Tour - Priestley's New Chart of History

Please note that this is a preview version of our digital interpretation of Joseph Priestley's New Digital Chart of History.

This work is still undergoing development before its official release. The design is not yet finalized and the content and feature set are not yet complete. This site is best viewed on a desktop/laptop.

Priestley's New Chart of History (shown to the right) was digitized and an interactive UI was created.

Scroll down to walk through the components.

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In Priestley's Chart, time is displayed by vertical lines, which range from 1200 B.C.E on the left to 1800 C.E. on the right. 100 year increments are depicted by a thin, vertical grey line.

Physical areas of land, or places, are represented on the chart by horizontal rows and generally represent what Priestley understood to be nations. Some of these places such as "Canada" or "Japan" remain familiar today, while others such as “Bithynia” may be less familiar.

The places are grouped into regions. For example, the rows for the places called "Canada", "Nova Scotia", "Florida", "Chili", and "Brasil", are all grouped into a region called "America".

Hegemony, or military dominance of one nation over others, is represented on the chart by polygons, the most important of which are also colored and sometimes inscribed in a larger script. Powerful empires such as those of the "English" and the "Romans" had control of many place-rows for many years.

Here is the digital recreation of Priestley's chart, built up programmatically from the data in Priestley’s original chart interpreted according to his own graphic algorithm.
This work is still undergoing development, so the actual interactive chart may differ from the preview shown here.

Hover the pointer over the chart to reveal which empire was in power at a given place in a given region.

Scroll to zoom into the chart to see an area in more detail. Use the "actions" dropdown menu to acess a growing set of interaction methods.

Click on the chart to select the place and empire in power in a given year.

We have paired the chart with a map that depicts which geographic areas Priestley represented and which he omitted from the New Chart of History.

When you click on the chart, both the specific the place-row and all geographic area controlled by that selected empire are highlighted in both the chart and map.

Visit the Cartogram tab to explore Priestley's distorition of geographic area.

The final version of the site will contain a variety of infographic interpretations of Priestley’s Data using contemporary tools and tools from Priestley’s period. The site currently includes multiple developments graphs.

When you click on the chart in the 'Explore Empires' tab, a graph shows the percentage of row-space controlled by the selected empire in comparison with the 10 largest empires at the selected year.

When you click on the chart or map in the 'Explore Places' tab, the graph shows the amount of time each empire controlled the selected place. You can select up to five places. The final version will include many other infographic interpretations