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Cartographies of Time
What does history look like? How do you draw time?
From the most ancient images to the contemporary, the line has served as the central figure in the representation of time. The linear metaphor is ubiquitous in everyday visual representations of time—in almanacs, calendars, charts, and graphs of all sorts. Even our everyday speech is filled with talk of time having a "before" and an "after" or being "long" and "short." The timeline is such a familiar part of our mental furniture that it is sometimes hard to remember that we invented it in the first place. And yet, in its modern form, the timeline is not even 250 years old. The story of what came before has never been fully told, until now.
Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways—curving, crossing, branching—defy conventional thinking about the form. A fifty-four-foot-long timeline from 1753 is mounted on a scroll and encased in a protective box. Another timeline uses the different parts of the human body to show the genealogies of Jesus Christ and the rulers of Saxony. Ladders created by missionaries in eighteenth-century Oregon illustrate Bible stories in a vertical format to convert Native Americans. Also included is the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by theirgeographic location, alongside little-known works by famous figures, including a historical chronology by the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and a chronological board game patented by Mark Twain. Presented in a lavishly illustrated edition, Cartographies of Time is a revelation to anyone interested in the role visual forms have played in our evolving conception of history.
From the most ancient images to the contemporary, the line has served as the central figure in the representation of time. The linear metaphor is ubiquitous in everyday visual representations of time—in almanacs, calendars, charts, and graphs of all sorts. Even our everyday speech is filled with talk of time having a "before" and an "after" or being "long" and "short." The timeline is such a familiar part of our mental furniture that it is sometimes hard to remember that we invented it in the first place. And yet, in its modern form, the timeline is not even 250 years old. The story of what came before has never been fully told, until now.
Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways—curving, crossing, branching—defy conventional thinking about the form. A fifty-four-foot-long timeline from 1753 is mounted on a scroll and encased in a protective box. Another timeline uses the different parts of the human body to show the genealogies of Jesus Christ and the rulers of Saxony. Ladders created by missionaries in eighteenth-century Oregon illustrate Bible stories in a vertical format to convert Native Americans. Also included is the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by theirgeographic location, alongside little-known works by famous figures, including a historical chronology by the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and a chronological board game patented by Mark Twain. Presented in a lavishly illustrated edition, Cartographies of Time is a revelation to anyone interested in the role visual forms have played in our evolving conception of history.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published March 3, 2010
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1874 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
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June 25, 2025I think it was in my primary school that I came into contact with chronographic forms: graphic representations of history, usually chronologically, in the form of a timeline. I still see them hanging in the classroom, up on high, starting with the 'prehistory' and ending in the culmination of our civilization: the kingdom of Belgium (yes, I come 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.
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.
December 24, 2019
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....
March 7, 2011
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.
The net result here is more of a coffee-table art book than a serious discussion of this (potentially) rich theme.
July 10, 2018
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.
+++/- 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.
November 1, 2019
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.
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.
May 4, 2015
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).
March 1, 2010
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.
January 27, 2020
I enjoyed the first part about the earlier development of the timeline more, but both were fascinating. My only critique was that the ebook version was terrible for viewing the very many and beautiful illustrations. I would go for the physical book instead.
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November 24, 2024Three great loves of mine, united: weird old maps; histories of things you'd never considered might need one; and the long, quixotic human quest to organise information. The timeline (as in visual representation of events, not in the multiversal sense) seems a fairly simple thing, doesn't it? Hell, this has one of my favourites before it's even properly underway, the nested millennia within billennia of Olaf Stapledon's mighty Last And First Men – with the bonus that I've never seen it in his original colour version before. But as we're soon reminded, none of the architecture of human understanding just happened, or was always there; everything has inventors, developers, and if sometimes we can't know who they might have been, for timelines we do. It's not so different from the history of any other field, medicine or physics, say – but here the giants are less familiar names, Eusebius and Priestley, albeit with occasional appearances by more famous figures like Mark Twain. More often, though, the famous names are on the timelines, not making them, and this is where the problems begin. After all, showing which figures in different spheres, or around the world, were contemporaries, is one of the fields where a timeline excels – but the more information you cram in, the further you risk at-a-glance comprehensibility. And that's before you run into problems with the information from different cultures not matching up, particularly once you start to get lists of emperors and pharaohs running back earlier than 4004 BC, when everyone knows the world was created... Although there were some entertaining bouts of syncretism; I was amused to see the Borgias claiming descent from Osiris. At the other end of time, some forward-looking chronographers would leave space for the owner to fill in events post-publication, and on some level it's quite reassuring to be reminded how often that wasn't a great deal of space, because it never seems like the end of the world can be terribly far away. Really, my only complaint is missing an easy goal by omitting a timeline of timelines.
September 17, 2017
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's full of very interesting history and stories. The author must have spent untold hours in research. I liked the graphics too but even though I could enlarge them on my iPad, they were still mostly unreadable. I wish they had been vector images. That way they could have been enlarged to any degree desired without affecting image quality. The images did make me appreciate the graphic tools that I have.
January 18, 2024
The best part about this book are the illustrations. The idea of a history of how humans have conceptually illustrated time is interesting to me, and I did learn a lot, but the writing style makes this hard to get through. It's more a list of major timelines than a narrative
July 25, 2021
Like a lot of coffee table books, the illustrations are lovely and the text is a bit turgid.
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September 21, 2022I love visual theory. Jus' sayin'.
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February 28, 2023Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg (2012)
March 9, 2015
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!).
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!).
January 12, 2014
"Already in the fourth century Eusebius had developed a sophisticated table structure to organize and reconcile chronologies drawn from historical sources from all over the world. To clearly present the relations between Jewish, pagan, and Christian histories, Eusebius laid out their chronologies in parallel columns that began with the patriarch Abraham and the founding of Assyria." (15)
"Chronographics had lost its original function as the key to the Bible [by the eighteenth century], but had gained a new one as the record of culture and its transformations." (95)
"Priestly's charts mark a crucial transition in the history of chronographic representation. After Priestly, most readers simply assumed the analogy between historical time and measured graphic space, so the nature of the arguments around chronographic representation shifted dramatically. The issue was no longer how to justify the analogy but how to best implement it." (126)
"Chronographics had lost its original function as the key to the Bible [by the eighteenth century], but had gained a new one as the record of culture and its transformations." (95)
"Priestly's charts mark a crucial transition in the history of chronographic representation. After Priestly, most readers simply assumed the analogy between historical time and measured graphic space, so the nature of the arguments around chronographic representation shifted dramatically. The issue was no longer how to justify the analogy but how to best implement it." (126)
April 13, 2023
el "método polaco" tweet. Polish-American System of Chronology
Time OnLine
The Philosophy of Joseph Priestley's 1765 Timeline
Time OnLine is a project by Daniel Rosenberg and the University of Oregon Libraries. The project explores a variety of timelines and other tools for visualizing history drawn from historical texts by presenting them in a new interactive digital format.
Time OnLine
The Philosophy of Joseph Priestley's 1765 Timeline
June 3, 2017
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.
* 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.
October 19, 2010
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.
November 2, 2015
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.
September 16, 2013
The book is a visual treat! More than that, it is a comprehensive and lucid survey of the timeline. Intended by the authors or not, _Cartographies of Time_ provides a holistic view of history, as it unfolds simultaneously across different spaces and places.
November 5, 2016
Big effort that probably pleases the specialists in the area of graphical representation of history/timelines.
The narrative needed to weave a story. Couldn't hold my interest.
The visuals needed to be significantly larger or least have portions blown up so that they could be legible.
The narrative needed to weave a story. Couldn't hold my interest.
The visuals needed to be significantly larger or least have portions blown up so that they could be legible.
January 1, 2011
This book was beautiful.
January 23, 2011
A visual feast. So much to digest...
July 29, 2016
My complaint is always the same for books like this - can they please be bigger? and have bigger pictures? please!
March 27, 2012
a thorough history of the timeline, heck yes.
May 16, 2012
Ordered this book from Amazon.
October 26, 2013
Absolutely beautiful book, but the layout makes is really hard to concentrate and read.
January 18, 2014
Time represented spatially. Neat!
May 7, 2014
Lots of cool pictures, commentary was interesting also.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews