Man, I was about to go on a proper rant and claim that the site didn’t have every battle because it’s missing the battle of Maiden Castle…
I claim no great historical authority here but, since I grew up mostly within sight of the hillfort, we were taught about its history at school to an extent that, at the time, felt unrelenting, cruelly repetitive, and utterly tedious. In reality though, it probably lasted for a single term at the fag end of 1985 when we learned about the Celts[0].
But what we learned was that General Vespasian captured Maiden Castle after a brutal one day battle in AD 43 in which Maiden Castle’s Celtic defenders were slaughtered in what amounted to a one-sided rout due to the superior weapons, tactics, and discipline of the Romans. This is what I remembered, but I wanted to look it up to ensure my facts were straight.
Welp… TIL because subsequent investigation and analysis has shown that it didn’t happen at all so, no, dear reader, my “facts” were not straight.
There never was any big battle.
There might have been the odd smaller skirmish during the Roman period, but the bodies we found that were all supposed to have died in the big battle actually span several generations, dying at different times over a period of a couple of hundred years, and the evidence of violence in their deaths was in the vast majority of cases inter-tribal and occurred before the Romans even showed up.
Maiden Castle had already fallen into decline by the time the Romans arrived and was mostly abandoned for a long period until a temple (that you can still visit the ruins of) was built early in the 4th century.
So the reason the battle of Maiden Castle doesn’t appear on the site isn’t because the site is carelessly built AI-slop but because no such battle ever happened.
I have been… disillusioned. Hats off to the human behind the AI that built the site.
[0] I remember this with such precision because it was the first period of history we learned about at middle school, and matters didn’t improve significantly, because next it was the domestic matters of the bleeding Victorians, and lots of episodes of “How we used to live”.
Working great on desktop, and seems accurate for major battles at least. I'm impressed, personally, and I'd be happy to see a lot more use of AI for these types of educational tools.
My only frustration is that AI use is not acknowledged or clearly described, and that sources are not linked to translation/edition/pages. That would have been appreciated.
looks fine on desktop. def AI, but I don't find it off-putting.
I think with AI we'll see a lot more of these little data viz projects that look good on machines like the one they were developed on, with little care for other devices.
Its not so bad. Before AI this information might not be even this accessible.
I think the data visualization component of these things are neat (ive been making stuff myself) -- since all the scaffolding and editing is super easy. I always have real questions around the underlying data though. It seems like the effort to put the site up is low, thus the vetting of data is probably very low.
When you present data to real life human beings you need to make your visualizations clearer. The map is OK, but literally everything else is nonsensical to me. Please take this as constructive feedback, because you can make something very cool with this data.
I disagree to an extent. A person did will this into existence and found the results interesting. People should be curious and share what they find! But, they need to present the things they find in a way that makes sense to them and others. Otherwise it's just sloppy.
The Romans in the 1400s still called themselves Romans and saw themselves as Romans (in Greek: Rhomaioi). They never stopped.
So, no, it's not at all like calling the Iraq war a British Empire endeavour.
It was our own much later civilisation that made the historical distinction between the older East and West combined "Roman Empire" and its continuation in the East (and sometimes in the West) post ~476 AD ("Byzantine Empire"). The Romans themselves never saw the distinction.
> An empire is an ideology which emanates from a seat of power.
Yes, not from a fixed physical location. If the empire fell when rome ceased to be "the seat of power" it was no longer the Roman empire by ~300 AD was it? Diocletian was larping...
The Roman empire continiously changed and evolved. The empire in ~300 AD wouldn't have made any sense to Romans from 100 BC (and probably a lot more sense to the Romans from 1000 AD)
Not at all. There was direct continuity here -- the Romans remained Romans in their eyes and never stopped. Indeed, the capital of the Empire never changed between 324 (well within what you'd call the Roman Empire) and 1204 (well into what you'd call the Byzantine Empire, when it was sacked and occupied by the Fourth Crusade).
The issue is that you are viewing a single entity differently, because of a hack in the way history was taught, biased by a Western Catholic church-based perspective.
The nature of being Roman changed from the early days of Rome to the final fall of the last remaining bastions in Crimea in the 1470s, of course. But the Republic was different to the early Empire, was different to the Empire in the 3rd century, was very different to the Empire in the 4th century, was different again to the Empire in the 6th century, was different to the Empire in the 9th and 10th centuries, etc, etc.
But that's no different to me pointing out that the way people thought and lived and worked in the United States in the late eighteenth century was very different to how they live now in the 21st century. But we still consider these people to be American.
"with several scholars identifying the "Dmitry", one of the three Golden Horde princes in the Battle of Blue Waters (c. 1362/1363), with a Prince of Gothia."
Certainly a good source of linked data. I was just using it to investigate why there's a fort called "Babylon" in Egypt, and then admiring the well-preserved brickwork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_Fortress
The map is good but you need to spend some time getting rid of all the crap that claude added around it. Make the map the focus, spend some effort thinking about how you want to present additional information, figure out how to tell a better story. People are saying "slop" because it looks like every other AI website out there right now.
Yer, LLMs are amazing at pushing the code out, but they are still far from understanding the project's intent within its broader context and constructing its presentation in a universally tasteful manner.
I claim no great historical authority here but, since I grew up mostly within sight of the hillfort, we were taught about its history at school to an extent that, at the time, felt unrelenting, cruelly repetitive, and utterly tedious. In reality though, it probably lasted for a single term at the fag end of 1985 when we learned about the Celts[0].
But what we learned was that General Vespasian captured Maiden Castle after a brutal one day battle in AD 43 in which Maiden Castle’s Celtic defenders were slaughtered in what amounted to a one-sided rout due to the superior weapons, tactics, and discipline of the Romans. This is what I remembered, but I wanted to look it up to ensure my facts were straight.
Welp… TIL because subsequent investigation and analysis has shown that it didn’t happen at all so, no, dear reader, my “facts” were not straight.
There never was any big battle.
There might have been the odd smaller skirmish during the Roman period, but the bodies we found that were all supposed to have died in the big battle actually span several generations, dying at different times over a period of a couple of hundred years, and the evidence of violence in their deaths was in the vast majority of cases inter-tribal and occurred before the Romans even showed up.
Maiden Castle had already fallen into decline by the time the Romans arrived and was mostly abandoned for a long period until a temple (that you can still visit the ruins of) was built early in the 4th century.
So the reason the battle of Maiden Castle doesn’t appear on the site isn’t because the site is carelessly built AI-slop but because no such battle ever happened.
I have been… disillusioned. Hats off to the human behind the AI that built the site.
[0] I remember this with such precision because it was the first period of history we learned about at middle school, and matters didn’t improve significantly, because next it was the domestic matters of the bleeding Victorians, and lots of episodes of “How we used to live”.
congrats and thank you for the detailed post!
My only frustration is that AI use is not acknowledged or clearly described, and that sources are not linked to translation/edition/pages. That would have been appreciated.
I think with AI we'll see a lot more of these little data viz projects that look good on machines like the one they were developed on, with little care for other devices.
Its not so bad. Before AI this information might not be even this accessible.
"1480"is like calling the Iraq war a British Empire endeavour imo.
So, no, it's not at all like calling the Iraq war a British Empire endeavour.
It was our own much later civilisation that made the historical distinction between the older East and West combined "Roman Empire" and its continuation in the East (and sometimes in the West) post ~476 AD ("Byzantine Empire"). The Romans themselves never saw the distinction.
An empire is an ideology which emanates from a seat of power. Byzantium != Rome. It's different in multiple ways.
People call themselves European all over European. It doesn't mean Spain = Portugal. It's a larp.
Yes, not from a fixed physical location. If the empire fell when rome ceased to be "the seat of power" it was no longer the Roman empire by ~300 AD was it? Diocletian was larping...
The Roman empire continiously changed and evolved. The empire in ~300 AD wouldn't have made any sense to Romans from 100 BC (and probably a lot more sense to the Romans from 1000 AD)
The issue is that you are viewing a single entity differently, because of a hack in the way history was taught, biased by a Western Catholic church-based perspective.
The nature of being Roman changed from the early days of Rome to the final fall of the last remaining bastions in Crimea in the 1470s, of course. But the Republic was different to the early Empire, was different to the Empire in the 3rd century, was very different to the Empire in the 4th century, was different again to the Empire in the 6th century, was different to the Empire in the 9th and 10th centuries, etc, etc.
But that's no different to me pointing out that the way people thought and lived and worked in the United States in the late eighteenth century was very different to how they live now in the 21st century. But we still consider these people to be American.
"with several scholars identifying the "Dmitry", one of the three Golden Horde princes in the Battle of Blue Waters (c. 1362/1363), with a Prince of Gothia."
[sorry, I'm old school. I still Wikipedia is a damn good single source of truth]