Human Timeline
InfraVis User
Aikaterini Glykou
Kerstin Lidén
InfraVis Application Experts
Liang Zhou, Jaume Nualart Vilaplana, Kajsa Palm
Funding
N/A
InfraVis Node Coordinator
Filip Berendt
Open Data
N/A
About
Human-Timeline is an interactive React and PlotlyJS application that visualizes the coevolution of human culture, diverse life species and environmental factors across vast timescales. Inspired by SIMILE’s TimePlot and TimeLine patterns, it combines stacked timelines with dual-axis plots so users can see discrete events, continuous measurements, and contextual periods in one place.
Challenge and Opportunities
The main challenge is harmonizing heterogeneous temporal data—archaeological intervals, isotopic measurements, and single time points—and rendering it for exploration and storytelling. Datasets must encode periods, ranges, and points while mapping categories to symbols, colors, and lines for intuitive filtering.
Results
The outcome is a ready-to-publish Human Timeline experience that loads quickly, guides users through dataset selection, and keeps interactions fluid. Its configuration panel can prepare narratives by curating filters and overlays, while its explorer viewport pivot views, highlight categories, and compare multiple quantitative series.
Extensibility allows new datasets added via JSON descriptions and Excel and lets research teams grow the library without code changes. Environmental backdrops, period markers, and custom species icons make visuals memorable, and packaged distribution lowers adoption barriers. Together, these pieces deliver an engaging, data-rich window into human history and its ecological context.