Historio IBM Research

Historio is an experiment in storytelling and visualization; it helps people tell stories by structuring their narrative into interactive timelines.

The first incarnation of Historio celebrates IBM's centennial anniversary. IBMers worldwide have been invited to contribute personal stories to augment curated stories from IBM's historical archives. Members of the public can use Historio to explore IBM's rich legacy and share their thoughts in the comments section at the bottom of each story. Favorite histories can be bookmarked and shared on several social networking websites.

Stories in Historio are structured as timelines and consist of time periods and discrete events that pair the author's narrative with photos, videos, documents, and geographic information. Historio features an exploration page that lets visitors browse the histories and search them by keyword, location, or industry. The results are shown as a novel circular visualization. By clicking on the timelines in the circle, visitors can compare multiple timelines at once, and view the events they contain in more detail.

Collaborators

Yannick Assogba, Paul Moody, Adam Perer, Irene Ros, and Joan Morris DiMicco

Technologies

Ruby on Rails and JavaScript