Strange Times: Visualising the Oddities of Time Data

Temporal data can come up against the strange ways humans understand and experience time. So how are we to visualise it?

Illustration by Tayler Edwards

Time is a common dimension for visualising data and people have created temporal visualisations for a very long time. The ‘earliest known attempt to show changing values graphically’ is a planetary movements chart, shown below, with time running horizontally dating from the 10th or 11th century. The timeline — mapping a sequence of events by time — is a classic visualisation form. (For a history of the timeline, have a look at the book Cartographies of Time by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, which has a wonderfully rich selection of illustrations.)

Planetary movements chart (time vs. celestial latitude). 10th or 11th century. By an unknown astronomer. The graphic comes from a section of a manuscript, in the Bavarian State Library, describing the movement of the planets through the zodiac. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Planetary_Movements.gif.

But visualising data in timelines can come up against the strange ways humans understand and experience time. We may agree that time is passing at a uniform rate, but there are complications. There are time zones and daylight savings. The human experience of time passing does not always match up to the rate of the clock (“time flies when you’re having fun”). Different cultures conceive of the shape and orientation of time differently. Which direction feels “natural” to draw the arrow of time can be influenced by the writing direction we use (this timeline in Arabic has time going right to left). Looking back on the past, more recent events appear in greater focus than those farther back.

In this post, I discuss how the ways we think about time shape the data we create (even if it’s not immediately obvious), taking the example of historical time. Illustrated by my own work visualising data from digitised museum collections, I explore how the designer can choose to either emphasise these peculiarities or to conceal them, highlighting other characteristics of the data instead. Time is fundamental to making sense of digitised museum collections (data that describes museum holdings: objects, artworks, texts, etc.) and visualisation can be a powerful way to analyse, explore, and present patterns and stories in this data, but it is a domain where the oddities of time data can…