Hypermedia has seemed a natural home for images of the collective journey of humankind since long before the Web came to be.
In 1945, when Vannevar Bush was conceptualizing a hyperlinked "record of the race" in his prescient essay "As We May Think," he imagined a hyper-historian blazing a "skip trail" through the "vast chronological account of a people," linking "salient items" into pathways which "lead him all over civilization."
The Web is a cat's cradle of timelines - from the Ben and Jerry's saga to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "skip trail" from the Sphinx to Demuth - but few are as ambitious as Andreas Nothiger's HyperHistory.
The online version of Nothiger's printed World History Chart, HyperHistory aims to give Net surfers a panoramic view of the flux that defined our civilization, from the first stirrings of the Rig Veda to the threshold of the next millennium.
The HyperHistory site and the World History Chart are based on a concept that Nothiger calls "synchronopsis" - simply, "seeing at the same time." By observing that significant events in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East were unfolding simultaneously, you comprehend relationships and underlying patterns in ways that one-dimensional histories don't give you, Nothiger explains.
"You make your own connections, you see your own thing. It's better than being spoon-fed the history," Nothiger claims.
By embedding links to other sites in the meticulously detailed map, HyperHistory serves as a highly-organized filter of historical sites on the Web, Nothiger points out. And watching the server logs allows him to grow the project according to demand.
"It's like having a footnote in a book that tells you how many people have looked at it," he explains, saying that the most popular areas of the site are the biographies of 20th century figures like Hitler, Einstein, and Picasso.
The germ of the World History Chart was a diagram Nothiger sketched in India years before he had ever seen a computer. Trained as an architect, a graphical representation of history came naturally to him, he says. One day, a couple of young people came into The Classical Joint in Vancouver, a jazz coffeehouse that Nothiger owned for 20 years, and persuaded him to port his burgeoning chronology to the Macintosh. One early version of HyperHistory was written for HyperCard. When Nothiger tapped a computing consultant for advice on crafting a version in Freehand 2.0, he was told it couldn't be done.
"He said, 'I thought it over, and it's impossible to do it with this program.' But I had already done it," Nothiger says, adding, "Vancouver is full of these guys." Nothiger ended up writing what he characterizes as a guide to "how a computer-illiterate guy can use Freehand" for Aldus, the makers of the program, he says.
Though hyperlinking lends his creation an interactive element that the printed version lacks, Nothiger doesn't see either one as a substitute for the other.
"The computer links and separates at the same time. The Web makes it easy to link up with like-minded people, but you should not forget your own neighborhood," Nothiger observes. "The computer doesn't make your coffee for you."
