Temporal Earth: data-driven animations of history

Temporal Earth turns the dates and places of history into interactive data-driven animations in space and time. The result is similar to Google Earth, but with the additional ability to travel through time and see history unfold before your eyes. Multiple animated geographical layers combine to provide a context to historical dates, with collections of photographs and other archives providing windows into moments in history.

In the following video, Temporal Earth’s founder Matthew Coller demonstrates how the colonial history of Australia can seen in a revolutionary new way, and uses archival photographs to explore the history of Australian aviation.

Our flagship visualisation Time-machine.Earth (still under development) combines a vast range of datasets into a visual synthesis of Australian history: convict ships, explorers, expanding pastoral settlement, Gold Rush sites, telegraph lines, railways, air routes, and WW2 bombings of northern Australia. The timeline can be zoomed in to view a year, month or day, or zoomed out to see the 65,000-year antiquity of human arrival in Australia.

Temporal Earth is still a work in progress and we are looking for funding and collaborations with academic researchers, educators, libraries, archives and museums, to bring history to life through this technology. Please email mattcoller@gmail.com if you would like to discuss your ideas.