Cool! I made something similar with the same datasets a year ago, but with geocoordinates instead of timestamps: https://theilemail.de/wikipage/ It shows a zoomable map with the "most important" wikipedia entries at specific locations.
It was very hard to get the parameters right so that the text is always displayed in a good size, while showing not too few or too many entries. I never published it until now, I think.
This is really nicely done, the log zoom makes 4M events feel navigable instead of like a wall. How are you serving a viewport at that scale: precomputed levels of detail, or a query against the raw events on each pan and zoom?
Thank you ! It's indeed precomputed levels of detail, the backend serves a key-value store: for each bucket a top 10 events that start or end in this bucket. A bucket is described by its zoom level (from 1 day to 2^34 days) and time coordinates.
See also my log-scale timeline of the universe — hand-curated rather than a giant import, and I hope also a bit nicer/simpler UI: https://deep-timeline.org
Thank you for sharing your project, it must have been quite some work to curate the events. My plan is to at some point be able to implement various filters so that people can make usable timelines. Right now it's more of a tech demo.
Nice! I can't help thinking it would be informative to see it on a linear scale. Vast, unfathomable stretches of time before humans come on the scene, and then human history is a blip at the end.
Also on a macbook, it took me a while to realise pinch to zoom doesn't do anything except zoom the page, pan is click and drag, and scroll is zoom. Cool project except for the controls, surely scroll should be to scroll up and down?
its a very promising idea, i recently god into the Bronze age collapse and this was a nice way to look around at other events happening at that time and put context to it. a few bugs to iron out but yeah good work
An arbitrary data error I found is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jekadefari is shown on the year 760251. That number is obviously wrong, it instead appears to be the postcode of the place.
Wikidata is the source I used to get metadata about Wikipedia articles. Sometimes the data is automatically extracted from Wikipedia articles which introduces these errors. What's nice is that the timeline representation easily shows these outliers and will help us fix them !
The problem is that there's no guarantee that extraction errors will always end up as outliers. Instead, outliers are merely the errors that are easiest to find.
Hi, thank you for giving it a try ! I test both on Firefox (152) and Chrome, mobile and desktop.
If you don't mind please send me (lucas@pluvina.ge) the error message that appears in the console.
Hi, I'm sorry for that, my backend is struggling a bit I didn't expect to be on the front page so soon.
On https://www.diena.co/everything/ there is a page with a video if you want to see how it looks and behaves.
Cool, though I assume there's some accuracy shortfalls, when not close to zero the UI breaks when years are ~1 pixel in size.
Probably doesn't matter for much of the content, though immediately comes to mind that for after big bang there is "known events" that happened at second-scale. Don't know if there's exact Wikipeida articles of those, but with an appropriately accurate timestamp storage & handling (128bit? more?), one could well zoom in to those if they did exist.
Yes indeed, I'll fix them at some point ! For in-between events it doesn't really matter to be able to zoom in, but it'd be great to explore the birth of the universe on this timeline. Storage wise it's already supporting such precision, but the UI (which was made for the 1900-2100 range initially) still has issues.
It was very hard to get the parameters right so that the text is always displayed in a good size, while showing not too few or too many entries. I never published it until now, I think.
<Insert bullet-ridden bomber image here>
Probably doesn't matter for much of the content, though immediately comes to mind that for after big bang there is "known events" that happened at second-scale. Don't know if there's exact Wikipeida articles of those, but with an appropriately accurate timestamp storage & handling (128bit? more?), one could well zoom in to those if they did exist.