Topotime

topo (from Greek τοπο-, a combining form of τόπος place)

Topotime is a digital humanities project aiming to join Place and Period (space and time) in conceptual models, data formats, and software for geo-historical research. We are developing an experimental extension to the GeoJSON data format standard, and open-source software to utilize it.

The project's planned work products include:

• GeoJSON-T (repo), adding temporal ("when") elements to GeoJSON, making it suitable for representing
  • attestations of historical geographic movement, such as journeys, routes, and flows (e.g. of commodities, people, or information)
  • historical gazetteer records
  • historical periods
• Linked Places (repo), a web application featuring (at the moment) a web map linked to a traditional timeline. The next phase development will add temporal geometry visualizations and some basic network analysis and visualizations.
• topotime.js (soon), a JavaScript library for rendering GeoJSON‑T data in web apps such as Linked Places. Its dependencies at the moment include the Leaflet, Simile Timeline, and D3 libraries, as well as [...TBD]
• topotime.py (soon), a Python package that reads GeoJSON‑T data and can (a) generate and analyze temporal geometries; (b) perform basic network measures

All of these are either in active development or design, so the contents of this repo are dynamic "works-in-progress." Comments, suggestions, and reasonably polite brickbats are welcome.

Documentation will be maintained on the Topotime project wiki

Contributors
Karl Grossner (kgeographer; twitter:@kgeographer); Merrick Lex Berman (vajlex); Rainer Simon (rsimon); Elijah Meeks (v0.1; emeeks)