Analyze you own words!

Well, this is an interesting one - a website that analyses your personality based on a 100 words you have written.

Of course, it's a little dubious - after all what we are writing for affects how we write. If one puts in 100 words from a report they will be very different from 100 words from a blog or from a diary & they intended audience (if there is one) will always have an impact.

Non the less it is a bit of fun, and surprisingly consistent in some of the things it had to say about me - despite feeding different text samples into it!

Why not have a go?

https://watson-pi-demo.mybluemix.net/

In Support of Historical Fiction

Currently reading the sparkling Herodotus the Histories translated by Tom Holland  one is inspired to think about historiography.

 Let’s face it Herodotus may be the ‘father of history’ but he is no stranger to a little romanticism shall we say in his work!

Yet it is not truly historiography or historical research or even the presentation of historical perspectives that this has led me to thinking of. Rather it is a musing on the worth of the historical novel.

It is understandable to me why some historians decry the whole genre. It has no necessity for objectivity, explanation, or even adherence to its original source materials. There are some truly execrable examples in the field too.

Yet when it is done right, and if one accepts that what one is reading is not history but fiction it can invoke beautifully a whole era or set of personalities. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall or Madeline Miller’s The song of Achilles are both such works.

    

The greatest joy a well written historical fiction brings however is a feel for the colour and flavour of the age bound up in a depth of imagination that some drier historians cannot emulate. If this rich, colourful, and ultimately imagined vista pulls people towards an interest in an era then perhaps that is no bad thing for the field of history in the long run.