ChronoZoom Beta

Wednesday, March 14—Einstein’s birthday no less—marked the release of the beta version of an incredible new tool for the study of history: ChronoZoom. This powerful open-source tool, a joint effort of the University of California, Berkeley; Moscow State University; the Outercurve Foundation; and Microsoft Research Connections, was unveiled at the Northwest Council for Computer Education (NCCE) Conference and is available for download.

ChronoZoom is an open-source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything. Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity. By using Big History as the story line, ChronoZoom seeks to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences an enable all this information to be easily understandable and navigable.

ChronoZoom was developed to make time relationships between different studies of history clear and vivid. In the process, it provides a framework for exploring related electronic resources. It thus serves as a “master timeline” tying together all kinds of specialized timelines and electronic resources, and aspires to bridge the gap between humanities and the sciences and to bring together and unify all knowledge of the past.

You can browse through history on ChronoZoom to find data in the form of articles, images, video, sound, and other media. ChronoZoom links a wealth of information from five major regimes that unifies all historical knowledge collectively known as Big History.