Visual Interaction Design for Experiencing and Engaging with a Large Chronological Table

The goal of our project is to design visual interactivity for a computational environment, which helps a user browse interconnected historical elements in a variety of manners. We argue that a computational environment to help people explore historical material needs to address the following three aspects: a network of changes, intertwined lines as trajectories, and associatable multiple proximities. The paper presents Timezoom, a prototyped environment, as a poof of concept to illustrate the three aspects. We use the chronological table of the history of the city of Kyoto, Japan, composed of 11,960 timestamped textual data elements.