Today, Microsoft Research announced the beta release of ChronoZoom, a place that brings together various pieces of information on the history of the universe.
Released in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley; Moscow State University; and the Outercurve Foundation,
ChronoZoom arrives as a new tool for the study of history.
It was already made available for download, and is set to be unveiled at the Northwest Council for Computer Education (NCCE) Conference.
The main idea behind this toll was to have the various details on specific events and the like put in a single place for fast access.
This means that students, since the tool was specifically designed for them, won’t have to search in more than a single place for the information they need.
In a recent
blog post, Rane Johnson-Stempson, education and scholarly communication principal research director, Microsoft Research Connections, offers a glimpse behind the curtain of ChronoZoom.
“There are thousands of digital repositories, collections, libraries, and websites full of images, videos, documents, facts, and figures—not to mention the wealth of content squirreled away in private offices, personal computers, and university servers,” Rane Johnson-Stempson notes.
“But the sheer volume and disparate locations of these resources confound researchers, educators, and students, who spend untold hours searching this information, seeking to better understand history and its lessons for our future. What if we had a tool that could bring all these resources together?”
The new tool was intended to make time relationships between different studies of history clear and vivid. It also delivers a variety of multimedia content, such as videos, text, charts, schematics, images, articles, and more.
Through
ChronoZoom, the past - starting 13.7 billion years ago - and the present are brought together through cosmic history, Earth history, life history, and human history. All this is part of Big History.
“Today’s release is a call to action to the academic community to try ChronoZoom in their classrooms and then vote on its features and let us know what could make the tool even more useful,” Johnson-Stempson continues.
“For academic experts and digital collection owners, it’s an opportunity to help determine the content that should be in ChronoZoom. For computer science institutions and developers around the world, it’s a call to join our open-source community and help us build the next set of features.”
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