I was particularly interested in how this piece might apply to representations of narrative events, and how we might understand our own use of narrative visualizations (e.g., act structures, Freytag’s pyramid, Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, etc.) through these lenses. Some of my takeaways from this piece:

  • Timelines are considered to have a low status as historical representations, but they are utterly important in contextualizing events and other representations of narratives.
  • It makes sense that chronology was once revered when it was much harder to identify or gather evidence to support representations of event sequences. Today, so much has already been chronicled and represented temporally for us that in a sense, here, we stand on the shoulders of these materials without giving them much thought.
  • I found the earlier clarification on the definition of historiography interesting: that it must “deal in real, rather than merely imaginary, events; and it is not enough that [it represents] events in its order of discourse according to the chronological framework in which they originally occurred. The events must be… revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence.” In this definition, we also see that historiographies are traditionally narratives lacking in much context that would normally be considered characteristic of authorial perspective.
  • Mitchell’s argument that all temporal language is contaminated by spatial figures is also interesting, indicating that our ways of thinking about time are relational in linear conception (e.g., before, after, etc.).
  • Eusebius’ Chronicles appeared to be a particularly pertinent turning point in the development of a timeline, giving the timeline an indexical feel and greater utility, allowing for more annotation on the part of both authors and readers. It also allowed for easier comparisons and cross-comparisons between and among different fields of discrete data and data types.
  • In Mercator’s example, an understanding of time also allowed for a more accurate representation of space–since he used astronomical data to support his cartographies.
  • It’s interesting that the authors don’t touch more upon timelines as used in academic research–specifically, in the social sciences.