timescape

plural timescapes

1. A perspective over a period (particularly a long period) of time.

   The entire human and most of the animal and vegetable genetic stock now found in Britain and Ireland arrived (and continues to arrive) over the last 12,000 years. That fact alone, it is suggested, offers a new longue duree (or ‘timescape’) for population history.

   2010, David Rollison, “What Came Before: Antecedent Structures and Emergent Themes”, in A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 33

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   Our timescape of life is really a picture showing the fluctuating diversity of life over the past 700 million years. There was little diversity before that time owing to the dominance of blue-green algae. What our timescape shows is, as expected, a number of surges in the diversity of life: […]

   1996, Graeme Donald Snooks, “Players in the Game”, in The Dynamic Society: Exploring the Sources of Global Change, London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 43

   With the idea of the timescape, I seek to achieve an extension of the landscape perspective, that is, to develop an analogous receptiveness to temporal interdependencies and absences, and to grasp environmental phenomena as complex temporal, contextually specific wholes. This involves a shift in emphasis not just from space to time but, more importantly, to that which is invisible and outside the capacity of our senses.

   1998, Barbara Adam, “Nature Re/Constituted and Re/Conceptualised: Mapping the Scope of Industrial Traditions of Thought”, in Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards (Global Environmental Change Series), London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, pages 54–55

   [Albert] Einstein […] believed in a ‘block’ conception of time – or ‘timescape’, as it is more popularly known – where all events in the temporal series are, as it were, laid out alongside one another tenselessly. On these terms, the flow of time from past to future, in particular the notion of the presentness of the Now, should at best be seen as functions of a finite subject’s limited perspective on the timescape.

   2003, Paul Crowther, Philosophy after Postmodernism: Civilized Values and the Scope of Knowledge (Routledge Studies in Twentieth Century Philosophy; 16), London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 112

   The painter's term landscape refers to a picture representing a given scenery, as distinct from a portrait or a still life depicting objects. A timescape is made of recognizable time areas, with permeable borders—private and public time, past, present and future time, home time and work time, etc.—all of which exist within a geography of space.

   2004, Gabriele Morello, “Spacing and Timing in Leisure Activities”, in Klaus Weiermair, Christine Mathies, editors, The Tourism and Leisure Industry: Shaping the Future, Binghamton, N.Y.: The Haworth Hospitality Press, →ISBN, page 73

   Faust I grew from the basis of a Sturm-und-Drang text concerned with addressing contemporary problems through culturally original and relevant materials into a fully-fledged representation of the cultural historicity of modernity. This development was driven by the desire to approach universals by integrating historical particulars into a temporally progressive and cumulative structure. It produced a complex mythic timescape, which stretches throughout modernity, but frequently also alludes to pre-modern elements, both classical-ancient and Northern-archaic. Contained in this timescape [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe presents complex constellations within modernity between the "original" and the "advanced", and between ancient and modern.

   2006, Maike Oergel, “Historicity as Identity: The German Myth of Modernity in Goethe’s Faust I”, in Culture and Identity: Historicity in German Literature and Thought 1770–1815, Berlin; New York, N.Y.: Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 225

2. literatureA multi-dimensional view of time, especially one in which time travel occurs.

   timescape n. time conceived of, or perceived as, possessing multiple dimensions.

   [2007, “timescape”, in Jeff Prucher, editor, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 241

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   My awareness extended beyond human memory and I drifted, lost in the crevices of the now visible Timescape. Then a point of light beckoned me and I strove for it. The light became the memory of my personality and I dove into it. I swirled in an ever-tightening spiral. I was all eight of my great-grand parents, I was both of my grandfathers and both of my grandmothers, I was my mother and my father and, finally, I was Jonathan Crowe again and I could now reflect upon what had been done to me.

   2008 April 17, Jefferson R. Weekley, “The Pool of Blood”, in Red Earth, Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 214

   [Mark] Zuckerberg is pursued throughout the timescape by the litigious Winklevoss twins, who operate a time machine bought for them by their daddy. Zuckerberg must constantly leap to and fro throughout the centuries in order to duck summonses.

   2011, Travis Harmon, Jonathan Shockley, “Introduction”, in Let There Be Facebook: Status Updates from God, Gaga, and Everyone in between, New York, N.Y.: Touchstone Books, →ISBN, page vii, footnote 2