YearThere

YearThere is a conceptual and practical framework for documenting, organizing, and presenting the events, artifacts, and social signals associated with a calendar year as a cohesive narrative. The term is often stylized as yearthere to emphasize the idea of a year existing as a distinct, recoverable period in cultural memory. While not a single software product, YearThere describes a family of digital archival approaches that combine data curation with timeline visualization.

The idea emerged in digital humanities and archival circles in the mid-2010s, with early pilots exploring single-year collections and basic event graphs. By the late 2010s, multiple institutions experimented with modular implementations that could be extended to multi-year archives, enabling cross-year comparisons and thematic analyses. Proponents view YearThere as a means to democratize access to yearly histories by combining primary sources, media, and annotations in an open, navigable format.

Core features typically include an event-centric timeline, a data model that accommodates events, people, places, and media, and a citation-driven workflow for submissions. Visualization tools provide interactive timelines, location-based mappings, and cross-year comparisons, while application programming interfaces enable researchers to query and export data. Governance practices emphasize transparent sourcing, reproducibility, and community moderation, with attention to privacy and ethical considerations when handling sensitive material.

Reception has been mixed. Advocates highlight potential for education, journalism, and historical literacy, whereas critics point to biases in source selection, uneven coverage across regions, and the risk of oversimplifying complex realities into yearly summaries. Related concepts include year in review, timeline visualization, and digital archives.