Joseph Priestley’s A Chart of Biography was one of the first examples of a timeline in its current form. The first edition was printed in 1764, and it was reprinted in various editions. Data from the 1st (1764) and 1778 editions are included in this package. A Chart of Biography visualizes the lifespans of more than 2,000 famous individuals from 1300 BCE to 1800 CE. A smaller example chart, “A Specimen of a Chart of Biography”, is displayed below.
This R package contains the data from that chart. It comprises three data sets.
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Biographiescontains names, occupations, birth dates, and death dates of the approximately 2,000 individuals in the full chart. -
Kingcontains names and dates of the rulers of major empires, which was used to annotate the axis of the chart. -
Specimencontains the names, occupations, birth dates, and death dates of the individuals in the “Speciment” chart.
priestley is not on CRAN. It can be installed using
