In a way, all visualization is the practice of using space to mediate thought. I appreciated the analysis of our use of spatial metaphors for time: interval, before, after, long, short. As WJT Mitchell commented:

The fact is that spaital form is the perceptual basis of our notion of time, that we literally cannot ‘tell time’ without the mediation of space.

I’m not sure I buy Lakoff’s argument about the line as an “intermediate metaphor” when interacting with digital clocks, but I do accept the basic premise that our interactions with space have shaped our understanding of time. It fits nicely with situated and embodied models of cognition, which posit that cognition is distributed outside of our body to our environment, and even our culture. (For a nuanced overview of the state of embodied cognition, please read Wilson and Golonka’s 2013 paper. If you liked that, you may like their blog, too.)

Rosenberg’s brief history of the use of timelines describes their use as tools to better understand history and culture: comparing events in different empires in separate columns of a table, eventually collapsing to a single column under the Romans, tells a specific story about the rise of Christianity, for example. He brings up Priestley’s visualization of the lives of scientists who made an impact in the field of optics as the first example of a timeline and I was surprised at how recently it was created. As he points out: humans have had the raw technology to create timelines for a very long time. They only didn’t come about for so long due to cultural limitations. But what were those limitations? It was never made clear in this part of the text.

Interestingly, the table- and column-based timelines created by the likes of Eusebius seem to have died out. The timeline tools we explored in last week’s homework assignment had no support for this kind of parallel presentation. And it was a limitation that most of the class had noticed, and commented on. Why is that? To what ends do we create timelines now that comparison of different sets of events is no longer so useful? It lends weight to the common critique that a programmer hears that the limitations of our software should not be an excuse to limit our thought. So I guess it falls to us to go out and make our tools better :)