timelines – Ammon Shepherd

Veterans Day Interest Spikes

Google has some interesting additions to their search results. You can now see ‘Related Searches’, a ‘Wonder wheel’, and a ‘Timeline’. I think the timeline may have been there for a while. It was for Google News, at least.

Anyhow, while checking the RSS feeds today, I noticed the Google doodle for today is about Veterans Day. I clicked the ‘Timeline’ to see what it had to offer. You first see a timeline with the number of web pages referencing the search result for a particular time. What first caught my eye were two large spikes in the timeline corresponding to 1919 and 1954. Second was a much larger result after 1984, and an increasingly greater result through 2009, with a drastic drop in 2010 (probably because it’s today and people are still posting about it).

Anyhow, using this timeline from Google allows to ask three questions and dig into the history of Veterans Day. The answers can be pulled from the links provided by clicking on the timeline for the year of interest.

1. Why the spike at 1918-1919? Well, as it turns out this was the first time Veterans Day occurred. It was set apart as a national holiday on November 11, 1918, to mark the end of World War I, which ended on that date. It was originally named Armistice Day.

2. Why the spike at 1954? In 1953 the town of Emporia, Kansas named their yearly parade the “Veterans’ Day Parade” in honor of all the veterans in their town. A bill introduced by that state’s congressman led to renaming the national holiday to Veterans’ Day!

3. Why the increased interest in 1984? This one was a surprise. On November 11, 1984, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated and accepted by President Ronald Reagan as a United States memorial. There’s even a link to a newspaper article.

Each year also shows an interesting little bump in May, which corresponds with Memorial Day in that month.

There’s no data in for November 2010, so it will be interesting to see if the trend continues and there are more pages for Veterans’ Day in 2010 than there was in 2009.

Do you see any other bumps or bulges in the timeline? What happened there to spark interest in Veterans’ Day?

Orals Passed!

Whew! That was fun. Marion Deschmuk, Dina Copelman, and Sean Takats are great faculty to work with. And I would not have been able to do it without the mentoring of Steve Barnes this semester. Also, it wouldn’t be possible without the support of my wonderful wife Jessica, and the prayers and encouragement from family! Only two more hurdles to go, prospectus in December will put me at ABD (all but dissertation), and then the simple matter of research and writing a dissertation.

To finish off these posts about the orals, I’m posting some images of documents I made to help me conceptualize the books in their proper time periods. It’s basically back to the notecard system and arranging them chronologically. Each “card” has the title, a list of themes, a note about sources, and the main thesis of the book. This was extremely helpful in getting a grasp of the books. I created these in a Mac application called OmniGraffle. What would be even cooler, though, is if Zotero had a way to create this type of notecard type display with the ability to drag and drop the cards to organize in themes or chronologically.

German History – Dealing with the knot of Nazi Past

40th anniversary of the moon landing

What space junky, almost historian, geek would I be without posting a little bit about some of the best type of history in existence. I refer, of course, to the history of man’s endeavors to explore space. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to step on a celestial body other than Earth. Michael Collins waited in the Command capsule as the two American astronauts made human history.

So here are a number of resources and articles describing some cool things about space flight.

Historic Spacecraft is an archive of space vehicles and other things space related. They have a lot of photos of vehicles, suits, and such. They also have posters and such for sell, if you’re inclined to have something on your wall. They also have stats and dates for all of the rockets and vehicles listed. A great source for photos for all your space history needs. Also really cool is a list of all completed Space Shuttle missions. Space Shuttle Discovery has flown the most missions, 36, so far (June 2009) with a total of 126 missions. The Space Shuttle Enterprise never made it to space, but you can see it at the Udvar-Hazy National Air and Space Museum in Dulles, VA. I’ve been there a couple of times, and it is extremely awesome.

Next up from Flightglobal is an interactive timeline of sorts, with lots of information about the missions, flights, computers, physics and people who made it possible to put man on the moon. Most amazing about the whole flight, is that everything was based on theory. There was no way to test the actual theoretical physics without flying to the moon and back. “Although the theoretical physics of travelling to the Moon had been laid down before the advent of the Apollo missions, this was the first time a series of manned missions had put the theory into practice.”

Speaking of computers, Linux.com has a neat write up about the software used to guide the Apollo 11 spacecraft to the moon and back. It’s incredible to think that they were able to do such an amazing thing with technology comparable to today’s calculators. All of the code used punch cards and took hours to see if it was written properly. Jerry Bostick described the process in the Linux.com article:

“We would give instructions to the programs by punching cards,” Bostick said. “You had to wait at least 12 hours to see if it would work right.” The early programming was done in the real-time computing complex in Houston using IBM 7094 computers with 64K of memory. There were no hard disks. All the data was stored on magnetic tape, with each computer having about eight tape drives. Most programs used for the mission were written in Fortran, Bostick said. “After Apollo 1, we upgraded to the biggest and the best equipment that government money could buy, the IBM 360 with an unheard of 1MB of memory. We went all the way from 64K to 1MB.”

Moving from space computers to space computer games, the Technologizer has a great piece about a well loved space game, Lunar Lander. This game started out as a text-based game written by a high school student. It became popular and was later turned into countless graphical spin offs. I’m playing one on the iPod Touch a bit too much at the moment. You can see I made the top 20 players for a while!

Finally, New Scientist has a number of interesting articles relating to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. One article addresses with the ethics and issues with the moon being a historic spot. Wherever there is a piece of human debris or footstep, it’s historically valuable. Should all of these sites and artifacts and footprints be protected? What happens when/if tourists are able to visit the moon? Who’s going to be the museum curator and the tourist guides? I’ll take that job!

Another New Scientist article lists several reasons why the moon is still relevant to science, for government, commercial enterprise and the normal guy.

Lastly, New Scientist has a neat interactive map showing the many multi-national places on the moon where humans have left their mark and made exploration.

Blast from the past

What I have for you this week are just a few websites that give us access to the past, an historical artifact that uncovers a mystery, and some new ways to do timelines.

A great resource, hopefully, for scholars. From their website….

“The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

Promote international and intercultural understanding;
Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.”

cuneform digital library initiative

Related to the WDL, is the CDLI. From their website….

“The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now nearly 225,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDLI.”

And here’s a short read on an interesting historical topic. It seems the history of the longitude will need a small rewrite. What’s most amazing, though, is the skill and craftsmanship of the compass at the heart of this historical debate. Created over 270 years ago, the original parts show no sign of wear and tear, while replacement parts broke down after 80 years. A remarkable piece of history.

The controversy surrounding this clock comes from recent work to replace broken parts from the initial attempt at restoration. It was originally believed that John Harrison created this clock all by himself. He being originally a carpenter, some scholars are a bit skeptic that he could create the intricate brass work needed to create the piece. The most recent repairs have lead people to believe Harrison had help, and probably commissioned out certain pieces. Comprising over 2000 pieces, this sea clock is a marvel of itself, regardless of who made it.

Now it’s time for some timelines!

It was a shameless publicity post to slashdot, but the timelines got me thinking of other timelines, especially as I’m creating one of my own using MIT’s Exhibit builder, and have created one for a course. So, here are a few timeline tools mentioned in the article.

SIMILE’s Timeline: easy to use, just point it to a data file (which is the most dificult part)

TimeGlider: Looks like a flashed based version of SIMILE’s product. A few different features. Here’s one in action, Rosenberg Cold War trials.

Google’s News timeline: you can do searches on other things as well. Kind of like a modern timeline.

TimeRime: They’re in this for the money, and it doesn’t look all that great, but I didn’t spend but more than a couple seconds looking around.

Finished 1989 Flash Map

I had to dig this out of the depths of my computer today, and a quick search showed that I never posted the final version. So here it is in all it’s glory. 1989 Events

[kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://chnm.gmu.edu/staff/ammon/1989/1989events.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”540″ height=”360″]

[/kml_flashembed]

Zotero's code_swarm

I finally figured it all out, and got a working version of Zotero’s development on trunk for the past year in code_swarm.

Next, I need to find or make some cool electronic music to play while watching it.

History of Software Applications

There’s a really cool new way to visualize the creation of software. It’s called code_swarm. Developed by Michael Ogawa as a way to do just that, visualize the creation of software. He’s a sort of software anthropologist. Not so much interested in the software, but how people interact to create it.

Here’s an example using the programming language Python (something I want to learn one of these days).

I think this is a great way to visualize history as well. I can imagine this being used with another idea I had a while back. Instead of tracking files and creators, track people and their movements. This would be great for looking at a family history. It would be cool to have a GEDCOM file of thousands of ancestors, plug it into this application, then watch as your family members come alive on a map, move around, and fade into history. I have ancestors from Sweden, Germany, England, and many places in the United States. It would be awesome to see their history plotted out this way.

It could even work on a smaller scale. How bout your own life’s travels plotted out.

Keeping on track with my readings course with Dan Cohen about history and new media (which I need to post about), how does this type of new media affect the study of history? If we plug in the details about an ancestors decision to move from, say, Sweden to Utah, can we better understand how individuals affect many generations afterwards? Will seeing the large number of ancestors in one place affect how we view ourselves in life? My thinking here is that we’ll see on one screen a large number of people living and moving, and eventually making you. If there were other important events plotted during the same timeline (perhaps a better term is a moveline), would that help us better understand the context of our ancestors history?

Lots of stuff to think about. And a large project to implement. Fortunately the source code for code_swarm is open source and freely available.