Exploring history with narrative timelines

Abstract

We develop novel timeline interfaces which separate the events in timelines into threads and then allow users to select among them. This interface is illustrated with five threads describing the causes of the American Civil War. In addition to selecting each of the threads, the sequence of events it describes can be played. That is, the user can step through the sequence of events and get a description of each event in the context of its thread. In addition, many of the events have links to more focused timelines and to external resources such as Wikipedia. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.