Histropedia Timelines – In the (Saint) Nick of Time.
Can you spot Saint Nick in the below timeline of saints?
Screengrab of Histropedia Wikidata Query Viewer (CC-BY-SA).
For today’s post, the Open Education resource we present to you is Histropedia – the timeline of everything.
Histropedia allows users to create visually dynamic timelines using structured data from Wikidata, articles from Wikipedia and images from Wikimedia Commons. It has in excess of 340,000 timelines listing 1.5 million articles from Wikipedia: including timelines on the Battles of World War One, the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, the Novels by Charles Dickens, Empires, Famous Artists, the filmography of David Bowie and many more.
This 1 minute 22 second video demonstrates how quickly & easily timelines can be put together using Wikipedia articles & categories to dramatically visualise events.
By way of example, I was able to create this Santa Claus in the movies timeline in a matter of minutes going from the 1900 movie, A Christmas Dream, by Georges Méliès right up to modern day with films like Trading Places (1983), Miracle on 34th Street (1994) and Arthur Christmas (2012). The published timeline is now available for others to view and add to as a free open education resource where each timeline event can be clicked on to take you through to the Wikipedia article to find out more.
Screengrab of Histropedia timeline for Santa Claus in the movies. (CC-BY)
Further, now that the Histropedia now has a Wikidata Query Viewer option this means that the structured data can now be queried even further. For example, I was curious to find out more about Saint Nick so I was able to ask Wikidata to show me all the saints it had information about and show them on a timeline according to their year of birth and colour coded by their place of birth. Click here to view the result.
Screengrab from Histropedia Wikidata Query Viewer Tutorial – Timeline of University of Edinburgh female alumni colour-coded by place of birth and labelled in Japanese, Russian, Arabic and English (CC-BY)
Histropedia’s developers, Navino Evans and Sean McBirnie, joined us at Repository Fringe at the University of Edinburgh in August this year where we recorded a short video tutorial in order to demonstrate how to create a Histropedia timeline using their Wikidata Query Viewer – this time on female alumni of the University of Edinburgh; colour-coded by their place of birth and labelled in Japanese, Russian, Arabic & English (depending on whether the query could find an article in these 4 different language Wikipedias).
This OER video tutorial has now been viewed a thousand times and is available to view on the university’s Media Hopper channel on a CC-BY license.
To find out more about Histropedia, you can read this article from the Wikimedia UK blog but why not have a go yourself!