chronology is hard

Via Flowing Data, The Public Domain Review on “The Polish System,” a grid system for visualizing a century’s worth of history: The Polish System — which almost anticipates Piet Mondrian’s abstract checkerboards and the wider modernist fascination with grid figures — coupled chronology to the map-making traditions of geography. In Jażwiński’s original chart, each main 10x10 box is a century and the rows separate decades. Within a century box, each individual square is a year, each color a nation (with shading for different monarchs or governments), and symbols can stand for marriages, wars, treaties, and other types of events. Should one become proficient with this system, they can peer down on the history of the world, summarized on a surface not much larger than a chessboard. This reminded me (like a lot of things do) of a post of Paul Ford’s, Unscroll Into, about his timelines project: About fifteen years ago I had this idea: Timelines on the World Wide Web! Hardly an original idea.…