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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@JubalBarca History grad here. A commendable thread. As your rightly allude to history is a question of interpretation but basic facts are basic facts - the framework of such interpretation.
Worryingly, this sort of tool is a prescription to what history is for those who can't be bothered to search further, symptomatic of AI culture and reductive degradation.
Xx
Nov 6, 2026, 6:55 PM@JubalBarca thank you for this thread. from one fellow historian to another 🔥🔥🔥🎯🎯🎯🔥🔥🔥
@JubalBarca "it's real work"
I think there's the rub: an awful lot of people who use generative "AI" (esp LLM-based tools) just don't wanna.
@JubalBarca (I've just checked, and: no Battle of Clontarf, no Battle of Hastings, no Battle of the Boyne.. gurrl whaaat..?)
@clickhere @JubalBarca they're literally the only battles I can name!
@urbanfoxe @JubalBarca Haha! Pfft, sure they're the only battles *worth* naming.
@essjayjay @urbanfoxe No, never; notwithstanding the name, I guess I was categorising "battles" differently.. 😬
@essjayjay @clickhere tbh I had to look it up...
@clickhere @urbanfoxe @JubalBarca don't forget the battle of pinkie , part of the rough wooing campaign
@JubalBarca "Historical data isn't like scientific data, it doesn't come polished."
Former biochemist here: A minor quibble but nor does scientific data. Especially so if it is the life sciences. It is (you would hope) more reproducible but it is not always polished.
Adding because I wouldn't want people to think that doing the equivalent thing with AI for scientific data would be any less likely to produce a lot of slop. It inevitably would.
@JubalBarca I’m in STEM, and I laughed at that bit. Some scientific data is well organised and annotated, but a huge amount is also an ungodly mess, with no raw source available, no clear ways of reproducing it, and on occasion produced through questionable means. So we’re all in the same boat really.
@Nicovel0 Yeah, polished was a very overblown word choice, mea culpa.
I think there are some real differences I was trying to get at re nominal reusability: even really very good historian-made data has a level of reader interpretation of sources that are simply not at all designed to provide that data or indeed be "truthful" as we would understand it, which adds some inherent reuse & data modelling problems.
But I definitely skipped over that too fast and picked the wrong word, my bad!
@JubalBarca oh it was not a criticism at all, it’s always fun to chat with my humanities/social sciences colleagues and get their view on what data they consider robust and why. And it is my strong belief that if more scientists did so they would be better scientists.
Nov 7, 2026, 12:27 PMI would argue that scientific data also comes skewed. I teach communications for scientists and one of the first things I teach is that science is political despite what they try to teach us. The data itself you can argue is apolitical but the decision of what data to collect is a political/social decision. Everything is political and all communication needs to understand the political nature of the ask. A lot fewer COVID deaths would have occurred if we understood that.
Thank you for this thread!
@JubalBarca Especially these points are very important. Thank you for your great analysis!