History Flow is a visualization application that provides a novel way of visualizing large collaboratively edited data sets. It is particularly well placed to analyze the iterations of large text documents.
Point History Flow to any directory with a number of document interactions and it will recognize the similarities between iterations and represent the continuities with a solid block of colour along a temporal axis. As the particular block of text are retained across iterations, as the text ‘ages’ those blocks fade to a darker shade. New text is bright and perturbations with a block of text are represented by gaps in the blocks and ‘fades’. History Flow has been substantially updated since I originally looked at it for the Assemblage of Collective Thought and its ability to parse a variety of text directories is much more seamless than the earlier Windows only application. As a Java application with OSX, Linux, and Windows installer History Flow is now available for all major platforms. History flow amiably represents the collaborative development of a large scale text based project – most notably Wikipedia entries. According to my particular bent I found the most interesting aspect of History Flow was its ability to act as a means of navigating the temporal development of document. History flow allows you to navigate the document by running the mouse over particular areas of the ‘graph along me to move down threw the document or ‘back’ through the documents development so I can easily navigated to a relegated portion of the document. Once again I’m more interested in the promise that this provides not just for analysis but for visualizing the document as non-linear and bifurcating and for providing the means of navigating these bifurcations. History promises such a means of navigating the network even if this implementation remains tied to a single thread and the two dimensionality of the representation would require a drastic redesign to facilitate a vision of the network that I have argued as missing in my previous post on the Visual Communication Lab’s work. That is to say that history flow allows us to see and to navigate the temporal dynamic of an incessantly emerging document and potentially a network in contra-distinction to the visuality of the network that knows no temporality, whose past is either replaced, or whose ‘pasts’ and ‘futures’ are forever superimposed in layers that obfuscate that temporality.