Weaving History

We are pleased to announce the first public beta of Weaving History!

Weaving History lets you create ‘factlets‘, containing basic information about historical events, persons, and so on, which you can string together to create historical ‘threads‘. These threads can then be visually represented on maps and timelines.

There’s a function that lets you automatically pull information from Wikipedia, including images, dates, locations and brief descriptions.

For example, you can see a thread of the Napoleonic wars showing the dates and locations of major battles, or a thread showing Shakespeare’s works.

Weaving History

Each factlet can be used in a multiplicity of different threads. For example, a factlet giving the birth and death dates for Leonardo Da Vinci might be included in a thread on renaissance painting, a thread on the history of famous inventors and a thread on the history of anatomy.

The project is very much a work in progress – and we’d love to hear what you think on our discuss list or as a comment below!

If you’d like to try it out, you can get stuck in and create a new factlet or thread! Also if you’d like to contribute – we’d warmly welcome help with developing the graphical interface, the code, or with curating the site!

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Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.

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