Who's Who in the Infamous Watermelon Rebellion
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.
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. 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?
In a way, there is.
We threw off the historian's restraints and experimented with using DALL·E 3 to produce portraits of our cast of characters. Our AI-generated gallery embraces the gaps in the historical record and provides 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 about the role each character played in the watermelon rebellion. (We added lots of juicy details.)
Best of all, each image - including the image at the top of this page - 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. *If the pop-up text does not display in full, click on the image to expand. Close the image to return to this page.
