Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg

Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline Reviews

• 
  Sense of History

  I think it was in my primary school that I came into contact with chronographs: graphic representations of history, usually chronologically, in the form of a timeline. I still see them hanging in the classroom, at a fairly high altitude, starting with the 'prehistory' and ending in the culmination of our civilization: the kingdom of Belgium (yes, I still date from the times that national history was the pinnacle of the history lesson).
  
  This book outlines how that chronographic representation of time originated and evolved, from the tables of Eusebius in the 4th century, to the timelines that you find in numerous graphic applications on your computer or in museums. In their introduction, the authors put a strong emphasis on the conceptual history visions that underlie those graphic representations, and that was exactly what pulled me to reading this book: “traditional chronographic forms performed both historical work and heavy conceptual lifting. They assembled, selected, and organized various bits of historical information in the form of dated lists. And the chronologies of a given period may tell us as much about its visions or past and futures as do its historical narratives.” In other words: the representations should reflect an own representation of time/history at the conceptual level.
  
  Unfortunately, the authors have completely lost sight of this intention en route. This whole book is a somewhat chronological sketch of the various forms of chronographs with emphasis on the technical and practical aspects: in tables, diagrams, tree-structure representations, with pictograms or concrete visual representations, colored or not, etc. Pretty interesting, certainly, but there is hardly anything to be found in this book about the conceptual background and implications of these various forms. Regrettable. Moreover, many illustrations are so small that you can hardly distinguish anything relevant. Really a missed opportunity.
• 
  Marc

  A bit of a deception, this beautifully illustrated coffee table book on chronographies, the graphic representation of history. See my review in my History-account on Goodreads:
  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
• 
  Patrick

  Visually pleasing, with much background on ancient representations. Includes some classics that
  Tufte et al. have referenced. Nevertheless disappointing - I was hoping for a more fundamental discussion of conceptual models of time, and how these shape our visual representations. Lacking are such models as those from narrative time (e.g.,
  Paul Ricoeur and
  Gérard Genette). A discussion of animated representations is also sorely lacking, since these incorporate time into the representation itself.
  
  The net result here is more of a coffee-table art book than a serious discussion of this (potentially) rich theme.
• 
  Antonio Delgado

  Cartographies are often ignored or considered secondary or complimentary sources of knowledge. This book shows that cartographies are not merely representation of information but producers of historical data and appropriations of knowledge for different uses. That includes, being a tool for knowing the past and the future: from creationism to eschatology, from financial data to transportation, from communication to entertainment, from art (photography, paintings and music) to virtual representation.
• 
  Michael Scott

  TODO full review:
  +++/- A book dedicated to visualizing time! Great idea, if only the implementation would deliver.
  + Claim that time is not fully understood and charted in sync with
  Edward R. Tufte's similar idea.
  ++/- Excellent coverage of the idea of time in Western culture, from historical time onwards. Only occasional contributions from Asia, Arabia, and Native America.
  ++ Good historical explanations on the origins of time charts and graphs in Western culture, related to how religion (the major filter of daily life since at least the 7th century and until the late 16th century in Europe) allowed various ideas to be developed. (In the wrong century, depicting time without matching the Genesis, creating confusion with the timing of the various events described in the Bible, confronting historical figures and dates with historical figures from the Bible, placing celestial objects over time, and so many other time-related concepts were highly controlled subjects; dissidents would be cautioned, exiled, tortured, or plain murdered.)
  +++ Excellent early chronology of figures inventing and refining time charts and graphs in the Western culture. Excellent tracing of key ideas, across centuries of refinement.
  + Good coverage of North American use of the notion of time, including in games. Nice link between the notion of (sequential) time and games in the Ladders and Chutes family.
  +/--- Good introduction of artistic use of time, but limited and lacking the depth of the first chapters.
  --- No room for modern representations of time in professional and commercial use. Watch faces, digital clocks (and watches), all sorts of time diagrams (see the circular representations in
  Manuel Lima's
  The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge, and various modes in
  Edward Tufte's
  Envisioning Information and
  Nathan Yau's
  Data Points: Visualization That Means Something), etc.
  - No room for fun, personal use of time charts and diagrams. For example, consider the personal analytics of
  Feltron's Annual Report (2005-2014), the computational linguistics work of
  Stefanie Posavec, and her collaboration with
  Giorgia Lupi on a year-long conversation over time-related data analytics. Plenty more exists along these lines.
  
• 
  catechism

  This is a very pretty book (although many of the illustrations could have been bigger), and it's sometimes an interesting and well-written one (assuming you are into hilarious chronography puns!), but I didn't feel it hung together very well, and I'm not sure if it was because the authors were trying to do too much or too little. eg: It mentions that the evolution of the timeline is a conceptual one, but the concept of time itself is largely ignored. The work of narrative historiography, while outside the scope of the book, probably should have featured just a little more prominently in the sections of the book talking about historical narratives. I also felt like it jumped around way too much when discussing religion, and it stayed pretty firmly in the camp of western civ.
  
  That all said, I thought the individual chapters were generally pretty good (my favorite was the chapter on artistic representations of time); it just lacked some larger coherent point.
  
  In my head, it goes pretty well on a shelf with with Tufte and other designy books (
  100 Diagrams That Changed the World); nerdy pop-sci books about calendars (
  The Calendar); extra-nerdy math books (
  Calendrical Calculations); and I don't know, some philosophical survey book like
  Philosophy of Time. It doesn't quite fill the gaps between those things, but it's a start.
• 
  Nathanael Coyne

  A beautiful, comprehensive but very interesting book about the history of chronology and timelines from very basic linear lists organised by intervals of time through to amazing hand-illustrated maps the like of which we don't see produced any more. I bought this book to help me get out of the constrained thinking of basic calendars controls and drop-down lists when designing user interfaces ... and it certainly did that. I admit I was mainly interested in the pictures, but the narrative is definitely worth reading too and explains the drawbacks of various innovations that designers still face (though often fail to recognise and address).
• 
  Elijah Meeks

  This beautifully referenced, beautifully illustrated exploration of the visualization of temporal phenomena is even more impressive than the many syllables that began this sentence. It turns on its head the normalization of temporal representation began by Priestley and documents so many different forms of temporal representation that it is a must for anyone concerned with the visualization of knowledge, especially if they intend to have a temporal element to that visualization.
  
• 
  Em

  This book took FOREVER to read, for a few reasons:
  
  * It mentions a lot of fascinating things and people in passing, so I kept looking those up and reading about them.
  * Although the content is really interesting, it's not written in a particularly engaging way.
  
  I learnt a lot, but I wouldn't recommend the ebook version. The pictures are just too small and low-resolution; they don't do the topic justice.
• 
  Michael

  Like a lot of coffee table books, the illustrations are lovely and the text is a bit turgid.
• 
  Karla Kitalong

  I love visual theory. Jus' sayin'.
• 
  Matthew

  The illustrations in the book present a wide range of intriguing documents, from the intricate and esoteric to the refined and minimalistic. For me, the illustrations form the core value of the book, making the small size of many of the images puzzling. There's plenty of space that could be used without cramping the design, but some pictures are left stamp-sized and illegible in a sea of white.
  
  The accompanying text is generally clear, presenting a written chronology to accompany the images. As another review mentions, there is little discussion of time at a conceptual level, but then that's not the aim of the book. After the first four chapters it starts to drift. Unless you are specifically interested in American examples the last half of the book is probably better skimmed – just look for the text relating to the more interesting illustrations.
  
  It's still a great resource representing what must have been a vast amount of research and resource gathering. I'd recommend it to both the general reader and those with a specialist interest.
  
  If possible, i'd have rated this 3.5 (the small illustrations are very frustrating, given how much effort must have gone into collating the sources and getting them into print!).
• 
  Benjamin

  Grafton crafts an excellent and engaging tale of the evolution of the timeline since the days of ancient Greece. Incredibly lush visually, the text is also very well constructed and nearly perfectly matched to the illustrations in rhythm and impact. A coffee-table book that is well worth your time to actually read and digest.
• 
  モーリー

  I couldn't get more than halfway through. There's almost no narrative here - no story. That makes the myriad examples appear as scattered cases without much relationship to each other. It was hard to stay interested. The pretty pictures didn't make up for a lack of substance; random exemplars do not a riveting book make.
• 
  Jenni

  * wishlist *
• 
  Jen

  This book was beautiful.
• 
  raul

  A visual feast. So much to digest...
• 
  LaLa

  My complaint is always the same for books like this - can they please be bigger? and have bigger pictures? please!
• 
  Fredrika

  a thorough history of the timeline, heck yes.
• 
  Charles

  Ordered this book from Amazon.
• 
  Cordelia Yu

  Absolutely beautiful book, but the layout makes is really hard to concentrate and read.
• 
  S

  Time represented spatially. Neat!
• 
  Steve

  Lots of cool pictures, commentary was interesting also.
• 
  Stephanie

  Graphically and intellectually rich. A fascinating book.