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• 1 2024-09-09T13:13:31-04:00 Who's Who in the Infamous Watermelon Rebellion 83 It's the interactive guide you've been waiting for! structured_gallery 2024-09-19T10:24:51-04:00
  The events described in episode 6 of the MapMaker Podcast feature a huge cast of characters. Although a few "big" names put in an appearance, most of the men involved were low-ranking, ordinary people without the means to commission a portrait let alone maintain a family archive. We know next to nothing, for example, about Johann Shulting or Onufrii Volkov other than the scant details in the documents.
  
  Historians are not in the business of inventing the past. Relying on written evidence places constraints on what we can know and what we can say about how and why things happened. Even when we have piles of documents at our disposal we never have the full picture - we can't see into the past.
  
  Would we understand this piece of history better if we could watch Admiral Mordvinov's facial expressions as he collected testimonies? What if we could see which men took meticulous care of their uniforms and which had crumbs in their beards? 
  
  What if there were a way to conjure those lost faces?
  
  We decided to throw off the historian's restraints and experiment with using DALL·E 3 to produce portraits of our cast of characters. We used relatively simple prompts [...] and after some trial and error built an AI-generated gallery that embraces the gaps in the historical record and provides (we hope!) a way to relate to the individuals who inhabit this story. We sorted them for dramatic effect.
  
  All you need to do is grab a bag of popcorn, get comfortable, and rest your cursor on the image titles to learn more. Best of all, each image has a hidden note: look closely and rest your cursor on the "jackpot" area to learn more about what AI gets right - but more often wrong - about the past.

  The Misinformation Spreaders
  
  
  The Order-Obsessed
  
  The Investigators
  
  
  The Accused

  Reasons to Rebel