The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead, time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.
Shams Tabrizi
Past
The first page of any history book defines history as “the study of the past”, if it’s a greek dictionary, then the definition of (ἱστορία – historia) is research. Plain and simple, just the word research.
History documentation started almost 5300 years ago, when the first writing systems were introduced in civilizations (drawing systems to be precise), the preceding era was called prehistory. Since then, History was transferred and documented using word of mouth, drawings, scripts, and even multimedia.
But who actually documented history? Dan Brown once said that history is “written by the winners”. How can we study something if we know already it is biased. Not just by the first reporter or writer of history but, by the following generations as well, a human being is never unbiased.
History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe.
Dan brown
Is history what really happened? Is it what is written in history books? Is it the central/middle point of view? A central point of view will make history tasteless!
Is it what historians decided is relatively accurate? Aren’t those historians biased, even slightly? Is history our own interpretation of all of that? Aren’t we ourselves biased? Is it the point of view of the majority? The majority isn’t always right? Is it what makes more sense? History doesn’t always make sense!
The distortion of history is an undeniable fact, sometimes it’s forced by intentional deformation by those who are in power, and sometimes it’s caused by unintentional negligence by irresponsible reporters or historians.
Present
Earlier this year, we released the beta version of Historydraft, the first of its kind interactive structured dataset of historical events. We used all the cutting-edge technologies to provide the best storytelling experience through maps, timelines, and statistics.
So far we have hundreds of stories with thousands of events, each story can be presented using our unique Storyteller, stories can be also presented as timelines or articles. We have Map Search to provide geo-time querying, we have day and location correlation pages (On This Day and Near me).
Future
The future is looked to as the unraveled secret that everyone seeks to predict and plan according to their prediction.
We are currently working on AI proof of concept models to help analyzing the past, detecting any defects, filling the gaps, and maybe even predict the future. These models will hopefully analyze history event in a way never seen before.
All of this wouldn’t have been possible without having our handpicked structured dataset of historical events. Historydraft is our way of researching and studying the past!
