Visualize History aims to provide a new way of presenting and understanding history. The application will provide an intuitive, interactive way to navigate the complex relationships within history.

Historical events are often restricted to the pages of books, newspapers and magazines, and from a very young age, people learn to approach history only textually. When images are used, they often supplement or summarize the prose; only rarely does visual data stand on its own. Yet no intrinsic property of the historical data enforces the convention that words should trump images. In fact, much of history is naturally presented visually. Any interesting history will consist of various parts, interlinked and roughly ordered. Students must reconstruct the multi-dimensional story from the linear prose they read in order to understand the complete picture.

Visualize History will attack the general problem by presenting that multi-dimensional story in multiple dimensions. For example, many key events are directly linked to a specific geographic location and all are linked to a specific time or time period. The application will therefore provide a way to navigate through both time and space. However, the logical relationships are just as important as the temporal or spatial ones, and the application will also provide a way to navigate from an event to other related events.