Conclusions
I hope you have enjoyed my tour of time, and that it has perhaps made you think a little more deeply about time and proved inspiration for your own visualisations that reveal “other times and spaces”. We saw how time is both a physical phenomenon that we can measure things against and a mental construct of our biology and culture, then considered some of the visualisation approaches that may be applied to visualise temporal and spatiotemporal data and patterns in relation to a conceptual spacetime data cube to reveal past and future events and states, movement, the age of a landscape, and space-time scale relationships. While many visualisations may be aligned to a single use, others straddle the use categories; for example, ‘The Ghost of Happisburgh’ shows time in the current landscape (or in this case seascape), the roads and buildings of a historic landscape (memory), and movement in a single image.
While data visualization can be very effective in revealing temporal patterns and processes, some aspects of time are more difficult to encode. On my bookcase sit a variety of objects that connect me to other times and places in different ways. There are fossils, rocks, historic artifacts, seeds, shells, and other items, some of which I collected while others came from my parents and other relatives. These objects are imbued with personal and family memories of other places and times that cannot be fully translated into data. For example, the sundial dated ‘1685’ came from my great uncle’s Sussex farm, then spent 40 years in my parents’ garden where I grew up, before nearly being left behind in a corner when the house was sold. On it is a core of obsidian chipped to make tools in Teotihuacan, Mexico, over 1500 years ago, a US coin from my years in North Carolina, and seeds collected with my son in Costa Rica. Perhaps one day I will put them all on a map – what was their path through time to me, and how do my thoughts and memories trace along those paths?
