Google Quick Visualization for Historians

A year ago I wrote a recipe for the TAPoR pro­ject to demon­strate a way for his­tor­i­ans to util­ize text ana­lysis tools to plumb his­tor­ical data from Google. In the recipe a user aggreg­ated search res­ults from Google and used the TAPoR DateFinder tool to rap­idly con­struct a chro­no­logy. This rather basic oper­a­tion has now been auto­mated by the folks at Google labs. Now, with the simple addi­tion of two words in your search request you can choose to view the famil­iar text search res­ults in two excit­ing addi­tional con­texts, tem­poral and spa­tial. The new Google Timeline and Map views is a power­ful but simple tool for his­tor­i­ans and oth­ers as well.
The pro­cess is fast and very intu­it­ive. You sup­ply a name as search term and spe­cify the timeline view. ‘ben­jamin frank­lin view:timeline’ returns the fol­low­ing screen:

Their routines cleans up the search res­ults and plots them visu­ally on a timeline by num­ber of res­ults returned by year. The search returns are organ­ized chro­no­lo­gic­ally below the timeline can be selec­ted to go to explore each event in greater detail. You can drill down visu­ally to increase gran­u­lar­ity by click­ing on timeline itself.
Addi­tion­ally, a GoogleMaps mashup is instantly avail­able and plots the same search res­ults on a map. Search res­ults are win­nowed to identify both dates and loc­a­tions and retained in your res­ults if they con­tain either. This obvi­ously raises ser­i­ous issues of bias, but from a quick and dirty start­ing point, these are left to you to judge.
The present­a­tion of this product is very sim­ilar to Exhibit from SIMILE. How­ever, where this Google tool allows you to scav­enge pub­lic data, the SIMILE product is a very handy frame­work to present your own inform­a­tion in without rely­ing on com­plex server con­fig­ur­a­tion. Both demon­strate the visu­al­iz­a­tion poten­tial that simple tools offer his­tor­i­ans. Chro­no­lo­gical visual present­a­tion is prob­ably the more famil­iar aspect. The oppor­tun­ity to rap­idly con­struct a spa­tial view on a Google map is less used, but amaz­ingly valu­able.
The addi­tion of such a simple tool to the his­tor­i­ans kit­bag offer tre­mend­ous new oppor­tun­it­ies to explore his­tor­ical data from new vant­age points.