Thread by @prathyvsh

Starting a thread on my process for creating a timeline visualizer. I am building this for visualizing and sharing my understanding of the history of Lambda Calculus.

Here’s some prior work I have done that gives an idea of what I am trying to achieve. It shows a subset of ideas, events, and collaborations among pioneers that influenced the course of logic. History is replete with such multi-actor conversations:

https://twitter.com/prathyvsh/status/1197525794245009408

I am doing this to complement my Lambda Calculus project and the results of these explorations will be available here shortly: prabros.com/lambda-calculu…

I will eventually drive towards a visualization where ideas, events, and personalities are plotted together. But for the initial implementation, I am going to go for one where just the lifetimes are visualized as in this image I did for the history of functions:

During my search for inspirations one fine work of timeline visualization that I stumbled on is this visualization by polymath Joseph Priestly from 1765! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Chart_o…

Trying something new with this thread. Going for a free form writing style with infocomic visualizations and see where it leads me. Here’s my views on narrating tangled networks of stories:

This is going to be a write up on how I see this timeline visualization process. It documents how a tangled network of ideas gets ordered into a somewhat linear space for narration.

This is how I conceptualize the braided space: A highly networked system of entities with various kinds of relationships between them. This could be anything from actors in an ecosystem to modules in a software system. It is an abstract representation of the configuration.

Entities in a space are connected together through links. A braided space can have a lot of circuitous paths between entities that cycle back in an (un)certain number of steps.

Here are some properties of the braided space: Entities can exist in isolation or can form multi/hyper graphs inside them. Such configurations have implications for the ways you choose to deal with such a system.