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What might history look like and how might it be used as a form of data?

Nanohistory is an online cultural network building platform where historians and scholars, or anyone, can document the connections between people, organizations, places, and things over time. It’s more than just a ‘social network’ focused on personal relationships. It envisions a digital history that documents the smallest objects of interest to historical scholars: an event, or interaction. Defining an event can be messy, but Nanohistory sees it as something that doesn’t necessarily have a title or a name - it just is. Nanohistory automatically links these events together to form network representations of the past.

The resulting data is a kind of multi-dimensional annal, lying in the space between more formalized kinds of historical writing, and the collecting and sorting of historical data or information. As an organizational and representational tool, Nanohistory tracks what historical scholars assert happened in the past, as much as what various witnesses and artefacts might indicate occurred. Users can group events and data as subsets, and assign them names for well-known historical events or episodes normally used in historical discussions or writing. The 1546 ‘Trial of Anne Askew’ is a good example: it consisted of numerous interactions, but not all historical or scholarly accounts are the same. Breaking down who says what about what happened permits scholars to see how history itself is composed of countless assertions about what the historical record might indicate. The platform contains tools to analyze and visualize this kind of data, ranging from webs of networks, to heat radar images that compare the different interactions grouped as an historical episode, to plotting spatial data, such as boundaries or itineraries.

For more see https://www.nanohistory.org