In this reading, the author points out the problem of having humanists and society as a whole become accustomed to one notion of a standard timeline. In today’s world we tend to view a timeline as a single axis spaced out chronologically by the dates at which the events occured. However, the author goes on to show that this idea is rather a most recent idea and time was not always thought of this way. Some cultures in history measured time using the stars and moons while others used tables with time running vertically in order to display various events that ran parallel to each other.

Reading this I did appreciate the way the author presented the challenge of designing other ways to represent time. I actually did not know that our way of representing time was much more a recent phenomena. However, looking at the examples he gave of past cultures like the “St. Gall Manuscript” made me think about why it was they represented time in such a way. Another thought that came to my mind was something upon which Joseph Priestley mentioned. He said that he did not recognize history as a narrative. In turn, this makes sense, since when analyzing history you tend to go back and forth in time to comment on different events and create links/patterns during that period of time. This reminded me of the table Eusebius created in which he lined up his events and time vertically in a table that way they could run parallel to each other and he could better overall compare the two. So this makes me wonder…where do we go from here? I honestly don’t know. I don’t think the reading really provided a solution. It just sort of raised the question. But in raising the question, it did provide curiousity and I think it achieved its purpose in challenging the reader to at least think about these concepts…well, at least it challanged me. So, like I said I don’t really have any new and outstanding ideas but one thing I did want to say was that even though we are trying to redesign timelines I think it’s important not to forget the beauty that lies in the simplicity of things. If a timeline gets too complicated to the point where the user cannot understand it then what’s the point of it in the first place.