American Civil War Daily on the iPhone

Tom Horn on December 10, 2009, 12:04 am

American Civil War Daily answers two fundamental questions:

What happened today during the American Civil War?
Where did it happen? Show me a map!

A lite version version is available free, which only supports today's date and shows 5 daily cards.

Flip through daily cards showing important events leading up to and during the deadliest conflict in American history.

Each card shows the date, a succinct description and a zoomable map for the event. You can flip the card over to read the Wikipedia article describing the event.

You can sort your deck of events using two mechanisms:

Sort by day and month for a this day in history view.
Select a start date and then sort by day, month and year for a true chronological sequence of events from that date onwards.

The data for American Civil War Daily comes from the American Civil War Timeline Project. This is a community contributed project to collect time and place data for the war. You can come to the site to browse the timeline or even log in and contribute new data.

The Timeline Project currently indexes over 400 hundred data points with new entries being added daily. If a significant event isn't in the database yet, it soon will be.

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Development,iPhone,American Civil War,App

Timeline Project Trilogy

Tom Horn on July 24, 2009, 9:42 pm

I have set up the third and final (for a while at least) of the sites devoted to geographical and chronological mapping of historical conflicts. Not that I need an additional time sink but the compulsion to add an American Civil War Project was irresistible.

That fact that I now have a Trilogy of sites is purely coincidental. My nauseatingly sycophantic obsession with StackOverflow can only go so far ... hmmm

Anyway, I have three projects ready for user contribution. Although I quite enjoy doing the research and populating data points myself, I do occasionally, quietly hope that some generous denizen of the Internetz will log in and contribute their valuable time to one of my three digital offspring:

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Development,World War Two,Napoleonic Wars,American Civil War

Timeline Project FAQ

Tom Horn on June 25, 2009, 1:54 am

So I thought I needed some kind of FAQ to introduce new users to my collaborative Timeline Project. This is something I will build upon over time:

What was the motivation for the site?
Where do I signup to contribute?
Why the Wikipedia link?
What are the tags for?
Who owns the data I contribute?

What was the motivation for the site?

While digging around in my attic some time late last year, I discovered a fold out Timeline of World War Two that had been a birthday present some years ago. It inspired me to investigate if this sort of information, in this format, was available on the Internet. I discovered that although there is a wealth of websites describing lists of events in great detail (Wikipedia being the most impressive), this particular presentation of the information (a scrolling timeline of events) was either not available or buried so deep in Google that I didn't uncover it.

What I did discover was an amazing programming tool which marries a scrolling dynamic Timeline (almost exactly what I had envisaged) with a Google map. The addition of geographic information to my original concept of a Timeline sealed my fate. Mapping historical events in time and space has become my new obsession.

You can now sign up for an account and start entering data.

Why the Wikipedia link?

Because of the limited space available for each map point, I wanted to provide the ability to link to a more expansive explanation for the data point. Wikipedia provides, in my opinion, the best collection of articles, maps and documents to describe the data that will be added to the Timeline system. I have mandated the inclusion of a Wikipedia link to ensure that users will always have an easily accessible link to more information if they require it.

What are the tags for?

Probably the most initially confusing aspect of the Creation/Editing User Interface is the addition of tags to new data points. Tags are a set of annotations associated with a data point that allow users of the site to sort the data in useful ways. Tags also include the countries (or states) involved in any data point in the system. Here is the current list of applicable tags and their descriptions:

Land - Any combat that involves land based forces (infantry, cavalry, artillary, armour etc...) should include this tag.
Naval - Any combat that involves naval units should include this tag.
Aerial - Any combat that involves planes should include this tag.
Airborne - Any combat that involves airborn troops (paratroopers), should include this tag.
Domestic - Any event that is purely concerned with the internal infrastructure of a particular country should include this tag.
Diplomacy - Any event that involves some kind of negotiation between two or more nations should include this tag.
International - Any event of significance to many nations should include this tag.

You will notice that you can apply more than one tag to a data point and you should include any and all tags that are applicable to the data you are adding to the system. The first tag is a special tag that is used to color the entry on the map. You should use the most significant tag first.

Who owns the data that I contribute?

Cannonade.Net will never charge for the data contributed here.