What is Emaki Frame?
Emaki (絵巻) is a traditional Japanese picture scroll: a long sheet of paper, read horizontally, that tells a story or the course of events as you unroll it, scene by scene. Famous examples include the 12th-century scrolls of The Tale of Genji. Here, that format becomes a zoomable digital scroll of history.
Emaki Frame is a shared framework for presenting a historical timeline as a “horizontally scrolling emaki (picture scroll).” Like a map app, zooming in reveals detailed events and people, and zooming out reveals the flow of the ages.
The mechanism of the screen (the frame) and its contents (the timeline) are kept separate. So Japanese history, world history and cosmic history all become scrolls in the same frame.
Open out, move in
The more you zoom in, the finer events and people appear. Zoom out and only the great flow of the ages remains.
Compressing eras
From 13.8 billion years to a few decades. The time scale stretches and shrinks era by era, so every period is laid out readably.
People and faces
Each person gets a face illustration, drawn automatically from settings even without an image.
Follow the connections
Link lines between events, and the events during a person’s lifetime, let you trace “why.”
Era transitions
At era boundaries, effects and cards fitting the age appear: seven kinds, including scroll, lightning, golden rain and ink.
No external libraries
It runs on standard browser features alone, with no special components.
Why we built it
Emaki Frame was developed for the history program of EduMuse (a learning platform based on cognitive science) by youside.me.
We often meet history as a subject of memorizing dates and terms. But at heart it is an accumulation of stories of people who worried, chose, and sometimes erred. We believe the very motion of surveying the whole flow at a glance and then moving in on what catches your interest is itself a clue to learning.
Every scroll carries the same tagline.
Study for learning.
Scrolls made with this frame
Japanese History EmakiFrom myth to the present. Follow the ages laid side by side, zooming in and out.
World History EmakiFour regions stacked vertically, with link lines showing how regions connect.
Cosmic History EmakiFrom the birth of the universe to the far future: 13.8 billion years on a single scroll.
Venues wanted: permanent exhibition
Would you like to show an emaki on a large touch display at a library, museum, tourist facility or similar? We provide a custom emaki and the Emaki Frame free of charge to venues with a public purpose and to local businesses that help revitalize their area.
Make your own emaki
If you would like to express your own life story, local history, or the history of a team or organization with this scroll UI, or embed it in your blog or company website, please contact youside.me.
About youside.me
youside.me is an independent, non-profit voluntary group that aims to gather up values hard to reduce to data or numbers and, through technology, make them a shared good (a digital commons) that anyone can use, learn from and nurture.
So that, in the shadow of efficiency and optimization, small noise, feelings that don’t divide neatly, the climate of a place, and each person’s story are not stripped away.
The official statement carries these words:
With structure and compassion, and free narrative,
beyond the frame.
Emaki Frame is an extension of that thinking. A structure (a frame) is a foothold for meeting stories, not a box that confines them.