I remember in junior school our history teacher saying History came from 'His Story'.
I believe that this stuck in my memory because it sounded wrong, limited and marginalising. I don't think I worked out all the implications then but perhaps the impact of this conceptual dissonance went on to drive an interest in alternative historical perspectives. |
History as a multi faceted subject/object/percept/concept.
There are the events and actions that happened and there is the narrative construct.
The narrative cannot replicate the events, it needs to summarise and attempt to map what happened with clarity and accuracy.
Inevitably it is informed by the preferences and prejudices of the narrator.
So well informed history analytics need to vectorise the disparate and often conflicting perspectives.
The events themselves that generated the historical narrative are often extremely complex.
Multiple actors, demographics, social/economic factors, bio/climatic and geo/topological components
interact in a dynamic, unpredictable complexity.
The narrative construct that we call history needs to be a finely crafted distillation of these
intricate deltas of fracture and flow.
There are the events and actions that happened and there is the narrative construct.
The narrative cannot replicate the events, it needs to summarise and attempt to map what happened with clarity and accuracy.
Inevitably it is informed by the preferences and prejudices of the narrator.
So well informed history analytics need to vectorise the disparate and often conflicting perspectives.
The events themselves that generated the historical narrative are often extremely complex.
Multiple actors, demographics, social/economic factors, bio/climatic and geo/topological components
interact in a dynamic, unpredictable complexity.
The narrative construct that we call history needs to be a finely crafted distillation of these
intricate deltas of fracture and flow.