Introduction
How many times in your life have you argued with someone about an event that you both witnessed? The classic example is with your favorite sports team. Your friend likes your team’s rival and they’re playing against each other: competing for a place in the playoffs. Your team is winning 21–14 with 10 seconds left in the game. Your rival’s quarterback hikes the ball and with knowledge of the clock slowly ticking down, throws a hail mary. It’s up in the air for what feels like years and when it comes down the receiver just misses it. You let out a sigh of relief and put out your hand to shake and humbly take the win. Your friend doesn’t seem to be going for it at all. Instead he’s screaming about pass interference, saying that the refs didn’t see his team’s wide receiver get held which stopped him from being able to make the catch. You immediately start getting upset at him for not humbly taking the result. The refs are paid to be making these decisions. He’s just being a sore loser right?
The point of this situation is not that football refs rig big games, it is that it is so hard to view a situation without the biases that we always carry. This concept is something that historians struggle with constantly. Seeing the American Revolutionary War as a win for the world of democracy is a no brainer if you’re from America, just as seeing it as a tragic end to the world of monarchs is a no brainer for your average British citizen of the time. For millions of events throughout history, countless explanations and causalities can be made from many different sides. I believe strongly that solutions to current events that haunt us aren’t a matter of right or wrong; they’re a matter of what can we do for both sides.
Figuring out what can be done for both sides however takes time, understanding for both sides, and a basis of why each side has the opinion that they do. Although most people agree with the concepts that I explained in this short piece of writing, there are very few tools that I have been able to find that are able to properly present history in this unique way. This is where Omnistory comes from.
Omnistory is going to be an online tool that allows historians to present history in this unique way. Historians are going to be able to easily provide events that have occurred. The project will start as an embed tool that can be used anywhere on the web (similar to a project called TimelineJS), and once this project is completed an entire system will be created online to house fully functioning versions of these timelines. This system will allow for not just the official timeline constructed through consulting professional historians, but also will allow further commenting by users that may support either side. Text analysis will also be done on these comments, which will attempt to give a better picture of each side’s opinion.
