Biograph¶
Biograph turns a single biographical source — a paper, an oral history, an archive — into a small, explorable knowledge graph that is also a chronological timeline. Point it at one subject's structured data and it builds a self-contained HTML page with three linked ways to explore that person's life: a network graph, a world map, and a chronological milestones reel.
It is deliberately narrow. Four JSON files per subject, each validated against a JSON Schema, are enough to model a biography tightly: who and what (entities), what happened and when (events), how things connect (relations), and where every claim comes from (sources). The goal is a model tight enough that two different people extracting from the same paper would produce essentially the same data — see Data Accuracy & Provenance for how that discipline is enforced.
Why a graph and a timeline¶
Most biographical tools pick one: a family-tree-style graph, or a timeline. Biograph treats them as two views of the same underlying data. Every event is dated (however fuzzily) and connects the people, places, organizations, and things involved in it. Click a person in the network view and their slice of the timeline highlights; click an event on the timeline and the graph highlights everyone who was there. The Map and Milestones views are two more lenses on that same data — no separate content to maintain.
Try it now¶
The repository ships one worked example: subjects/suntola/, extracted
from Puurunen (2014)'s history of Tuomo Suntola's invention of Atomic
Layer Epitaxy — 67 entities, 42 events, 50 relations. Build it and open it:
Then open dist/suntola.html directly in a browser — no server required.
See Getting Started for the full walkthrough.
What's in this documentation¶
- Tech stack — what Biograph is built from, front end and build side.
- Getting Started — install the one dependency, build the example subject, open it.
- Usage Guide — the build/validate CLI, and the full step-by-step process for adding a new subject from a source paper.
- Architecture — the data model (the four JSON files, the controlled vocabularies, the fuzzy-date chronology mechanism) and the frontend (the three views, how selection state stays in sync across them).
- Data Accuracy & Provenance — the citation discipline, schema validation, and the verification tiers used before any portrait or map coordinate is added.
- Extending & Contributing — adding vocabulary values, cross-subject bridges, and where the project goes from here.