Month: February 2015

  • Timelines

    Since memories become blurred as time goes by, the existing documents, journals and images are extraordinarily important records for people to understand history. Nowadays, historians tend to use both the chronology and geography to interpret history in a more digital way. “While history dealt in stories, chronology dealt in facts”.[Grafton] Chronology is widely used among…

  • Timelines: History and Chronology in Spacial Terms

    The somewhat young medium of displaying history, the timeline, reinvented not only how people chronologically present history, but also the way in which they think about history. According to Grafton, “The timeline offered a new way of visualizing history, And it fundamentally changed the way that history was spoken of as well”  (20). The chronological, linear…

  • Timelines

    As Grafton said “graphic representation is among our most important tools for organizing information.” (Grafton, p. 10), time maps and timelines are quite helpful for the study of history. These tools for organizing historical events match “our mental furniture” (Grafton, p. 10) which shows our favor on visual forms. Chronology organizes information in a pattern.…

  • Timelines

    Without chronology, history is just a million different little stories thrown together. According to Grafton, “While history dealt in stories, chronology dealt in facts.” (Grafton, 10) Chronology adds order and reliability to history. The chronology of events has shown Christians, for example, “when to celebrate Easter” or when other important events may occur (Grafton, 11).…

  • Timelines

    Chronology is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. It is really important to us because it determines the actual temporal sequence of past events. While historical texts have been subject to critical analysis, we ignored the formal and historical problems posed by graphic representations of time, the most important…

  • Blog #3 Timelines

    Thinking about how we represent history has been a question that has occupied us for millennia.  Why does chronology of events matter?  What can it show?  How can we represent history? In his Introduction, Grafton observes that “Teachers and theorists claimed, over and over again, that chronology and geography were the two eyes of history:…

  • Distant Reading

    During the process of learning about Distant Reading last week, I found it quite interesting to capture the beauty of Distant Reading. Distant Reading, as Whitley mentioned in her writing, is not to take the place of traditional close reading, but to give readers a broader view of the whole documents in a quantitative other…

  • On Distant Reading

    Humanists always spend too much time on exploring useful information from tremendous humanity database. The theme of the book, the intentions of authors and the subtle evidence of the contemporary lives, culture and thoughts are all hidden in hundreds of pages, or even more, of humanity materials. However, nowadays, humanity exploration no longer consumes as…

  • On Distant Reading

    The picture to the left may look like a children’s drawing to most people, but in reality it is an analysis of the frequency of five different words in a document. Every time the word shows up in the document, the assigned, colored line takes a turn at a specified angle. This is a clever…

  • Distant Reading: Plural Pronouns Reflect Collectivist Society

    Distant reading of texts can help readers understand overall themes, concepts, and cultural context. For this reason, distant reading can help to answer the following question: Were the Moravians in the 18th century a collectivist or individualist society? Some distant reading strategies will better display this orientation in society than others, however the theme remains sound. In…