ChronoZoom is a really neat system built by Microsoft Research:
http://research.microsoft.com/
http://www.chronozoomproject.
There will be a presentation and demo on May 18 at 10 a.m. in the Simpson Center for the Humanities, Communications 202.
Among other things, MSR is hoping that some UW CSE students might be interested in contributing to further development of ChronoZoom. Their development partners thus far have been Berkeley (for content) and a university in Russia (for technology).
Here’s a description of the May 18 talk, followed by a description of partnership opportunities.
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Title: ChronoZoom: Bridging the Gap Between the Humanities and Sciences
Abstract: Imagine a world where scientists, researchers, students, and teachers collaborate to share historical information through images, videos, documents, charts interactive tours, and more. Imagine a world where leading academics publish their findings to the world in a manner that can easily be accessed and compared. ChronoZoom is an open-source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything and supporting the emerging field of Big History. Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity. ChronoZoom seeks to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences by enabling all kinds of information to be visually presented and organized. In this session, learn about what challenges we have in taxonomy and content and how humanistic researchers and ischools can help. Understand what ChronoZoom hopes to accomplish with the research community and how computer scientist can better work with scientists and humanists. We will then provide a behind the scenes look at bringing ChronoZoom to life through HTML5 and Windows Azure. We will address the various visualization challenges, data management issues and user interface questions solved in this project and the complex algorithms created. We’ll discuss what we hope to accomplish in the next phases of ChronoZoom development and how other computer science PIs can work with the team.
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ChronoZoom Project:
Background: Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity. Envisioned as a new discipline launched 25 years ago by Dr. David Christian at Macquarie University, Australia.
Big History invites scholars of the humanities and scientists from fields like geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, astronomy, and cosmology to work together in developing the broadest possible view of the past. However, incorporating everything we know about the past into Big History greatly increases the amount of data to be dealt with. A serious problem in teaching Big History courses is conveying the vast stretches of time from the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, to the present, and clarifying the immensely distinct time scales of cosmic history, Earth and life history, human prehistory, and human history. A traditional linear timeline is ill equipped to convey the vast differences in time scales. Furthermore, incorporating the plethora of data from so many fields and disciplines into a single, comprehensive view has proven difficult. To present Big History properly, a completely new kind of tool had to be developed.
ChronoZoom, developed in collaboration between Microsoft Research and Roland Saekow and Walter Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley, overcomes the challenges of visualizing Big History. “By letting us move effortlessly through this enormous wilderness of time, getting used to the differences in scale, ChronoZoom helps to break down the time-scale barriers to communication between scholars,” says Professor Alvarez. One goal is to have educators and students use ChronoZoom to deepen their study of history. At the university level, our goal is for ChronoZoom to allow scholars and scientists to bring together graphically a wide range of data sets from various disciplines and to search for connections and causal relationships that better explain the universe and our world.
About the Project: ChronoZoom 2.0 is focused on providing a dynamic, interactive cloud based data visualization tool for Big History. When completed, this project will be online and freely available to anyone interested in using it as an educator, a student and/or a researcher. ChronoZoom is already a solution provided to the Outer Curve Foundation and is available on codeplex for computer scientist around the world to modify and use the code, add to the code and work on the project. The vision is to enable innovative ways of teaching Big History and empower interdisciplinary research. ChronoZoom is truly a community based project with development being done by Moscow State University and Content leadership by UC Berkeley. ChronoZoom is a highly curated, peer reviewed historic timeline full of audio, video, images, documents, etc. that can help explain the interplay between sciences and humanities. This is a partnership with the International Big History Association, Gates Big History Project, UC Berkeley and Microsoft Research Connections. Visit: http://research.microsoft.com/
What is the Opportunity: ISCHOOLS: In growing ChronoZoom it is critical to bring the best researchers data and stories inside ChronoZoom. We need library scientist who understand content, taxonomy, data organization, etc. We would like to get a PI and graduate student interested in leading the content community and strategy for ChronoZoom. This would mean looking at the data structure and ensure it is correct and will be easier to search, flag and organize all the data that will come into ChronoZoom. When we look at each regime how to determine what are the most important events should be in each regime, where to get the content, what are the best repositories and digital libraries, who are the best researchers to contact. Who are possible experts to help support, what are great organizations to partner with like (CERN, UNESCO, Smithsonian, etc.) how do we build a plan on organizations we work one on one to hand hold versus wait till there is a tool for them to create a timeline/tour on their own?
HUMANISTIC & SCIENTIFIC PROFESSORS, RESEARCHERS, STUDENTS: Work with us to build ChronoZoom to be the platform to help digital humanities. Have your research, lectures, content come alive in ChronoZoom and be shared with students, educators and researchers around the world. Give feedback and help shape the features and capabilities needed for ChronoZoom to be a good teaching and learning tool.
COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCHERS & STUDENTS: Help us build the features and capabilities required in the tool. 80% of ChronoZoom was built by graduate and undergraduate students at Moscow State University. We need a technical lead computer science department to lead the project and organize the community with Microsoft research and later lead. We are also looking to have computer science departments to help us solve the current difficult computer science challenges in this project:
- Visualization: How do you visually portray different interpretations of events/research/data? How do we deal with debates in dates (+/- standard deviation)? How do we compare multiple timelines and datasets? How can you populate a visible canvas with only relevant timelines? As CZ grows the number of timelines will also grow, how do you provide a meaningful view of the areas that interest you? How do you allow this without destroying the opportunity to discover new relationships? Given that exhibits are curated displays of content items (up to 15 per exhibit) centered around a specific topic, can an algorithmic method of creating these exhibits be developed? Can we move from human curators to automation? This also suggests that we can algorithmically analyze the highly diverse content and yield useful combinations that reveal new insights and organization of events (topics).
- Data management: How do you create a sustainable model for localization, taxonomy for multimedia data sources, manage data from multiple repositories, creating a third party authoring tool connected to proper database and data structure to enable curated timeline/tour and crowdsource/social rated timelines/tours. How do you organize (nest) timelines so that vast amounts of data can be easily explored? “ And as a corollary, How do you provide a meaningful experience without directing the user? What would tools look like that would encourage exploration in the ChronoZoom paradigm.
- Machine Learning: How can visitor behavior be used to provide an “intuitive” progression of information presentation. How can overall visitor experience be used to predict what an individual is trying to find. Since ChronoZoom will contain many millions of content items, and only a very small percentage will be visible on the canvas in exhibits, how do we expose the underlying content in a way that facilitates visitors discovering what they want?
- Data Views includes Visualization, Data Management and Machine Learning: Given that one organizational taxonomy can’t satisfy every visitor, what is the set of views needed to permit timeline creation and organization to satisfy a wide range of interests; for example, a topical organization for some, geographical for others? What other taxonomies should be considered? Can we use machine learning to discover entirely new ways of looking at this data?
Thank you,
Rane Johnson-Stempson
Education & Scholarly Communications Principal Research Director | Microsoft Research Connections | Cell +1.425.457.3665 | Office +1.425.421-3447