This isn't the first data-scrape/AI history attempt I've seen and I'm sure there'll be more. If this sounds negative, it's not to dunk on this guy in particular: rather, it's because I really think it's important for you, dear reader, to carefully think about these problems. We're going to face more of them in public history - and it's going to exacerbate existing problems with how we ensure good quality information gets a hearing. I hope we can learn to do better.

Here endeth the thread.

Historical data isn't like scientific data, it doesn't come polished. Everything is skewed and incomplete, and we need data visualisations that help people understand that rather than pretending a sense of completeness that isn't there. This sort of tool doesn't make those recognitions and doesn't appear to have had any significant spot checks or discussions with experts, and the result is something that is frequently a misleading mess at best and runs into real ethics questions at worst.

Whilst I'm very far from the end of academia that thinks academia has all the answers, in this case we do have quite a few of them. First, tools like this need to come with a lot more clarity in what they do *and don't* show, making clear their limitations to public users. Engage with scholarship on what you're trying to do: good historical data-vis isn't a few days' project with Claude, it's real work. Finally, talk to a historian, or if you want to do global history, quite a lot of historians.

I don't think that the author of this tool intended it to be what it is - but what I see in it is mostly a replicator that hardens existing biases in its sources and presents them as data-visualised fact. When it comes to things like erasing the complexity of recent political arrangements that affect people today, or wiping out indigenous histories in colonised parts of the world, then I think there is a real ethical problem with that as a way of approaching how we view and explore the past.

There's an underlying problem with a data-scraping/AI approach to this though which is that we end up reflecting the data quantity biases in Wikipedia (largely written by western Europeans/N Americans & wildly skewed in its topic matter) and, where AI is involved, derived from general pop historiography because a large language model's weights will not default to more complex representations than the average, and the average by statistical weight is rooted in very old fashioned histories.

So why does all this end up being the case? I think firstly it derives from wanting to flatten history into something that's just too simplified. Categories like civilisations and empires and realms often do a lot of historiographical work, and visualisations like this present them as consistently *the same type* of entity, even if some are city-state collections and not unified polities at all. There is no one model of what a "civilisation" is and political power overlaps a lot in reality.

Or take the Mkhargrdzeli family - whose domains are just treated as part of the Kingdom of Georgia, and it's true that they were officials at the Georgian court but they also have inscriptions proclaiming themselves as kings despite being vassals of the Georgian monarchs, because that was a culture & period where kingship and "independence" did not need to be aligned (actually quite common).

Even modern political structures don't work well on border maps, as we saw earlier with the Czechoslovakia problem. Premodern ones work far, far worse. English kings held land in France at times *as vassals of the French king with respect to that land*, so is that English land or French? Map-painting also obscures many ways of life: giant blobs for nomadic peoples with labels like "Kipchak confederation" do no justice to the actual ways that people interacted with or controlled territory.

The next problem to consider is what creates a 'top level' unit. "Independence?" What does that even mean? Many historical leaders were concerned with stability and extent of power more than "independence" in a modern-state sense.

The approach here is totally confused. 1366 Touraine here is a "civilisation" despite being a (misplaced) county: Isaac Komnenos' independent Cyprus in 1188 is Byzantine which would have been news to the Byzantines who had recently lost a fleet trying to recapture it.

First, map gaps. Some of these are just nonsensical, like the example below where some parts of the 1616 Holy Roman Empire are apparently non-entities.

Some are more troubling though. Oceania is a blank space before British colonisation in Australia: the pre-colonial histories of Australia and Aotearoa are relegated to "non-civilisation", erased entirely. Even some known cultures like the Hopewell are absent: the computer is unthinkingly replicating the full colonial model of who gets seen.

I think this is an inherent issue - I could keep generating casual spot-check problems like that for weeks if I had the time to do so, the scope of human history is large enough that this sort of auto-processing will always produce these levels of errors. You do need historians to do history!

I also think there are some even more fundamental issues with the data-vis, though - ways that this events-and-civilisations model distorts our understanding of the past more than supporting it.

Much of the data is just wrong, clearly misinterpreting the relative independence of different places. Probably really quite a lot of it, since the spot-checks I've been able to do at a glance have found a bunch of issues.

Here we have Czechoslovakia being treated as part of the USSR after the Prague Spring (no, still in the Warsaw Pact), South Vietnam in 1970 as a direct US territory (nope!), Scotland in 1616 labelled as England, and San Marino apparently losing independence in 1799.

OK, I just saw someone posting about a project called Terra Tempora (https://terra-tempora.com/?ref=mastodon), which claims to let you "scroll through history", searching for battles, treaties, and "tracking civilisations".

Unfortunately the whole thing is a classic object lesson in why we shouldn't entrust our understanding of history to data scraping and AI processing, which is pretty clearly a core basis for the project. Here's some examples.

#History #DigitalHumanities #DataViz #Histodons

I was pleased to see in #UKPol news that the Liberal Democrat conference voted overwhelmingly to bring forward & then pass the Restoring Trans Rights motion at their conference today, opposing the discriminatory & unworkable EHRC guidance and calling for reversing it, amending the relevant laws, and implementing better structural measures to protect trans people.

Worth taking the good news when we can get it. Solidarity with friends who are getting TERF-dogpiled over it.

#TransRights

That's such an unimaginably horrible realisation that we shy away from recognising it, but it's true and we have to confront it if we want to keep children safe. Locking them out of online contact is likely to isolate that block of vulnerable children to a worse degree. Furthermore, when children go on social media anyway, which they will do, they're now doing something illegal, which makes it much *harder* for them to ask an adult for help when something goes wrong online.

But also, for child protection, this is a double-edged sword. Yes, social media exposes some children to things they should never see, but it also exposes children who've been brought up in terrible situations to the possibility that what they're facing is wrong and an alternative world exists. Britain has for decades been obsessed with the danger of strangers, but statistically it has always been the case that more children are under threat from members of their immediate family and community.

A blanket ban on social media for under-16s is the wrong choice. It's not working in Australia, and it won't work in the UK.

Social media harms don't magically stop affecting people as they get older. Bans are also rarely difficult to circumvent. So by failing to ask the social media companies to bear any cost - cleaning up their act, making them legally responsible for content they actively recommend and promote through their content algorithms - Starmer has failed to tackle the problem.

Been having a paperwork day. Realised I screwed up some paperwork which will probably cost me another couple of hundred euros in not being able to get reimbursements for doing my job.

It was my mistake, but still, feels like the world shouldn't really work like that. Feels like someone like me having paperwork days to wade through this stuff probably isn't doing anyone much good either really?

Feeling small, sighing big.

#academia #histodons #universities

"A time-teller? Then what does it say the time is? Badger, surely you must know these things." yipped the fox, circling excitedly around the old octagonal stone.

The badger stood on her hindlegs and looked at the object ponderously, patting the pointer with her paw and assessing it from different angles.

"I think it's wintertime," she said, finally.

#Winter #MicroFiction #WritingCommunity

So you know there are some people with birthdays that get overshadowed by Christmas?

Well, there's a saint who has the same fate! Anastasia of Sirmium's feast day is on December 25, which I think ought to make her the patron of people who have overshadowed other things in their Christmases (and she's actually a patron of apothecaries and healers).

So, happy feast day of Anastasia of Sirmium to all of you who need it: I hope you have a peaceful day.