A Review of Livius

As an assignment for my public history seminar, we were required to review an historical website. For my own target, I chose Livius - Articles on Ancient History, created and maintained by Jona Lendering in Amsterdam. This site has been around for a long time, as I'll mention below, and I've been familiar with it for most of its existence. I hadn't looked at it in a few years as of the assignment, actually; I figured that would be an interesting target for my newfound Mad History Skillz, and reviewed it last week. Without further ado:

Asked why he created Livius on his site's FAQ, Dutch historian Jona Lendering cites his impatience with scholars' tendency to write to specialists more than the general audience. That, along with the lack of clearly-written and easily-accessible, yet still scholarly, material for non-specialists, inspired him to launch his considerable website on ancient and classical history in 1996. For the last eleven years – an eternity in “Internet time!" – Livius has remained more or less exclusively a one-man endeavor. The site is regularly maintained, being modified or expanded roughly once or twice a week. Lendering refuses to accept outside help producing content for the site, preferring to bear sole responsibility – and blame – for any errors on the site. (Many of the site's pictures are the main exception, many of them having been taken by his colleague Marco Prins.)

For a personal project, Livius' scope is vast. As of its September 29 update, the site boasts over 3,200 separate pages. While many of these can be quite short, with Lendering promising to expand them later, several hundred are substantial, encyclopedia-style articles. Nearly all articles are illustrated to one extent or another, with a mixture of maps, images of coins or ancient artwork, and photographs of what different regions discussed look like today. Several articles expand into large subsections in their own right. For example, the section on Julius Caesar is a twelve-section biography with two dozen annotated and translated excerpts from primary sources, a single link in the main index branching into thirty-seven separate pages. The vast majority of articles on the site are heavily cross-linked to others, with some off-site links as well. The scope of the site is impressive geographically and chronologically as well: the broadest sections of the site are nine of the major regions generally accepted within ancient and classical history (Anatolia/Asia Minor, Carthage/North Africa, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Judaea/Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia and Rome), with the sections on Greece and Rome the most developed. Other sections have their own strengths: for example, a large collection of Mesopotamian primary sources with images, transliterations, and translations.

Two major problems exist with the site's content: the issue of sourcing and the Livius' inward-looking nature. The first is perhaps the most serious: very few articles have formal bibliographies, although several (particularly in the Greco-Roman and Jewish sections) do discuss primary sources, often at length with excerpts. This is by no means consistent across the site, unfortunately. (Lendering mentions in his site's FAQ that he is reluctant to reference secondary sources often because of growing plagiarism using Livius.) The balance of links is another major problem, as the vast majority of links are within the site itself. While this means the site is very well cross-referenced, it limits the site's use as a jumping-off point to other resources, at least directly. Livius' front page does have a collection of links to “related websites,” however.

Lendering begins to run into accessibility problems with how he organizes and presents his information. Livius is organized as several layers of indices, which means someone accessing the site will usually have to encounter one or two alphabetized lists (sometimes roughly subcategorized into geography, biography, etc.) before getting to the articles they seek. This can be daunting if a reader is seeking general information rather than a particular topic. Lendering has recently added a Google custom search to his main page, however, which makes finding specific articles easier than in the past.

In terms of appearance, Livius betrays its age. Lendering first launched his site in 1996, before the combination of ubiquitous broadband and greatly expanded computer capabilities began to shape Web design. Lendering has continued to use many of the design principles of that earlier era on his page, keeping to a very minimalist, no-frills design which may appear (please pardon the pun!) rather Spartan to contemporary eyes. This approach, combined with a navigation bars at the top or bottom of most pages, makes navigating the site quite easy: links are obvious and pages load quickly, even on dialup connections. However, this sometimes causes problems visually; images are often themselves sized by the standards of lower-resolution monitors. Many appear unpleasantly small on modern screens, particularly for those viewers who like lots of detail or close-ups. As with the rest of the site, however, the images are themselves being steadily updated, with more “modern” sizes appearing in newer articles.

Lendering seems to have had mixed success in his stated goals for Livius. He does accomplish part of his intended purpose, by having a free resource online from which readers can get a fairly good picture of the ancient world, particularly classical times. However, ease of access to this information is limited by the site's significant organizational problems and some gaps in its selection. Livius is a work in progress, and due to the scope of the era which Lendering is attempting to document – and the fact that it is, at its heart, a personal project – it will likely remain so for some time. Perhaps unfortunately for Lendering's intentions, it is likely to be more accessible to students or hobbyists who already have some amount of ancient history knowledge under their belt before visiting, especially if his idea of the “general audience” is those just beginning to study the period. Livius is a site which aspires to be comprehensive and which aspires to be accessible to the wider public, but does not quite – as a living site, perhaps does not yet quite – meet these goals.

Exhibits of The Future!(tm)

In my last post I linked to an interview on "technologies of persuasion." There's a pretty heavy advertising element to that, obviously, but it's an element I think could be used in producing history at times. Anyway, I'm bringing that up mainly because I found an example of this sort of thing the other day that could be fairly easily applied both to that concept - it is, at its heart, an advertisement - and as a neat way of presenting history that shows the kinds of things you can do with contemporary technology, a bit of creativity, and a tremendous amount of caffeine.

A few days ago, a friend of mine pointed me at a neat example of how one could present a history exhibit with modern technology in the form of this advertisement for Halo 3. What could a science-fiction FPS have to do with the presentation of history, you ask? Well, take a look at that site. It's Flash-heavy and has audio and video components for those of you whose computers may not be up to the task, but anyone with a moderately-recent machine shouldn't have a problem.

For those of you who can't (or won't) check out the URL, the basic premise of the advertisement, with all the game-setting stuff boiled out, is that it is a historical exhibit - specifically, a war diorama/memorial. It's a very large one, hence the tremendous amount of caffeine, but what's neat about this is the way it's displayed. The viewer's perspective isn't looming over the entire display, the way we tend to stand over most such exhibits in a typical museum, but it's down at the display's ground level as the camera pans and weaves through it. (That panning and weaving is largely under the user's control; you can go through it relatively freely.) That's just neat on a visual level, but what makes it especially neat, at least in my opinion, is how additional content is worked in at various points. At regular intervals in the tour through it, a link will pop up over one figurine or another. Those links lead to content which expands the context of the scene - a "first person account" in the form of a statement from Someone Who Was There on this link, a biographical sketch of another person on that one, a video of a veteran being interviewed elsewhere in the museum for another, a description of one alien baddie or another at another link, and the occasional spot where the tour pauses to allow a full panoramic view of an important location.

At first I simply looked at it thinking "well, this is certainly a damn cool piece of work" - I tend to have a healthy respect for anything that was obviously done painstakingly and well, and this is no exception to that. But after a few minutes I started thinking about it some more. This advertisement is in the form of an exhibit at a fictional museum, of course. It's an ad for a computer game, after all. But what if we got a few other people together and gave them some modern midrange hardware and software, a bit of creativity, and a tremendous amount of caffeine?

This thing isn't just an advertisement to me, although it is (at least to this semi-casual Halo fan) a pretty effective and extremely good-looking one. It is also, perhaps after one distills the game's elements out of it and looks at it on a more abstract level, a template for a pretty impressive, interactive type of exhibit in general. On top of the eye candy factor, it's a neat way of taking a diorama - normally a pretty passive sort of display, much like most things you'll see in museums - and turning it into something interactive.

If this could be made, then why not, say, a similar treatment of a diorama of Stalingrad?

Or Rome at its height?

Or 1930s New York City?

Or anything else, for that matter?

You Are Getting Verrrrry Innnnnterested....

A few years ago I earned the nickname "Patient Zero" among several of my friends. Fortunately for all involved, the infections involved were mental: I had a tendency for awhile to get bitten by one interest or another in such a way that those around me managed to pick it up as well. A couple of them would take advantage of that: "I want the guys to listen to this new album, so I'll get Patrick interested in it and the rest will take care of itself." Given how esoteric my interests, and those of my friends, are, this has caused some spectacular feedback loops at times.

So when I just stumbled across this interview over on WorldChanging with author Doug Rushkoff, in which he's asked about his recently-created course on "technologies of persuasion," my curiosity was piqued. Early in the interview, he takes issue with some popular ideas on what persuasion entails:

Seriously, I wouldn't want to use any tactic to get someone to take my course, or to do anything at all. Once a person has been cajoled, there's almost always a negative effect later on. Chairman Mao used to talk about this – how people can't be inspired to foist a revolution, but that it has to come from them. (Not that he lived or led true to this dictum.)

I get asked all the time, "how can we get people to be more this or more that?" Usually by Jewish groups looking to get kids to be more Jewish, progressive groups looking to get people to be more politically active (or at least to contribute money to the right PAC), or my editors asking me to get more people to buy my books. And I think the object of the game is to get out of the mindset of "getting people to do something" and instead just create a really nice, really open invitation.

The key to doing this, Rushkoff believes, comes in the form of connections:

My whole pitch on marketing and communications is for companies to stop creating mythologies and persuasion campaigns around the products that they're disconnected with, and to start getting involved in some aspect of the thing they're selling. [emphasis added]

It definitely has a larger focus on things like, say, marketing or politics than a broader, in-general How To Convince People About Stuff sort of persuasion, but I also believe there's room for some overlap here into "our" topics such as presentation of history outside the academy. As historians, we may not be selling a product in the conventional, give-us-money-we-give-you-stuff sense - though the universities may well be, given the rise of the student-as-customer mindset (which is a whole other rant anyway). But we are trying to get ideas across to others, and most of us at least aren't trying to limit that to a stagnant, preaching-to-the-choir sort of situation.

I'm not, at least, as someone who's studying public history, and also as someone who has his own portion of that vaguely ivorytowerian "why oh why don't people know anything about their history woe woe arrgh?"angst (which I'm sure I share with many of those who read this). Doing some looking around in order to find ways to reach audiences, or perhaps even create them, seems like something worth chasing to me. I'm normally allergic to marketing lingo, joking that people should need a license to use the word "paradigm" in a sentence, but this interview at least piqued my interest enough to try to getpersuade you guys to take a look at it and think about some of it.

It's worthwhile for those two points I quote above, I believe: that you can't really make someone be interested in something (after all, as several of us discussed yesterday, the consumers' - and audience's - thoughts and beliefs will remain their own, beyond our feasible reach, unless they themselves decide otherwise), and that some kind of involvement and connection - doing and being instead of simply selling or pushing - is probably a better way to spark interest in others.

Great! It's all so clear now!

Well, aside from the implementation part. Yeah.

I definitely like and agree with the idea. The question of how we can do these things, of course, depends on as many separate variables as our interests and circumstances and projects may present. So I don't know. On the one hand, the advice may seem unnecessarily vague, especially if we're a little outside the box as historians. On the other hand, it's still useful for all its vagueness: blank checks can be fun!