TIME MODELLING

Research Problem:

• What templates and metaphors may be used for the conceptualization and representation of time?
• How can research in the humanities make use of a vocabulary of visual forms through which to represent temporal relations?
• How can visualizations of temporal relations be enriched through research into conception of time and graphic forms for its representation in other disciplines such as philosophy, the natural sciences, geography, history, anthropology, narrative theory, and statistics?
• Can these visualizations be organized into a set of tools that serve researchers in the humanities for conceptualization and display of temporal relations in their data?

Humanities Focus: Subjective Experience of Temporality

• What are the specific requirements for representations of temporal elements that derive from humanistic inquiry?
• How can the subjective temporal relations in lived and experienced time, often encoded in discursive, rather than numerical form, be accommodated in a graphic system?
• How can such subjective relations make use of the explicit systems for representing quantifiable data that have developed in natural sciences, statistics, or other mathematically grounded data bases?

Seminar Overview, Goal, and Principles:

• Three levels of inquiry should be kept in mind as the seminar proceeds:
  • General issues and concepts about time and temporal relations;
  • Questions specific to scholarly research, particularly in the humanities;
  • Requirements characteristic to data structures that support these issues and inquiries.
  
  
• The goal is to articulate the representational strategies through which these three levels can be integrated and to give them schematic visual form.
  
  
• Principles guiding our project are:
  • Wherever possible, make use of vocabulary or concepts already well-established within the literature;
  • Create the simplest possible set of representational strategies (metaphors or templates);
  • Work from case studies to create the set of representational strategies and then test to see if there are cases that have requirements beyond these;
  • Create graphical forms that are intuitive, familiar, and as much as possible, well-established as conventions within commonplace usage.

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  Overview   |   Problem, Focus, and Goals   |   Conceptual and Representational Issues   |   Informatics and Temporality   |   Visualizations   |   Cross-Cultural Concepts   |   Geo-Spatial Temporality   |   Narrative Theory   |   Relativity   |   Summary for Representation   |   Bibliography