I found Mitchell’s argument on the relationship between language and spatial quality of time is interesting: ‘temporal language is contaminated by spatial figures, we speak of ‘long’ and ‘short’ times, of ‘before’ and ‘after’ – all implicit metaphors which depend upon a mental picture of time as a linear continuum…’ The perception of time and space also differs in various social and cultural contexts, e.g. some Mandarin dialect uses ‘up’ and ‘down’ which has a vertical dimension, to describe time as close and distant.

Various forms of visual organizations were developed to document events in relation to time. The cases in the article about chronological tables and matrix of kingdoms make me appreciate how data today could be translated automatically into different formats to coordinate users’ needs. For example, windows file explorer allows the user to view in ‘list,’ ‘large icon,’ ‘details,’ ‘tiles,’ and many other formats so that the user can sort and check files more conveniently.

Furthermore, the direction of writing also reflects people’s perception of time. For example, traditional Chinese books read from right to left, and each line begins from top to bottom, which is different from normal English readings.