Stone, Paper, Silicon

Launching a website where you can build your own personal archive of human history

My bookshelf is littered with history books, whose status varies from “impulse-purchase, never opened” to “read cover-to-cover, notes on almost every page.”

My internet history is a similar story of stops and starts, full of half-consumed and mostly-forgotten wikipedia pages, youtube videos, and reddit threads.

Oh, book on the Kurds on the top shelf. Someday I will get to you.

I love learning about the past. I’m a great admirer of humanity, and never get bored with trying to wrap my head around the place and time we occupy in the grand sweep of history¹.

But I am also incredibly forgetful. After finishing a book, podcast, or article, I rarely retain much. Like a statue of Ozymandias, my knowledge crumbles, and I’m left with nothing but a memory of a name, or a sense that some city was important.

I’ve long envisioned having a visual archive to make my knowledge of history sticky. A vague dream of some kind of an ever-growing timeline into which I could codify my knowledge².

I’ve tried journaling, using spreadsheets, and various online tools. None have worked well enough.

So since software is free now, I decided to build it myself.

Stone, Paper, Silicon is a personal archive for hobby historians. It is NOT a complete timeline of humanity, but rather a basic and flexible framework into which you can use to slot in historical knowledge as you learn.

It has three main features: Timeline, World Map, and Quiz.

Timeline: This is anchor. You can see the framework of history laid out before you.

Five regions on the y-axis, time on the x-axis, scaled by human experience and broken down into periods for each region

You can add timeline entities here for states, religions, cultures, and events you learn about.

Some example events added in Europe

World Map: Explore the rise and fall of states, nations, and empires throughout history, year by year. If you see a state you want to learn more about, click on it, and add it as an entity to your timeline.

Quiz: Quiz yourself on historical events that have been added by all users.

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For now I’ve built very basic multi-user functionality. You simply enter your name when you land on the site. Any timeline entities you create will appear under your profile and will be publicly available to others.

But enough of my words. Give it a try, and let me know what you think!

1. I’ve also created an actually to-scale model of the solar system in my hallway to remind me of our physical insignificance.

2. My brief plan to put this timeline on our hallway wall - instead of a solar-system model - was nixed by my wife who thought “it wouldn’t look good”