Lifespan

ME: Location is an interesting one. Did you say there’s a type of span called “place”?

Yeah, that’s how you can say person A lived in place B

But London is a place… and it’s not exactly got a “lifespan” like a person or book or album…

No, you’re right… places are located in space, not just in time. But… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_London

OK, so you could tell the story of things over any timescale?

Yes. We could look at what New York was doing when London was founded… in about 43AD.

And what was that?

Lemme ask ChatGPT…

In New York in 43 AD, the land was home to Indigenous peoples living in a pre-agricultural to early agricultural society, with long-established traditions and seasonal lifeways. The name “New York” wouldn’t appear until over 1,600 years later (1664), when the English took over New Amsterdam from the Dutch.

Well well well

Yep.

Alright, back up a little bit… I’ve just spotted a big question

I know, I’ve been expecting this bit.

Personal lifespan data is… personal

Definitely. Things in Wikipedia are inherently public, but your own information has to be private to you.

Very private

Very.

So… you have some sort of access and permissions system going on here?

Yeah. And it’s complicated.

Try me

So… everyone needs to be able to be able to see public spans - bands and famous people and all that - but personal spans are only visible by their owners.

Makes sense

Yeah, but what if you want to add your family, and have them able to see each other’s spans? Or what if we’re friends and we want to see each other’s lives? I mean… what if your brother wants to see what your mum was doing when…

…Sgt Peppers…

That’s the one.

So…

There’s the concept of groups. Users can own spans, but users can be part of groups, and groups can have view/edit access to other spans.

So you’ve put all of us beta testers into a group?

Exactly. You can see my information, I can see yours.

All of it?

No, you can have some of your stuff shared in groups, and other stuff private only to you. Complicated, like I said.

Errr… yeah. So how do you visualise and control that?

You’ve put your finger on it. That’s a big one. I’ve got some ideas, built into the app, but they’re not perfect.

Fair enough. What else isn’t perfect?

Well, all of it. But particularly the “what I can see and what you can see” part of it. It’s simple, but kind of complicated at the same time.

What are the other big problems?

Adding and editing information is a real challenge. There are basic ways to do it, but they’re clunky to put it mildly. I imagine it working a bit like a music editor, with parallel tracks that you can drag and split and move around… but at the moment it doesn’t work that way. It’d need a totally new Javascript front-end to make it happen.

I can imagine. What else?

Importing big datasets. I’ve got some medium-sized semi-automated imports going on - like blue plaques - but we need to import thousands and thousands of things. Once you connect them all together, we’re looking at millions and millions of spans.

That’s a lot

Yes. But databases are clever, and you can make this stuff scale if you do it right.

Have you done it right?

No.

Oh

Oh. But it’s OK, this prototype is about working out how things might work, so the right way can be found.

Alright. There’s something else, though, isn’t there?

Yes. Scale isn’t just a data problem… it’s a UX problem.

You mean how to decide what to show, when there’s a lot of things that could be shown?

Precisely. If we ask “what was happening in 1997?” the answer is pretty limited when there’s only a few spans in the system. When there’s many many, it becomes a major filtering problem to work out what to show and what to hide, and how to make it make sense.

Wikipedia manages it

It does, and that’s why some pages in Wikipedia are big lists of things. But this is somehow trickier. Because the answers to some queries are massive.

Yeah, I can see that. I mean, if you show all the public figures in the system who lived in London at some point in their lives, you’d have a very big list

Exactly. So we need to have ways to shine the torch into the darkness and see just what’s in the light beam, not just turn on the floodlights and be overwhelmed.

I guess lots of websites have this problem… like Twitter? The “firehose” problem?

Yeah, but Twitter - and similar things… YouTube, Instagram - have a built-in timeline paradigm, so you can show the most recent content by default. This is like that, but with a less obvious timeline, because this is meant to step outside the timeline. You want the completeness of Wikipedia, and the focus of Twitter.

Or “X”

Or “X”

I can’t believe I said that

It’s OK, we’ll work it out one day.

That makes me think, actually. If you look up “Twitter” in Lifespan…

…does it say “X”? Yeah. It’s a bit like looking up London and wondering whether it should say “Londinium” at some point. Or if the BBC goes from being “company” in 1924 to “corporation” in 1927… or whenever it was. It’s the “Ship of Theseus Paradox”

Remind me

It’s the philosophical problem of identity over time: if an object has all its parts gradually replaced, is it still the same object? What makes something the same thing, rather than a different thing, when it changes?

I guess you and I are different things, physically, as we age? I mean, I’m not the same physical cells and atoms I was born. But I’m still “me”?

Yeah, according to ChatGPT…

If we take the weighted average across tissues, many estimates suggest that about 50% of your body’s cells are replaced every 7–10 years. But your neurons, eye lens, and some muscle cells stick around for life.

But point taken. When a company merges with another company and renames itself to another company name, like “Orange” merging with “T-mobile” and becoming “EE” (Everything Everywhere, by the way).

The future’s bright

It was. If you look up “Orange” in 2008, it’s called “Orange”… but in 2012 it doesn’t exist, because it’s now “EE”. So we need a whole new way to declare relationships between things, so you can see that EE started in 2010, but was the result of a previous merge of other things.

That’s doable, though, right?

Yes, but it requires many-to-many connections, rather than one-to-one.

Bit of an edge-case? I mean, you don’t need to worry about mobile phone companies?

Yeah… but lots of things change and evolve in complex ways. “Radiohead” used to be called “On a Friday”, but it’s the same people. Is that two things or one? Same with “The Beatles” and “The Quarrymen”, “Red Hot Chili Peppers” and “Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem”, “Glaxo Wellcome” + “SmithKline Beecham” = “GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)”, “Google” becomes “Alphabet”, “Facebook” becomes “Meta”…

“Marathon” becomes “Snickers“

Yeah. Lady Diana Spencer. Gordon Sumner (Sting), Reginald Dwight (Elton John), Paul Hewson (Bono)…

I get it

Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr)

OK, OK. So we need to rethink things a bit, is what you’re saying?

Yes. But I think it’s doable. Just need to change the model a bit so that things don’t have names baked-in quite so much… they can have names that are themselves spans.

And they don’t do that at the moment?

No. Names are primary required fields, and they’re fixed. They’re the basis of URLs, too, which makes things interesting.

OK. Can we stop now?

Yes. My head’s full too.

There’s lots more though, isn’t there?

Yeah.

• :white_check_mark: Spans within spans (like your second year at university). That’s done.
• :white_check_mark: Groups of spans (like Desert Island Discs). That’s done.
• :white_check_mark: Places having geolocation metadata (so we properly know that London is in the UK). That’s sort of done.
• :white_check_mark: Family trees (so we know who your parents, children, grandparents, aunts and uncles are). That’s done.
• :white_check_mark: Time travel (so you can see what a span looked like at a particular date). That’s sort of done.
• :white_check_mark: Flickr image imports (so you can see your photos in context). That’s sort of done.
• :white_check_mark: Imports from the Science Museum exhibit API. That’s sort of done.
• :thinking_face: Governments/prime ministers/elections… that’s not done.
• :thinking_face: Importing books, films, TV programmes… that’s not done.
• :thinking_face: Importing Twitter archives… that’s not done…

There’s more, isn’t there?

There really is.

Sounds like you need help to step back, rethink all of this, and make a proper plan

It does, doesn’t it?

But I can sort of see… something… some potential

Me too.

I mean, we could import all of the contents of the Tate Modern’s exhibitions, with all the artists

Yep.

And museum collections

Yep.

And organisations would love the fact that their information is presented in new and dynamic ways

In theory.

And we could import major news events through history

Yep.

And then it would be a self-perpetuating community, built on top of Wikipedia and all the other data out there

Yep.

And it would reach some sort of critical mass and…

Yep.