A brief outline of future development

The Time Atlas is a project under development. It will evolve as the idea is implemented. Here is a list of things that will be added to the current version. To implement them will require funding, so nothing will happen quickly.

• Currently adding information affects only the decade pages; all other pages are static images and have to be changed manually by the site administrator. It is planned to couple the appearance of the century pages to the content of the decade pages. Adding information will then change the appearance of both decade and century pages. This will also avoid contradictions between the information shown on decade pages and on century pages.


• The appearance of the countries and regions in the individual civilizations has to be ordered in some way. Currently they appear in the order in which information is added to the database. Ordering them alphabetically is one way of solving this, but there may be other, more logical ways to display relationships between regions.


• As the content grows it will become necessary to offer additional display management tools. Entries are already classified into various categories (state and society, science and discovery, religion, visual arts etc.). It is planned to add category buttons to the display to allow the user to display only entries from selected categories. This will make it possible, for example, to display only entries in the category "Literature".


• I am not an expert on civilizations. I hope to be able to establish an editorial board of experts to oversee the growing content and further development of the Time Atlas.

The Time Atlas is open for public access

It took longer than anticipated to get the Time Atlas into the desired shape. There is still much to be done, but the Atlas contains enough information already to make it publicly accessible. So I decided to reduce the level of password protection.

The content of the Time Atlas is now accessible, but users cannot yet edit it. Quite a few things still have to be done before public editing is possible. These are:

• Currently the Time Atlas shows only personalities. This places far too much emphasis on the role of the individual in history and has to be balanced by a listing of events. The Events editor is still under construction.


• The navigation is not complete. Currently it works correctly going from decade pages to century pages but not in the opposite direction.


• A facility to edit existing entries has to be added. Currently all editing has to be done in text mode directly in the data base, something the ordinary user will not want to get involved in.


• The various indexes are not yet ordered alphabetically.


• Currently only the decade pages are dynamically updated as new information is added. Information in the century pages is static and displayed as an image map with links. This can result in discrepancies between the information shown on the century and decade pages. There are actually quite a few such discrepancies that have not been sorted out yet. Version 1.0 of the Time Atlas should be seen as a demonstration of a concept, not as a reliable source of information.


• When this project was started it relied heavily on Arno Peters' Synchronoptische Weltgeschichte. As a result the spelling of names in the century pages sometimes reflects German spelling. The resulting different spelling of names in century and decade pages still has to be cleaned up.

More information about the concept and planned future development will be posted in a separate entry.

The use of BC and AD in the Time Atlas

This post is based on a comment in Chapter 1 of my website and book "Science, Civilization and Society." It explains why I use the notation BC and AD in the Time Atlas:

Although time does not have a beginning and an end, when it comes to the study of history it is necessary to define an anchor point on the timeline as a starting point for the counting of years. Many civilizations used more than one starting point, for example the first days of the reigns of successive emperors, which leads to the adoption of several eras and identification of dates by only positive numbers ("the fifth year of the reign of Emperor Tai Zong of the Tang dynasty"). The South American calendar was based on a zero point so far back in time (at 3113 BC) that for all practical applications the identification of dates also invoked only positive numbers.

The European civilization used and still uses two eras, B.C. ("Before Christ") and A.D. ("Anno Domini", Latin for "in the year of the Lord"). This system, which leads to a positive (forward) count for the A.D. era and a backward (negative) count for the B.C. era, has been widely accepted today.

Some argue that in today's "global village" the terms B.C. and A.D. are offensive to civilizations not based on Christianity. They propose the terms B.C.E. ("before the common era") and C.E. ("common era") instead. This does of course not eliminate the original problem that the European civilization imposes its own calendar on the world as the "common" era.

While I have made every effort to give an unbiased view of the civilizations of the world, it would be futile to hide my cultural origins. Rather than imposing the Christian era as the "common era" on all civilizations I prefer to continue with the European tradition and use BC and AD to reflect my European upbringing. Whether the Time Atlas will offend other civilizations will not be decided by the use of BC and AD but by its content.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Civilizations of the World blog. The civilizations time atlas is currently under construction and will become available before the end of the year. Preview pages can be viewed on the website. If you are interested in the project use the website to send me an email.