Loreline (loreline.live) is a collaborative story platform where anyone can upload footage, photos, and clips and assemble them into a "loreline", a living visual story that plays back in chronological order, with scenes ordered by the real date they happened.

How does Loreline work?

Each loreline is a timeline of scenes (photos, video clips, or embedded media such as YouTube). Scenes are placed by their real capture date, so the finished loreline plays back as a chronological story. Multiple people can contribute to the same public loreline, so the story grows and evolves over time.

What can you do on Loreline?

You can create your own story from scratch, browse and watch public lorelines on topics like history, music, sports, film, and culture, contribute footage to open community stories, and embed any public loreline into a blog or article.

Is Loreline the same as the open-source interactive-fiction language?

No. loreline.live is a collaborative story platform for building chronological visual stories. It is unrelated to any same-named programming or interactive-fiction language.

Science

96 public collections on Loreline.

Documentaries

DiamagnetismEvery ordinary substance, water, wood, glass, a frog, is very weakly repelled by a magnet. Anton Brugmans noticed it in a piece of bismuth in 1778; Michael Faraday proved in November 1845 that it is a property of all matter and gave it a name; and in 1997 Andre Geim floated a live frog on the strength of it. The 250-year story of the weakest form of magnetism, and of what people have built on it since.
Chaos TheoryOrder hidden in disorder, the science of the butterfly effect. From Poincaré and Lorenz to fractals, strange attractors and the Mandelbrot set: how simple rules produce endless, beautiful unpredictability.
Near Death ExperiencesAn archive of what people report when they come close to dying, and of the research that has tried to account for it. It runs from Raymond Moody putting the term into general use in 1975, through Kenneth Ring and Bruce Greyson building scales to measure what experiencers describe, to the prospective cardiac-arrest studies: Pim van Lommel following 344 resuscitated patients for the Lancet, and Sam Parnia placing hidden images where only someone above the bed could see them. It holds the physiological accounts alongside them, which are a quarter of the archive: the gamma surge measured in the dying brain, the sensation of leaving the body produced by stimulating the right angular gyrus in one patient, the anaesthetic and REM models, and the oxygen research. That people report these experiences is documented and stated plainly here. What the experiences mean is contested, so every interpretation is attributed to whoever holds it, findings say what was measured and how many people were in the study, and the points where researchers genuinely disagree have a section of their own. Two things are worth knowing before you start. No hidden visual target has ever been identified in any prospective study, which is what the researchers themselves report. The physiological and sceptical research is represented here in proportion to what its authors have put on the public record, which is less than the experiential material: the papers are published, but far fewer of them are filmed. And every scene carries the day it was published, not the date of the events it describes: almost none of this material survives as period footage, so a talk published in 2024 about a 1991 operation is filed on the day it appeared, and the caption tells you what it is about.
MedicineSeven thousand years of trying to fix the human body, told through what survives: trepanned skulls and bronze acupuncture figures, anatomical theatres and plague broadsides, the first ether operation and the first vaccine, iron lungs and X-ray tubes, midwives and asylums and field hospitals. It follows the instruments and the buildings as much as the discoveries, because those are what the record actually holds. Where medicine did harm, and it did a great deal, that is here too, stated once and plainly. The patients in these pictures did not choose to be in them, and the archive is built to respect that.
UndergroundWe live on a thin skin. Beneath it are voids that water spent millions of years dissolving, shafts people sank looking for salt and gold and coal, cities carved out of soft rock by populations hiding from armies, and a biosphere of microbes that may outweigh everything walking around up here. Below all of that is a planet we have never seen and never will, the deepest hole ever drilled reached twelve kilometres and stopped, which is not quite a third of the way through the crust, let alone the six thousand to the centre. Everything we know about the inside of the Earth we learned by listening to earthquakes. The underground is also where the record is kept: it buried Pompeii and preserved it, held Tutankhamun for three thousand years, and kept the oldest art anyone has found on walls that no daylight ever reached. This archive goes down through all of it, the caves, the mines, the digs, the tunnels, the life, the descent, the deep earth, and the underworld people imagined long before they could measure any of it.
Deep-Sea ExplorationInto the abyss, the machines, explorers and creatures of the deep ocean, from HMS Challenger and the bathysphere to Alvin, the Titanic, hydrothermal vents and the ROVs mapping the sea floor today.

Loreline, a collaborative story platform

What is Loreline?

How does Loreline work?

What can you do on Loreline?

Is Loreline the same as the open-source interactive-fiction language?

Science

Documentaries

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