About NanoHistory

An Introduction
»How does it work?
»What can I do?
»What do I need?
»Why 'NanoHistory'?
»Compared to Other Tools
Networked Events
»Entities
»Verbs
»Events
»Dates & Time
NanoHistory is an historical social network platform currently under development that allows users to track historical people, organizations, places, things, and their interaction over time. Our approach uses verbs to preserve agency and to try and keep your events human-readable. When we stick countless events together involving any number of people, organizations, places, and things, the result is a cultural network that reflects the kinds of interactions and situations people have in everyday life. They meet for drinks, they write books, they live in places, and they create and produce new objects.

NanoHistory is also a response to the overwhelming nature of Big and Linked Open Data for individual humanities scholars. It asserts that the cleaning up and critique of such data requires providing scholars access to a nano-level granularity to historica data. One of the problems scholars are facing is not only the sheer amount of data now available, but how to use it effectively. This means turning from being consumers of Open Access data into producers and mashers. NanoHistory allows users to pull data from existing resources and mash it up with their own. Or critique it. It's meant to be both a kind of middleware for Open Data, as much as a tool for doing your work.

It is a major revision of the custom research environment built for the McGill-based project 'Making Publics' which concluded in 2010, and the Network Event Model which resulted from a 2012-13 SSHRC Public Dissemination Grant.

You can gain a sense of where we're headed via our blog where we'll post our progress.

Licenses

The data contained within NanoHistory is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://www.nanohistory.org.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.nanohistory.org/about/ See also Creative Commons License and https://choosealicense.com/licenses/cc-by-sa-4.0/

The software and code powering NanoHistory is licensed by Matthew Milner under a GNU General Public License v3.0.
Based on a work at http://www.nanohistory.org. See also https://choosealicense.com/licenses/lgpl-3.0/

If you'd like to know who we are, who we're working with, and what we're using, check out our team, partners, and credits pages.