A Simultaneous View of History: The Creation of a Hypermedia Database

This paper describes the creation of the hypermedia application A Simultaneous View of History, a compilation of sources related to the practice of visualization by European explorers in sixteenth-century Latin America. The overlapping layers of data that can be constructed through hypermedia design are compared to a palimpsest. Both the palimpsest and hypermedia can present a simultaneous view of different discourses. The artist discusses her idea of presenting a “palimpsest view” of history by using hypermedia to juxtapose historical materials and thus point to differing versions of historical events. She discusses the research involved in the creation of the application and reconstructs some of the techniques that European explorers used to gather data in Latin America. She compares the sixteenth-century European practice of compiling and presenting data from foreign lands to modern scientific visualization, which uses the computer to present images of otherwise imperceptible data.