Firefly & Serenity Timeline

The Firefly and Serenity Interactive Timeline is an interactive extension of the original printed information graphic mapping of Firefly and Serenity made by Eric Benson. The printed version displayed only the timeline of the television episodes, film, short stories, novels, and comics superimposed over the map of the planets and moons in the “Verse.” It showed the path from planet to planet (and moon), all the media in the Firefly/Serenity canon took, and what characters were on board the Serenity spacecraft at each stop. The map was visually interesting but wasn’t dynamically editable nor did it display, due to limitations of legibility of large quantities of small type on printed ephemera, the articles written about each media item. This visualization is built with Simple NetInt, a custom-made JavaScript

library designed to visualize networks based on the representation of entities and their relationships as nodes and edges. The interactive 2D canvas is a universal space that contains relative subspaces for each dataset. The nodes instantiated from each dataset are positioned in their own coordinate system, which could be a timeline, a position relative to a map, or just clusters by proximities. A distinctive attribute is that edges connecting nodes jump from one coordinate system to the other. The result is a system of nested accordion-spaces, in which users can compress or expand each subspace to match the dimensionality scale of other subspaces. With this 3D emulated technique users can parallel data sequences facilitating the discovery of patterns.