James Burke · Connections
Connections knowledge graph
A prerequisite map of the inventions, ideas, systems, events, and people that show up across James Burke’s Connections series. Nodes are the things; edges mean “builds on / is a prerequisite for.” Time runs bottom to top: older knowledge lower, newer knowledge higher.
Explore the 3D graph
Filter by type and time period. Matching nodes stay bright; the rest go grey so the shape of the whole map stays visible.
Open graph →Guided presentation
Slide text on top, live graph below. Narration lights the relevant eras as it talks through the industrial cluster and the deep-time backbone.
Play presentation →Portrait video
Shareable vertical cut of the same story: density by era, the missing present as a date stamp, and why the sparse early links are high-signal.
Watch video →One insight the filters make obvious: about 69% of the graph sits in the Industrial Revolution band. Coverage thins before 1760 and after 1945. The empty top is mostly a fingerprint of when the series was made. The thinner deep-time links that still made it in are often the high-signal ones — worth keeping even when the editorial center of gravity was factories and engines.