Why map just three dimensions when we live in four? That’s the reason Google Earth got a timeline, but until now we’ve never had a shared repository for georeferenced historical events, at least not in the same way that we have shared repositories for georeferenced photos, like Panoramio.
Time Space Map to the rescue! “Time Space Map is an encyclopedic, online atlas of history and happenings that anyone can edit. It is a geographic wiki.”
Time Space Map is the brainchild of Frank San Miguel, who wrote in with some fascinating context about this new site, so I leave the rest of this post to him:
I was one of the creators of mapquest.com. This was during the time of the first web browsers and I wouldn’t shut up about this new thing called the web. They finally let me build a prototype and so was born project webmapper which became project mapquest, and eventually mapquest.com (There were many others without whom mapquest would have never happened).
Ever since I left mapquest in the late 90’s I have dreamed of building an immersive mapping application that would let people travel through time to any place in the past and see what it was like. It was an impractical idea at the time, but things have changed recently. The result is Time Space Map, an encyclopedic, online atlas of history and happenings that anyone can edit. It is a geographic wiki. Here’s my introduction.
In case you are interested, here is an essay about the early days of mapquest, why a good idea isn’t good enough.
Wouldn’t it be nice if all of Wikipedia’s historical events could be mapped to Time Space Map via some automated process? (That would avoid a lot of duplicated effort.) Wouldn’t it be nice if Google Earth’s timeline could be put to use exploring the history of any place you care to zoom in on, via a KML network link served by Time Space Map? Can you imagine the wonderful new ways of doing a your history project in school? I was born way too early:-) I love the sudden burst of potential and opportunity an innovative site like this brings about.