Heterochronologies: a platform for correlation and research in temporal graphics

The difficulty of integrating the data, metadata, and classification schemes produced across a wide geographic, historical, and cultural variety of institutional sites and practices was a major impetus for the creation of Linked Data (LD). The promise was to make diverse sets of data interoperable through subscription to an array of standardizations while leaving the original data intact. These operational requirements enable interoperability at the expense of specificity, and require considerable resources for implementation. While LD supports connection and access across disparate data sets, it is not focused on the intellectual issues that have to do with enabling the correlation and comparison of diverse ontologies, or preserving and exploring their epistemic and cultural specificity — issues essential to humanistic study. In addition, LD is exclusively concerned with linguistic data, and can hence not be applied to information that is expressed in graphical form. Contrastingly, the Heterochronologies project regards temporality as a concept expressed epistemically through various culturally-specific, authoritative ontologies, which are instantiated by graphical representations such as chronologies and timelines. The project concentrates on extracting computationally tractable structured data from historical images so that the underlying ontologies may be compared without subsuming them into a hegemonic data model. In this sense, the Heterochronologies project is an exercise in comparative ontology. In this paper we describe the factors that motivated the project; its various epistemological underpinnings, as well as the methodological approach that guided its development; the phases of our work; and the contributions that emerged from the project. Though currently still in development, its culmination is a digital platform — the Time Capsule — that supports comparative pedagogy, and in so doing demonstrates both validity and relevance of a few fundamental notions: a) structured data can be systematically extracted from graphical structures with a logical approach; b) comparisons of temporal schemes can be supported by a digital platform that considers them as instantiations of ontologies that need not be reconciled to a single standard; c) the historical and cultural specificity of these ontologies can be exposed and analyzed using digital means.