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Today in Church History

Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 4:50 pm
by atticusewig
You know how sometimes you'll
see something that says "Today
in 1956 [insert historical event]"?
Let's see that for the Church.

If this already exisits, please
let me know. lds.org is pretty
vast and I do overlook things
from time to time. Perhaps this
already exisits in written form,
and a community project to type
it in could be organized.
I just think it might be interesting
content to add to lds.org or the
LUWS calendars.

- Atticus Ewig

Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 5:43 pm
by cottrells
http://www.JosephSmith.net has an "On this Day..." feature (main page, right hand side). The UK country site http://www.lds.org.uk also has an "On This Day in Church History" feature displayed in a box on the main page.

Similie Timeline

Posted: Wed Sep 10, 2008 9:15 pm
by dlongmore
Here is a tool that would do a very good job of handling this.

http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/

Posted: Wed Sep 10, 2008 9:31 pm
by mkmurray
dlongmore wrote:Here is a tool that would do a very good job of handling this.

http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/
Funny you should mention this link; here is a tool the Church is developing right now based on that project:

http://tech.lds.org/wiki/index.php/Chur ... pplication

Because it is on the LDS Tech Wiki, it appears they would like the Community to get involved. I'm sure more details are to come.

Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2008 2:09 pm
by Kent Larsen-p40
mkmurray wrote:Funny you should mention this link; here is a tool the Church is developing right now based on that project:

http://tech.lds.org/wiki/index.php/Chur ... pplication

Because it is on the LDS Tech Wiki, it appears they would like the Community to get involved. I'm sure more details are to come.
If you ask me the biggest difficulty here is not the application, its the data.

I've seen a couple different independent efforts to do just this. They have relied on a combination of Andrew Jensen's Church Chronology and information from the Deseret News Church Almanac.

The problem is that the data after about 1900 or 1910 is reduced to "Some Stake Somewhere was formed in 19XX" or "Mission Somewhere else was formed in 19YY" or even "Temple Somethingorother was dedicated in 19ZZ"

THIS MAKES IT BORING!!

Its really too bad, because interesting things were happening -- things that affect us today but are mostly forgotten.

And if you provide data that only covers the 19th Century, aren't you saying that the Church has stagnated since then?

I think that if you want a project like this to be truly useful and interesting, you need to involve some folks that are interested in the Church in the 20th Century -- people that can come up with the interesting data.

Perhaps the way to do this is to allow the community to help collect the data also? After all, there is an ongoing need to add new data, isn't there?

Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2008 4:30 pm
by russellhltn
Kent Larsen wrote:The problem is that the data after about 1900 or 1910 is reduced to "Some Stake Somewhere was formed in 19XX" or "Mission Somewhere else was formed in 19YY" or even "Temple Somethingorother was dedicated in 19ZZ"

THIS MAKES IT BORING!!
Well, unless it's the stake or temple district you live in. :) So it would be nice to do this is "layers" that allow you to turn on/off history according to your interests.

Now, I'm sure someone would find the date that the church started doing membership records using OCR Font typewriters, started MIS/FIS, and MLS boring too. :D

Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 1:04 pm
by Kent Larsen-p40
RussellHltn wrote:Well, unless it's the stake or temple district you live in. :) So it would be nice to do this is "layers" that allow you to turn on/off history according to your interests.

Now, I'm sure someone would find the date that the church started doing membership records using OCR Font typewriters, started MIS/FIS, and MLS boring too. :D
Well, just to drive home the point, layers isn't the only thing needed.

The system needs a way that data can be added. New events, newly discovered events, events that users think are important.

I'm not saying that the system should be open like Wikipedia, so that everyone can add data (I'm sure we would get a lot of anti-Mormon activity that way), but I do think that allowing new data to be added would make the system much more interesting, and draw a lot more users.