HistoryInCube

How did you start

I started off by collecting trivia for each year in the past centuries and populating key words like Finance/War/Popular Person/Invention/Discovery
I used worldtimeline.info I tried contacting the owner to have an arrangement for me to use the data but he denied. So I set about another path.

I starting looking at all wars from 1000 on wards and starting relating it with Popes of that time.
The earlier history is very scant and the resources are not that much. I was able to collect some good data in a year and half for first 500 years. But as we approached modern history the work expanded

Important Decision

While 2019 was approaching I took the decision to focus only on 300 years of history from 1700 to 2000 as the online resources are good and it is an important part of us as a civilization

Muddle phase

The Years for 2018 to 2019 were spent in browsing through the wars and getting a hang of the three centuries. My sincere intentions was to accumulate as much as i can with as many countries and regions spanning the world.
In a movie there is the protagonist but he gets support by other actors. In history as well we tend to focus on the main characters but there are other players who played their part, maybe a private who is long forgotten or the heroics of a Lance Commander buried in the books.
I wanted to create a tool that will give the flexibility of picking and choosing anything from the sands of time, without much difficulty and while following a line of thought!

Full time work and part time project

I worked full time in a job contracting in various roles of Business intelligence. After work I used to dabble on my project. In my project I had to deal with my own challenges. The challenge of trawling through history (in all 984 wars) and challenge of cleaning the persons who came in different spellings, and peculiarly when you study wars of Vietnam or Cambodia or Russia or Greece, the name of the people would give me a spin 🙂 But I found python to be very useful in dealing with all the challenges. Today we have AI but if you can learn python that itself is mini AI.

Charlie Munger

While picking up on the wisdom of Charlie Munger, he advocated the unashamed usage of ideas from other disciplines in your line of work
I saw the usage of OLAP cubes to get the different financial figures across various regions or stores or products and the incredible speed in which it can be achieved which allowed quicker decisions. Using the Cube for navigating history seemed like a pursuable idea

The French 55 Barrel concept

When the French colonized Algeria, they had to travel the great desert.
Surely starting a journey with no end in sight is not great for travel. The French ingeniously had marked the sand route with 55 barrel drums spaced exactly 5 km apart. So once you start your journey and come to the first drum, the next drum comes in your sight and the previous one fades away.
When you travel and when you know you just need to reach the next barrel gives you a sense of some accomplishment and keeps your spirits high while doing the long journey.
I create my own 55 barrel concept.

Georgie Geerdharry

No Georgie is no historic personality but a kind friend 🙂
He used to live in Sydenham and had a large large garden. On my lazy weekends I used to go and help Georgie in his DIY tasks which included taking out weeds, moving piles of mud or other things, painting the fence and lawn mowing. I used to get free lunch 🙂
I am mentioning Georgie because he had a concept of doing his small garden projects. He had 6 things in his mind and he used to toil over the weekends on one of those 6 things and then move to the next. Each small project would feed the next and in the next 6 months all 6 completed tasks would surprise me with the final outcome.

I picked up in practical terms to divide your tasks and work on them independently and then put them together and most importantly you will only see the results later and not immediately!!

Family support

Every project that occupies you cannot be done without the love and support of your wife and children and the prayers of your parents and elders.
The Logo design is done by my brother.

Began and Beghannn

I Began to do my work but the momentum was set when
I Beghannn, which is put your H in it. That H is your Hardwork, Honesty, Humility, Himmat (hindi word for courage) and your heart. The extra n’s towards the end is the extra gumption you require when you undertake something big.

The Cleaning

Any data product has to undergo cleaning so that the final version in your hand must be well presented without duplicates.
When you trawl through the webpages you sometimes come across persons who are named differently in different pages. Eg: See following examples of Before Cleaning and After Cleaning

My important Partner

In the 1600s and the 1700s, the scientists were religious. In the current era, majority of scientists are atheists.
I have nothing against my fellow atheists.

I confess with pride that I am a believer and this work would not have been possible without the Invisible help from Allah (swt). There were times I had no idea to proceed in certain direction, and after a quiet prayer, the heart strengthened and the path became clear.

There were times during the data cleaning process when unwittingly I found an error and I wondered how did I find that, I would have easily overlooked it. I follow a system of data error checking and honestly even that system would not have found some of the errors that came to my attention!
So I have to declare that I am the sole creator of this product but I had big help from my Ever Knowing and Ever Helping Allah (swt). I thank Allah (Swt) profusely for all the help till now and also in the future.

AI and the Big Question

I was discussing the product with my relative around the time ChatGPT was launched and he showed me whatever your product can show, the information would be available in the AI tool.

It was a real sobering moment and which made me pause and think. Should i continue making the project which was still undergoing cleaning and how can I compete with AI.

I guess this is the big question in the minds of not only creators like me but big IT corporations that are at cross roads at this point in history.

I knew at that moment, my product has a play element which allows the user to drag and drop things and gives him/her the ability to discover history and its people and with whom a person fought or allied.

With the power of the cube which allows me to associate a country and person to another country and person, it has something unique and I think HistoryinCube does better ad faster. The cube is simple but powerful when you setup the Dimensions and the Facts (which you can check in the videos)

So I continued believing in HI (Human Intelligence) which is unique and creative and can stand out in the world of AI.
I do not take AI as an adversary but a tool which I used as well to check my work and also in the coming years, I might turn out better products using AI but not abandoning my HI 🙂