History today is taught in a narrative form - a text or story that describes a series of events with people acting. This, however, means that whoever gets to dominate the creation of that text can shape the story being told. The result is a deterioration of civic discourse. The absence of a coherent presentation of competing narratives based on conflicting data caries over to online tools and platforms.
The fundamental limitations our approach addresses are three-fold:
Firstly, the narrative itself is problematic. History is non-linear - multi-faceted and interconnected. While a text is necessarily linear with one thought presented after another, a better fit for the complexity of history is a network of connected people, events, and places that can be sorted, grouped, and filtered by the user in ever changing ways driven by their own desire to understand these connections. We achieve this by representing history with a graph of objects and their relations.
Secondly, a written text has to be written by someone. Those writing can either be a select group of experts or the public at large. In the first case, you have to find enough subject matter experts to cover the breadth of human endeavors and you have to trust that they truly are experts in the field they are writing on. In the latter case, competing opinions may result in "edit wars", repeated changes, additions, and deletions to the text in an attempt to shape the narrative. In a graph representation of history, no modification needs to result in the deletion of data. All changes are recorded with reasons derived from source material. This combines the strengths of scholarly curation with the breadth of collaborative work.
Finally, in a text, factually incorrect claims need to be deleted. Malevolent actors can overwhelm the curators by repeatedly adding the same incorrect information. Continuously correcting for such intentional distortion may be time consuming and emotionally exhausting. In a graph representation, no incorrect claim is deleted, but rather it is recorded as incorrect along with the reasoning behind the judgement based on source material. This reverses the dynamics of discourse on the historical record. Malevolent actors would need to invent ever new, incorrect statements since duplicates are easy to eliminate.
