May 22, 2007
More Timelines: oneTimeLine and the BBC British History Timeline
Picking up on a post from last week about timeline search displays, I just received a heads-up to a search intermediary - OneTimeLine - that "crawls the web and identifies events in time. When you type in a search, onetimeline matches up the words to events it's identified and displays them to you as a timeline."
Here's the English Civil War battle query:
The result item links click through to the original content, whether it's on wikipedia (it's not really surprising that a lot of the results are from there ;-) or an arbitrary website.
I'm not sure where onetimeline is pulling its results from, but it'd be quite neat if it was a custom search engine that users could inspect...
[Update: the onetimeline folks say: "We're using the Amazon Crawler over at http://awsp.alexa.com from which we're indexing Wikipedia, BBC, YouTube and a custom timeline/history search."]
I'm reminded that one of the criticisms levelled against Google Scholar, for example, was that users can't tell what journals/sources are included, unlike commercial academic search tools (or even Windows Live Academic), which do disclose the search domain.
As with the Google view:timeline switch, it would be really handy if the results were made available as a "temporal" RSS feed of some sort (or even better, a geotemporal RSS feed), such as a feed that could be piped directly into a Simile timeline widget.
Another timeline related tool I've discovered this week is an interactive British History timeline from the BBC.
The tool lets you explore significant events in British history either via the timeline, or by searching on dates or key events - english civil war battles gives the following, which suggests to me that the search engine could do with a little tuning...
Another way of navigating the timeline is via predefined journeys:
Each defined journey contains a series of items, ordered naturally enough by date:
At the moment, the timeline links to short, textual resources - I can't wait to see if they start incorporating audio and video resources too :-)
There is considerable opportunity, I think, for allowing students to create their own timelines (and maps) of key events in whatever subject they are studying, particularly if they can enrich the timeline with multimedia resources.
Maps and timelines provide useful scaffolding for organising information and helping students make sense of - and a story out of - the things they are learning.
Let's just hope this tool doesn't go the way of BBC Jam...
PS here's yet another timeline display (via Kiyo's Blog); a timeline search limiter from the FT:
I could see this sort of interface being handy for visually limiting search results in an academic journal or conference database, for example...
Posted by ajh59 at May 22, 2007 08:01 PM