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James Burke

Without an exhaustive personal knowledge of history, technology, literature, and a myriad of scientific disciplines, the connections between apparently random historical elements have often remained hidden or obscured within the silos we've created around subject matters—until now.

The Knowledge Web helps make those connections.

An interactive educational tool, the Knowledge Web not only informs users about the scientists, artists, innovators, and explorers of history, but also reveals the connections between them. Navigating through a dynamic, visual database of knowledge, Knowledge Web users not only learn about history's movers and shakers in their own context but also how they impact modern life. Users can begin with any subject: Start with ice cream and track the connections to Einstein, or enter through the gateway of global warming and explore the way to chewing gum or Humboldt.

Users can follow James Burke on his unique guided tours of history, or they can pursue their own journeys. Pathways through history allow users to immerse themselves in a virtual world of human knowledge as they visit historical environments, talk with scientists like Galileo or Madame Curie, and experiment with those innovators’ scientific equipment.

A web of historical connections

The Knowledge Web presents knowledge in a highly interconnected, holistic way that makes it possible to follow an almost infinite number of paths of exploration among people, places, things, and events.

Within the Knowledge Web’s visual database, each such person, place, thing, or event is represented by a node in a web of connections. Selecting a node brings up in-depth information, a "vital statistics" summary, and links to multimedia content or supplementary web sites.

From each node, users can travel to other nodes that are connected via historical relationships. The Knowledge Web also allows users to "zoom out" and see the constellation of other nodes that relate to any given starting point. Users are never lost because they are oriented in space by maps, in time by a timeline, and in their own journey by an archived list of all the nodes they’ve visited. They can even save maps of their journeys and e-mail them to other explorers. The map and timeline can also be used as input with other filtering devices, so users can find, for instance, French seventeenth-century chemists who were self-educated.

The possible pathways are infinite. The Knowledge Web contains thousands of nodes connected in tens of thousands of ways.

The best way to get an sense of how it works is to watch Burke explain it in the video demo of the Knowledge Web.

The Knowledge Web not only informs users about the scientists, artists, innovators, and explorers of history, but also reveals the connections between them.

Users can follow James Burke on his unique guided tours of history, or they can pursue their own journeys.