, and in what order; 5. Events that change recollection of the past and prediction about the future; 6.Events that have their own timeline but also a new influence; 7. Time as events rather than a continuous sequence In this project, we concentrate on the design of interactive visual representations that address issue (6), where what is being represented is the experience of someone who has encountered an event from the past, or a sequence that began in the past, but adds not just the context from the past, but also the contemporary context. Some prosaic examples might include seeing stars, hearing an old song for the first time, or watching reruns of televisions shows.