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!

Technopeasants of the Academy, Unite!

Academia isn't, of course, the only realm where people are currently going at it hammer and tongsdebating the implications of the Internet as a tool for production and distribution of ideas both new and old. Some of those realms, though, might surprise people who are entering or becoming fully aware of the debate within history or other such fields, though.

Back in April, a fellow by the name of Howard Hendrix flew off on a self-described "rant" condemning writers who use the Internet to give their work away freely. He says that he is "opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free," going on to define the neologism "webscab" as someone who undercuts his fellow workers (or in this case writers), thereby undermining the fight for better pay and working conditions, etc. He says they are "rotting our organization from within" along with a few other similarly loaded terms of phrase, and goes on to describe the victims of webscabs - the people who sell their work in the traditional venue - as being converted into "Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch[es]." The existence of these webscabs, in fact, offends him so much that, as part of his right to resist technology he sees as "destructive to [his] ways of life and [his] beliefs," that he's decided not to seek a renewed term as the vice-president of his organization. After his term ended, he would in fact step away from technology altogether, saying he'll answer emails but "won't blog, wiki, chat, post, LiveJournal, lounge or lurk -- and [he]'ll be the happier for it."

So what's so unusual about this? It does, after all, sound like a kind of complaint that has come from a variety of different directions in the last few years, though worded in less confrontational terms. And confrontational those terms are; Howard Hendrix's words sparked outrage of terrible power, still palpable when people in his field discuss it today, several months later.

Oh, I forgot to tell you what his organization is? I should probably do that - Howard Hendrix was vice-president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, one of the primary SF/F-related organizations on the planet, source of the Nebula Award, one of the higher honours a writer in either field can receive.

In a blog article over on Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow - who in January 2003 released his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, online for free in addition to releasing it as "a physical object" in bookstores, under a Creative Commons license - gives his own views on Hendrix's statements after having followed a debate between Hendrix and "web-novelist/podcast-novelist" Scott Sigler at a science-fiction event in San Francisco last week. As one can safely assume from the fact that Doctorow is one of the "webscabs" Hendrix rails against, he takes strong exception to the arguments against using the Net as a medium for releasing new material, particularly if it's being done freely. Hendrix made various arguments, ranging from economic problems to mere rhetoric, and these seem to be addressed in turn well enough. While Hendrix is obviously in the minority within the SFWA on this opinion - witness the vitriol in the LiveJournal thread relaying his original statement - there is still a debate going on there to the present.

So if big names in the science fiction community, one of the more technology-friendly bodies of people on the planet (at least for the most part), are arguing back and forth over the Net as a medium, there's clearly something worth discussing here. As I am posting it here, I rather obviously believe that there's some connection to digital history practices.

One of Doctorow's points, and IMHO his most important one, is that the Net as a medium "diversifies the ways in which works find audiences adn vice-versa, undoing the 20th century's enormous trend to concentration and more bargaining power for fewer media companies." The concerns about monopolization of knowledge are probably less pressing in academia - at least in the humanities or social sciences upon escaping the freshman level tomes. However, the potential benefit of getting information to audiences which want information but may not have access to it - or indeed, may not even know the information they want is out there[1] - is fairly obvious to me. I, like Doctorow, flatly reject arguments that suggest people will stop buying books, or the "ugly straw-man, visibly untrue" that those who support this kind of ready distribution are naive optimists.

What I do see as an issue in online distribution - particularly of the free and unfettered kind, particularly particularly of the free and unfettered kind dealing with academic topics such as history - is the problem of quality control. Sturgeon's Law holds for a lot of things released online, to the point where one may think that Sturgeon was perhaps being a little optimistic. There is no shortage of incomprehensibly weird, if sincerely-expressed material out there[2], and I do believe seperating the good from the bad, or the bad from oh-my-God-make-me-unsee-that, is a problem. While it's different in degree from what we run into in the average bookstore, or even the average university library, though, I don't think the matter is that different in kind.

Others may disagree, of course; I know full well that I'm nowhere near the "self-proclaimed Luddite" camp (and in fact often joke semi-seriously that I would love a brain-to-Photoshop interface for working with graphics). I certainly see more potential than risk or threat in the digital age, though. I'm unconvinced by the arguments surrounding The Imminent Death Of The Book and other such things, and have always believed that if someone wants to get their work out there for free (or for whatever they want to request in exchange for it), more power to them. The Internet and the media shooting off from it make it easier to do things like that in some unorthodox and interesting ways, and I enjoy seeing some of the things that can result from that.

As for the quality issue? I dunno. Even the bad stuff out there can spark discussions which can lead in interesting directions. And the bad stuff out there that doesn't do that, which doesn't languish either, but merely incites or misleads or otherwise displays itself as the result of abuses of history or cryptohistory? Well, they put their stuff out there, so what's preventing us from issuing forth refutations. Hendrix complained about the impact of free releases on the SF industry; Doctorow's response in both words (his refutation of Hendrix's argument) and deed (his first novel was a commercial success despite being available for no-strings-attached free download, and nearly won a Nebula besides[3]) is perfectly clear.

[1] - I assume you've all had your fair share of "so that's what that is! now I have a name for it!" moments. If not, what's your excuse?

[2] - A friend of mine is attempting to popularize the idea of using "the Timecube" as a unit of measurement for just how, well, stark raving mad a given source or person or argument sounds. "Some guy called into the radio talk show this morning, and flew into this incoherent rant that topped out around 0.8 Timecubes!"

[3] - As a result of this whole debacle, International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day was declared on April 23rd, in which authors (and anyone else who wanted in on it) could release "a professional-quality work" for free on their websites. Somewhere between scores and hundreds of people, including some fairly big names in the field, participated, and thousands of amateurs had fun with it as well.

Cleverly-Named Introductory Post

"First post!" as they say over on Slashdot. Not quite as satisfying since I'm the only one who can post here, but oh well. That just means I can claim the right to a moderately rambling and self-indulgent introduction, doesn't it?

Who I am can be seen off to the right of this post, and this blog exists as a component of that public history program. Specifically, it's a component of History 513, also known as Digital History: Methodology for the Infinite Archive, taught by Professor Turkel here at the University of Western Ontario.

One of the fun things about being in a program as (relatively) obscure as public history is the raised eyebrows. If I had a nickel for every time in the last few months I've been asked "public history? What's that?" I would probably be gazing down upon you all in air-conditioned comfort from the privacy of my newly-purchased space hotel. It tends to result in interesting discussions, at least, and the topic is usually quickly understood, even if it's seen as a bit weird, not the standard "History of [Topic] in [Place] during [Time]" that most people associate with history classes.

When course schedules come up, and it's learned that I have something called Digital History on Wednesday afternoons, the same sort of question shows up, with a little less confusion, a little less "what's that?" and a little more incredulity, a little more "why's that?" Shouldn't history courses, after all, deal primarily with the hows and whens and whos and whats of the past - preferably involving, to complete the cliche, Dusty Old Tomes and entweeded professors with four hyphens in their surnames? Short of its use as an archiving tool, maybe, isn't most modern technology either irrelevant to the study of history or even an active hindrance to it?

I obviously don't think so, otherwise I wouldn't be here, doing this.

On the one hand, I'm well aware of the arguments and controversies and confusion and even contempt about the ubiquity of technology in modern life. I remember the large part of it firsthand, particularly the aspects to do with the Internet back in the early nineties. ("The Information Superhighway: Threat Or Menace?") On the other hand, I grew up sufficiently around and engaged with most of it that I take much of it completely for granted, wondering what the fuss over new technology is rather than wondering what the point of it is.

It's an interesting position to be in. Even though I can sympathise with some of the revulsion towards the more absurd or annoying[1] aspects of connected culture, and tend to take issue with a lot of the jargon and hype within it - I'm allergic to the prefixes "cyber" or (when followed by anything other than "-mail") "e" - I probably qualify as one of the digerati or whatever term is used to describe netizens this week. At least, I've been around net.culture long enough to remember "what's your major?" being a pickup line or understand why today's September 5122, 1993, so I know it's got its share of unique quirks and familiar mundanities. I think I've chosen my camp.

So here I am, in any case, one more drop in a delightfully growing noosphere. Obviously I'll be posting about digital history; it is, of course, required on the syllabus a terrific confluence of several of my main interests. This kind of topic, the wealth of resources and opportunities under its umbrella, brings together a lot of things: history proper, its research and presentation[2], ways of outreach that bring the materials to an audience outside the classroom or archives, and the various facets of digital and online cultures. It helps create the kind of environment in which someone can easily read Herodotus in the original, catch radio shows on obscure conspiracies, see the past without the monochrome, discuss counterfactual history (or more conventional fields) in a lively and active environment... the list goes on, and I am most happy that it does.

Much as I am aware and understanding of the anxiety and controversy over many aspects of the Net in this day and age, and much as I wonder about some of the people on it at times, I remain a pretty enthusiastic supporter of its adoption by historians (and people in just about any other field, from mathematics to metalworking). It's an area where a lot of the potentials are only starting to be tapped, and a lot of the concerns are, I believe, somewhat overblown, and it's something I intend to explore in considerable detail.

When I first became aware of this sort of field, back before I had a name for it, I almost immediately thought "I want in on this." As I start the transition from "just" studying history to "doing" it, that remains the case.

[1] - Don't lie: you've done this.

[2] - One of the more amazing examples of this I've encountered can be seen here. In this video, Professor Hans Rosling, a professor of international health at the Karolinka Institute in Sweden, makes a point of the usefulness of new technologies as teaching tools that is hard to ignore. Taking the fairly abstruse topic of developing-world demographics over the last several decades, he handily spins together a presentation which is both riveting and very easy to understand. Rosling's point - that a lot of relevant, important, practical information is lying fallow, and could be understood and applied very easily were it just for a different perspective - becomes clear as day starting at about five minutes in.