The Futures Past Archive is designed primarily with teaching in mind, but may also be useful for researchers who wish to view broad trends in the relationship between speculative writing and real-world advances. As a teaching resource, the FPA will provide an accessible overview of the literature in a given speculative area, such as germ theory or telegraphy. These can serve as starting points for student research or inspire deeper examinations of the wider relationship between imagination and invention. Alternatively, the timelines presented in the FPA could suggest new ways of examining current discourses of technology, creativity, and invention.

Ideally, the FPA will have a crowdsourced component where researchers will add to the various categories, possibly taking responsibility for a category and receiving attribution for its stewardship. However, a great deal of information will need to be present on the site before crowdsourcing becomes a possibility. For my categories, I will look to resources such as Wikipedia for lists, images, and other information on imaginative works and historical technological developments, which will constitute a kind of second-hand crowdsourcing. At this stage, the value of the project will lie primarily in the arrangement of the timelines and the “distant reading” component of the visualizations.

I intend to create the FPA using Flask, a web framework for Python. I will also use Javascript to create the timelines that will appear on each page. Initially, I will choose a small number of technologies (5-10) to present, and can expand the selection once those have been implemented. My MVP will have these components:

1. A home page with stylized images of technological categories.
2. Two timelines for each category.
3. Information pages on the theoretical basis for the project.

To achieve this, I will need to scrape data from Wikipedia and other sources and store it in a structured way, and for this I will use Python and mySQL, respectively.

Larger Scale Project

Ultimately, I would like to see the Futures Past Archive benefit from the crowdsourcing efforts of scholars and enthusiasts of both science fiction and science writing. It may be too much to hope that contributors will congregate organically, but one way to begin small-scale crowd sourcing might be to reach out to domain experts in certain technologies, such as experts in the Victorian railway or the Napoleonic semaphore, and have them curate a category. These scholars would receive attribution on the site, and with some grant funding, the FPA might even be able to offer small honoraria for these efforts.

Eventually, I would like the FPA to be a comprehensive resource for the comparison of science fiction, speculative nonfiction, and real-world scientific developments. Such a comprehensive tool might give some insight into the relationship between scientific writing and scientific practice, or at the very least show the messy back-and-forth of cultural supposition and practical technological advancement. I would also like the FPA to be visually appealing, making it more attractive to students and the interested public rather than a small set of specialized historians and literary scholars.