These readings make me reflect on my own education, because the historically and socially situated representations of the timeline and the map were so prevalent. It definitely points toward a positivist tendency, as Rosenberg and Grafton bring up on p21. Especially when it came to older historical events such as the American Revolution and World War I, we focused a lot on maps and dates—-data from measurement of time and space. These data silently normalized colonial naming conventions, and filtered our thinking through the lens of Euro-American ethnocentrism. It wasn’t really until we got to JFK and Vietnam that any sort of human subjectivity was explicitly offered in our history education. And I have to imagine that’s partly because that’s when my teachers or their parents were alive to experience it firsthand. It’s weird how cultural memory works–at least in classroom settings, history gets flattened and loses its emotional intensity after a few generations. I personally could not stand history class because I hated memorizing names and dates. But historical knowledge is so much deeper and more interesting than that.

I think Rosenberg & Grafton are a little bit too in love with the time-map idea. It provides only some additional affordances. However, I did really enjoy the breakdown of the matrix style representations towards timelines and then towards time-maps. I’m especially fascinated in Chapter 4 at these ideas to condense all of history into these single charts. It was a much less specialized time in terms of academia and historical study. But it’s obvious how much is lost in such a condensation.