This was a really interesting discussion of the timeline and how we think about time itself. The first part (half, maybe) of the piece seemed to be about how time is closely related to other concepts. I found the author’s comparison of how we think about time and space surprising but true: we tend to use the same words to describe both. Distances in space can be long and so can intervals in time. In fact it is very difficult to take about time in such a way that could not also apply to movement along a line in space. This quote by W.J.T. Mitchell stood out to me in the text

“we literally cannot ‘tell time without the mediation of space”

I found this connection surprising because I generally think of time and space as separate concepts, at least in everyday life. However the article’s discussion of time has me convinced that we think about time only in terms of space. I would be very interested to see whether this persists across all languages and cultures. Perhaps this effect is not present in all languages, or perhaps it is a core aspect of how humans think of time.

This piece’s views on the Annals of St. Gall were also interesting. On the one hand, you can see the lack and variation in type of information in the chronology as evidence that it was poorly made or incomplete. On the other hand, the very structure of the document can tell us about how the authors and original readers viewed time and the world. As the essay quotes Hayden White, the document reflects a world “in which things happen to people rather than one in which people do things.” I wonder how the structure of other documents (perhaps maps) can reveal details of the mentality of a region or period in history. Furthermore, I wonder what our current use of linear timelines says about us.

I also found it amusing that the piece mentioned how “filling in an ideal timeline with more and better data only pushed it toward the absurd”. In our own discussions of timelines last week the main complaint that arose was that timelines were ill-suited to datasets that include many events in a short period. It seems this problem has been known for centuries now.