When Microsoft Research teamed up with the University of California Berkeley to create a digital tool for exploring the history of everything, we knew we had the potential to build a killer educational app. After all, a tool that can reveal the cross-currents of history, revealing the interdependencies that cut across disciplines, geographies, and cultures, would offer a major advance in the understanding of Big History—the history of not just humanity, but of life, Earth and, ultimately, the cosmos. Moreover, it would provide researchers with a tool to derive unique insights based on multidisciplinary connections between vastly disparate data sets.
On March 12, the resulting tool, ChronoZoom—a dynamic, zoomable timeline that starts with Big Bang and ends with modern history—won first prize in the Educational Resources category of the 2013 SXSW Interactive Awards (opens in new tab). As described on the SXSW website, the SXSW Interactive Awards competition “uncovers the best new digital work, from mobile and tablet apps to websites and installations, while celebrating those who are building tomorrow’s interactive trends.”
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ChronoZoom was developed to make time relationships between different studies of history clear and vivid. In the process, it provides a framework for exploring related electronic resources. It thus serves as a “master timeline,” tying together all kinds of specialized timelines and electronic resources, and aspires to bridge the gap between humanities and the sciences and to bring together and unify all knowledge of the past. With the planned addition of in-browser content and authoring tools, we hope to enable educators and researchers to build timelines; explore rich, multidisciplinary contextual spaces; and to tell and share stories based on authoritative data.
Donald Brinkman, Roland Saekow, and Michael Zyskowski accept the 2013 SXSW Interactive Award for Education
The prestigious SXSW Interactive Award for Education recognizes the educational value of this amazing open-source product. Moreover, it honors the multidisciplinary team that came together to make ChronoZoom a reality: software engineers, program managers, and project leaders at Microsoft Research Connections in Redmond, Washington, and students and professors at Moscow State University in Russia and at UC Berkeley and University of Washington in the United States. This distributed team developed cutting-edge HTML5 and JavaScript code and implemented services on Windows Azure (opens in new tab) to create a rich, visual database full of historical events and timelines.
The ChronoZoom project is part of the Outercurve Foundation (opens in new tab)’s Research Accelerators Gallery. The Outercurve Foundation, a non-profit, open-source foundation, provides software IP management and project development governance to 22 open-source projects. Developers can get involved by visiting the source code project on GitHub (opens in new tab).
In his acceptance speech, Michael Zyskowski (opens in new tab) dedicated the award to Lee Dirks (opens in new tab), who strongly believed in and supported the ChronoZoom project.
I encourage you to experience the power of ChronoZoom (opens in new tab) for yourself. But be forewarned—it can be addictive!
—Donald Brinkman (opens in new tab), Program Manager, Microsoft Research Connections
Learn More
- 2013 SWSX Interactive Awards Winners Announced (opens in new tab)
- ChronoZoom beta (opens in new tab)
- ChronoZoom project page (opens in new tab)
- Become a Time Traveler with ChronoZoom (opens in new tab) (video)
- ChronoZoom Tutorial (opens in new tab) (video)
- UC Berkeley-Conceived Online Tool Finalist for SXSW Award (opens in new tab)
- Presenting the History of Everything (opens in new tab) (blog)
- On the Road with ChronoZoom (opens in new tab) (blog)
- ChronoZoom Receives Digital Education Achievement Award (opens in new tab) (blog)
- Education and Scholarly Communication at Microsoft Research (opens in new tab)