While I was on vacation, I learned a lot about the various places I went to. I also started reading A History of the Arab Peoples. Until now I had always thought of history as being extremely boring, but somehow all that changed in only three weeks, and I suddenly realized that the inter-relationships and complexity of history can be fascinating.
Being a programmer, and having a very poor memory for names, I naturally started wondering how I could create a database out of all this, to help me organize and remember everything I've been learning. I'm thinking of something like Mathworld, but for history. It would store a lot of snippets, annotated with metadata that can be used for organization and searching. For example, one snippet might take place in Barcelona (place), in 1583 (date), involving both politics and Christianity (themes), and be worth mentioning when considering anything within 10 years and 100 miles (relevance). And of course the information would have been gleaned from somewhere (source).
The resulting website would be very different from most history books. Instead of being a linear narrative, or even a hyperlinked set of pages, it'll just be a collection of little snippets, like the panels next to exhibits at museums. Making the result actually be interesting to browse will probably be the most difficult part -- most people find history boring enough already that if you take away the narrative, their eyes will glaze over before the page even finishes loading. But I'll work on that problem once I actually have some content.
Obviously this is a mammoth task, and I don't feel like restricting its scope in order to make the task more managable, so it would have to be possible for other people to contribute to the database. Which means that the markup will have to be relatively simple, along the lines of Wiki.
I'm currently trying to keep this idea really quick and dirty, so that I'll have a hope of actually implementing something before I lose interest. Of course the first question is what language to use to implement it... ;)
Followups to History:Posted on July 10, 2003 05:35 PM
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The only problem with the History DBis unlike mathworld so much of history is written from a subjective (and somewhat propagandistic) point of view. It would take a lot of careful editing to make it accurate.
This is not to say an objecive point of view is impossible, only that most people hate objectivity more than anything :)