fter a series of meetings with Johanna Drucker’s group at UCLA, along with Geoff Bowker and John Seberger, over the summer, our thinking on this project has evolved. As we move into a more active phase of work, we look forward to refining our own ideas on multi-chronologies within compendia like the French Encyclopédie and incorporating some of the insights that emerged from our discussions this year. Over the next few months, we will return to the Encyclopédie and perform a series of experiments to try and capture how different chronologies interact, or come into contact, in the context of the work. Do, for example, different disciplines represent time differently? Or are particular events across different scales described through different languages of chronology? Our research is shaped by four primary questions that seek to capture how different temporalities are mediated through chronological systems:

1. Is time represented as something with movement, or is it understood as a static environment in which different points can be located? That is, is time understood as an unfolding, or even evolutionary, process, or is it a static timeline in which the past, present and future simultaneously exist. And if time is represented by movement, how is the movement characterized? Is it continuous or discontinuous, moving in unequal steps across multiple histories?
2. Is time directional? Whether represented through movement, or through a static timeline, does the arrow of time point in a specific direction (or directions)? If it is moving, is it pointed towards the past or the future, and how does this intersect with the ways in which causality is described?
3. What is the dimension of time? Is primarily about the past, the future or the present? Is it one or two dimensional (or more)?
4. What are the intervals of time? Is it measured through quantitative markers (seconds, hours, days, years), or is it primarily event based? Do the intervals stay consistent through the chronology or are the malleable based on the kind of time being represented?

Our next steps in this project will be to work both top down and bottom up: we plan to analyze the language of the Encyclopédie computationally to locate the points of the text that are clearly invested in a language of temporality, and, at the same time, we will locate specific chronologies by hand and use these to train a computational model that can recognize language the is specific to this chronologies. In this way, we hope to both develop a richer map of the chronologies of the Encyclopédie, and, more importantly, find points of contact in articles at which different chronologies are brought into contact with each other.