The Imperiia ProjectMain MenuResearch Dashboardsmaps, visualizations, and moreVeles: The Data CatalogOngoing ProjectsThe MapMaker PodcastEvery story starts somewhere.Teach with MapsGalleriesKelly O'Neilldc20b45f1d74122ba0d654d19961d826c5a557f5The Imperiia Project // Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University
Speaking of documents...
12024-09-19T10:23:11-04:00Kelly O'Neilldc20b45f1d74122ba0d654d19961d826c5a557f591plain2024-09-19T10:23:11-04:00Kelly O'Neilldc20b45f1d74122ba0d654d19961d826c5a557f5The events we have dubbed "the watermelon rebellion" are described in a series of reports published in the Arkhiv grafov Mordvinovykh. See documents 485, 567, 569, 580, 585 in volume 1.
Do you believe what you see? Do you believe what you hear?
How can you even begin to make sense of history if you can't keep track of the cast of characters?
If you have landed on this interactive guide you already know that the events described in episode 6 of the MapMaker Podcast feature a huge cast. 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. Not really.
Would we have a better sense of how gossip spread if we could assess the width of the streets, the height of the buildings, and the way the wind blew in from the water? 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.
