About

A project by Peter Cai and Jackie Ma.

The history graph attempts to visually depict events in history as a graph, where nodes are events and edges are relationships between events and people. The graph is constructed by crawling Wikipedia and extracting event and people data from the text. This is made challenging as Wikipedia data is not structured in a predictable way, and the text is not always consistent.

The relationships between events and people are verified and entered by hand. The graph is then visualized using a custom timeline renderer. Some relationship information is automatically inferred from the text, but most is entered manually.

While it's impossible to understand history just by looking at a graph, we think it's a fun way to explore how people and events are related, and who were contemporaries.

Technology: Ruby on Rails 7.x, PostgreSQL 14.x, React 16.x.