I'm thinking someone must've done this already. An idea I've had for a while: large-scale interactive website. Can zoom in or out, pan along multiple timelines. Can filter certain trends--for instance, technological growth, territorial expansions, economic patterns, politics, religions, resources, agriculture, musical trends, and so forth. Enables you to see, if you zoom far enough out, thousands of years describing the evolution of literature, the rise and fall of empires, and so forth. Would be heavily database intensive, very data-centric. The main feature would be the user's ability to search for specific criteria, and the tool would output the data in beautifully designed graphs, either as static images, or animated timelines.
Has this been done already? I do understand the difficulties involved in creating such a thing, the limits of data aggregation, librarian science having its limitations, questions as how to qualify or quantify the data in question, etc, but I'm hoping small strides at least have been made towards such an idea.