> This is a regurgitation of the old critique of history: what's it's purpose? What do you use it for? What is its application?

Feeling a bit defensive? That is not at all my point; I value history highly and read it regularly. I care about it, thus my questions:

> gives us an interactive compression of the views from a specific point in history without the subsequent coloring by the actual events of history.

What validity does this 'compression' have? What is the definition of a 'compression'? For example, I could create random statistics or verbiage from the data; why would that be any better or worse than this 'compression'?

Interactivity seems to be a negative: It's fun, but it would seem to highly distort the information output from the data, and omits the most valuable parts (unless we luckily stumble across it). I'd much rather have a systematic presentation of the data.

These critiques are not the end of the line; they are step in innovation, which of course raises challenging questions and, if successful, adapts to the problems. But we still need to grapple with them.