Magic Studio

This is a bit of a ‘niche’ post, but anyone interested in history and illustrating the relationships between historical events may find it useful!

I was in Norway last week, teaching at the University of Agder in Kristiansand (right down in the south of the country), for the 2008 European Integration Summer School, which has been run almost every year since 1999 for graduate students of all ages.

Here’s a picture of the University, in case you’re wondering what it looks like:

Anyway, the course focusses on policies and policy-making in the European Union and part of the challenge is trying to make sense of the 50+ years of European Integration.  So, we decided to use Magic Studio to build some timelines and help create some sense of perspective.

The first challenge was to ‘plot’ a number of significant events that have helped to shape the EU as we know it today, so we decided to use the Treaty creation and amendment dates – since the EU is based on a legal framework.  You can see the finished timeline here.

All fairly straightforward. One of the key issues is that in the last 20 years there have been a much greater number of Treaty amendments and of a much more substantive nature than in the 30 years following the original Treaty of Rome. There are good reasons for that (which I won’t go into here, but it’s all to do with having to negotiate more often to deal with increasingly difficult issues).

Following on from that, we also wanted to show these legal landmarks related to other historical events in the history of the EU. In this example, we made a copy of our original timeline but also plotted the various enlargements that have taken the original 6 Member States to the 27 we have today:

The process of constructing the parallel topics and related events enabled us to illustrate the relationship between the outcome of the Treaty-amending negotiations and the enlargements themselves.

There, I told you it was a bit of a ‘niche’ post!