They did say in the original article that the pattern was incorrect, and likely to have been a third party copy of a design originating in some Muslim area. That's disproven by the dating research presented here, but it wasn't unreasonable.
Agreed, pith is the whole brand of Twitter. I can make an exception for a tweet storm containing a handful of messages, but 60 is a dead horse thrice beaten.
That being said, where else would this kind of content have worked where the everyreader wouldn't have given up after the third or fourth paragraph of dense medieval historic record?
The best argument I can see for tweetstorms is that they're stretching the upper bound of the format.
A Medium post or something would be more natural for this length of text, but it also deters people with the possibility of a ten-page story. 60 tweets might be absurdly long, but at least you know it's not going be 200. So the format is dumb, but I think you're right - it offers a guarantee to readers who don't want denser pieces.
Hell, might as well post it as greentext on a 'chan. It's not like any of the media sites already mentioned are all that reputable as channels for transmission of reliable facts, anyway.
Used to be that a tweet storm was okay because you knew it'd only be like 15, and not absurdly long like 60. This is definitely a slippery slope we've already slid down.
I can look at the scroll bar on an article and decide if I want to continue after a couple paragraphs, I can't tell from a tweet that starts "5/" if it'll go to 8 or 60.
The everyreader isn't reading all 60 tweets anyway. This would have worked best as a single tweet with a link to the full article on Medium or something. The article preview in the tweet can have a few more tweets of content and people who want to read beyond that can have the whole thing in a readable format.
> having to then digest the content on Twitter really lets the content down.
The 'benefit' though is that people automatically believe whatever they read on Twitter. You could copy and paste the exact same text into a Google doc, and the number of people who believe what this guy is saying would probably fall by 90%.
There's a reason why whenever there is a hoax about Justin Bieber or whoever having died, it's always Twitter where these things spread.
> You could copy and paste the exact same text into a Google doc, and the number of people who believe what this guy is saying would probably fall by 90%.
The crazy part is that Twitter took its inspiration from SMS, long after SMS had a way to automatically stich together messages into longer wholes. But Twitter never adopted said system, and are now developing an equivalent system...
There's a real reason why tweet-chains like this work, and a big part of it is that blogs are separate from social networks and you have to use a mediocre link to attract views, while twitter-chains are inherently integrated into the network, so you're not linking to the content, you're directly sharing it.
I understand that the limitations of twitter make it a difficult format to express it, but like most mediums with major limitations, these limitations can breed creativity and greatness.
There's a reason why a Facebook post goes viral on Facebook a lot easier than anywhere else. Same reason why twitter-chains are successful.
I'm sure blogger posts are popular on blogger though.
Except it didn't actually work—when I read it the messages stopped at about 31/60, then twitter started showing replies and I could never find #32 an later. Blogs don't have that problem. Twitter is pretty useless for real communication.
You should realize that I wasn't saying "thing works for you individually" and rather was saying "thing works generally and is succeeding"
I'm sorry you had a bad user experience.
However your anecdote does not invalidate the reality that tweet chains are far more popular than blogs for spreading analysis of news today. They are extremely popular and successful, even if you have personally failed to use them as you would like.
This, IMO, is like someone experiencing motion sickness while using an Oculus Rift and then boldly proclaiming all of VR to be a complete failure.
He's not using any server resources, he's accessing a service that people willingly put up. There is no legal or moral contract that he then has to execute all the crap code they happen to stuff into the HTTP response.
This also misses the main point. People try to argue, like you're doing here, that publishers need to survive and so you shouldn't ad block. I used to do that with reddit, until I started noticing page loads that wouldn't end and continuous network usage. Reactivating the ad blocker solved that. The reality of the situation is that ad networks are malicious actors and need to be handled as such.
Many sites do have a TOS that prohibits altering their code. The question would be: does selectively choosing not to run certain code constitute altering it? The world seems to have decided the answer is no.
I had never heard of coinhive. Is the idea that, instead of using ads or direct payment, the user allows the website to mine for "money" using the client's computational resources? That's actually a pretty cool concept.
That's why I said "concept," not "implementation." There is a difference.
Edit: To be clear, if it was opt-in, whereby you got to choose if you would rather pay money, view ads, or offer cpu cycles in order to view a site, I could see it catching on.
Good question. In my mind the users would just run the code for the duration they were on the site- like that @home stuff from years ago, but while browsing a particular site.
It is an interesting concept yes. Also it has the merit of actually accurately measuring the time one spends on the site. (As browsers can throttle JavaScript on tabs which are not in front). How to communicate this to the users is a bit hard though. Should the site show ads and somewhere have a toggle to switch to mining? Would people actually go there?
I think Twitter is good when it's used for its intended purpose, but I definitely agree with you--When you start telling some epic story and end every tweet in "1/X", you should probably just be writing a blog post.
why doesn't twitter create this feature ?! it my be easy to just follow up the replies on every tweet and the read the hole content at the same time, not bit by bit to the point where you forget where you were.
Greed, Glutony, Limitless Luxery, Writting without boundaries and principles, Depravity and textual Fornication are so out of characters
280 is the depth, where thought and rambling begin. Imagine a facebook of incoherent mindset selfdefense rambling. Do you really want to lose the freedom from this freedom of speech?
You'd think by now they'd add a "details" or body section to tweets, so 140 chars is used for a title or summary, and then you could have a standard blog post attached to them. That way people using SMS can still use them for whatever the hell they use them for.
I dont get why this gets so much attention. Of course there was a contact.
Vikings conquered Sicily, south Italy and other meditarinian locations since 8th century. There was a slave trade. At some point Islam conquered 20% of Europe.
That's technically true, but a bit misleading. The battle of Poitiers was in 732; whereas the siege of Vienna was in 1529, 8 centuries later, when the reconquista had ousted the arabs from Spain.
People projecting their own value of multi-culturalism onto historical artifacts and cultures.
Multiculturalism and tolerance are valuable, wonderful additions to our world, but we shouldn't desperately try to find evidence of it where it isn't. It's desperate and embarrassing, and taints the institutions doing it as simply being publicity seekers first, and scientists second.
My country has quite a few castles which were destroyed by Turks. It is written on welcoming billboards along with other important dates. Some multiple times. Some castles were build specifically to defend against turks and families who ruled them became "famous Turk killers".
So you know, Islam conquering parts of Europe happened.
And Vikings did attacked north of Europe and I think they ruled Russia basically at one point.
So I still don't know whether there are details that makes their meeting impossible or whether you just chalked away possibility of Turks and Islam attacking Europe in the past impossible without studying it.
No one doubts contact occurred. But articles like the original are often interpreted to mean 'see a thousand years ago Islam was peaceful, everything was great then white people screwed it up.' Whether that interpretation is warranted is of course dependent on how you feel about where it was published- if the original article was just in some journal somewhere no one would care. But because it was turned into a story by the BBC, it is immediately cast in the light of current politics regarding Islam.
The parent says that there was contact and used the word "conquered" and "slave trade".
Downvoting it for political reasons that have zero to do with history being discussed, because some unrelated discussions about tolerance something is textbook suppressing of historical truth for political reasons.
There is nothing controversial/political about that.
They were neighbours because they conquered Sicily and Spain
"Cultural exchange" in past happened mostly thanks to slave trade. Teachers were mostly foreign slaves, who converted young elite to their culture. For example Greek culture spread in city of Rome mainly by this.
Equating Turks (not sure if you mean that or Ottomans?) conquering armies with "Islam conquering parts of Europe" (Greece?, Spain?) seems likely to be problematic; the latter would suggest willful adoption en masse of Islamic religion, political structure, warring.
Did the conquerors instigate Sharia, did they do the Mohammedean standard "pay jizya, convert, or die" offer to the populous? Did the conquered people convert and then seek to forcibly "convert" others?
Yes they did. That's how we've got Bosnians (and other Serbian-language people of Muslim Nationality), and Albanians, and there's a subset of Bulgarians too as far as I remember.
They tried to convert people everywhere, there was resistance. Not in the ISIS style, I have to admit. But by hindering Christians and giving preferences to Muslim converts.
Contact or goods exchange does not mean multiculturalism, that is the frequent online reaction to articles like this, but it is incorrect. When we talk about Anglo-Saxon objects found in Viking graves, we would not automatically equate that with a multicultural society, it could be as a result of pillaging, or trade, or some more intimate cultural connection, or a combination of all three, and might also include third parties.
The idea presented in the original article was that a Viking was buried with a piece of fabric carrying an Islamic design, which had been incorrectly copied by a third party. They in fact said a Muslim Viking "could not absolutely be ruled out" but was unlikely. How you go from this to "Viking-Islamic multiculturalism projected into the past" is beyond me.
Edit: Just googled around and did find a Guardian article with the subheading "University researchers’ ‘staggering’ claim appears to contradict theories that Islamic objects in Viking graves are result of plunder", although that wasn't replicated in the BBC article which was posted to HN.
First off, history isn't really science, it's history. It's a liberal art, most people get a B.A. in history not a B.S. Historians may use science, but a geologist dates rocks, not a historian. Historians don't learn or practice the scientific method, nor do they report their results in scientific journal format.
Second off, viking history is Hacker News?
Because reddit.com/r/history is a very appropriate place for this, and reddit.com/r/askhistorians would be a great place to talk to experts about this.
But Hackers News? 0 historians, 0 experts, wrong subject matter. It's just weird. It devalues this place greatly when it imitates reddit because it cannot out-reddit reddit.
It's a correction to a story that was popular on HN last week. If we're going to upvote fake news, the least we can do is upvote the corrections or rebuttals to it.
There most certainly are B.S. degrees in history. There are also > 0 historians here, > 0 experts here, be they degree- or tenure-holding. Some of us don’t practice because we turned our history degrees into tech careers. Some of us have other interests outside history. Some of us think history includes tech. Some of us have interests outside tech, and that includes history.
And some of us use multi-purpose websites like reddit to talk about our wide interests, while keeping Hacker News, started by the Silicon Valley tech-company incubator YCombinator intentionally for SV tech news and discussion, more in-line with the entire point.
Again, the reddification of hacker news is its demise.
You will always get better history discussion on reddit.com/r/askhistorians, a community full of verified historians, than Hacker News, a community of mainly programmers and those involved with modern tech industry. Specialization works. Diluting this website will destroy it, just as it destroyed reddit prior to subreddits.
There are people that have history degrees here, and historical and archaeological stuff hits the front page all the time. Along with economics, biology, astronomy, and all manner of other potpourri.
Once in a while there's even a story about software and technology that makes it through...
I follow an ancient history blog (in Dutch)[0] that has regular "Method on Monday" posts devoted to explaining that history is science. It has specific circumstances such as a dire lack of data, but there are methods to work with that.
I wish there was a website that was nearly identical to Hacker News, created by a company incubated by YCombinator, which had a nearly identical layout and vote style, but which had "sub"communities for topics, allowing the SV-tech focused YCombinator news site to stay on topic...
>It should go without saying that a single scholar’s un-peer-reviewed claim does not truth make.
What about a single scholar's un-peer reviewed rebuttal? One of the fun things of social media is that something like this goes viral and everyone says "see I knew it" and the skeptics get shot down for "you're not an academic" but then another academic is skeptical and then we're back to "see, see I knew it." I don't see a solution here buts an amusing pattern.
Not sure who the authority here is, if anyone. I imagine this is the kind of thing that will need to be debated and 'solved' at a later time, regardless if Prof Mulder's skepticism is correct. There could be more to this story that she doesn't know, for example, but I'm personally leaning towards her thesis, but I'm naturally skeptical so I'm fairly biased.
For all the bashing about twitter, in the not-too-distant past this exchange would have played out over a year or so, assuming the original claim didn't just languish in some obscure journal somewhere.
Well, that's the big issue isn't it? Pre-twitter, pre-out of control social media, etc a claim from a Jr level person like this would have been met with skepticism and gone through an academic filter that would has squashed it. Nowadays its all over the world before there's a sane response to it. Sadly, many who have memorized this little factoid will never see the rebuttal.
It's hard to tell how much filter was applied since the BBC article only cites the team themselves- I don't see any indication that Larsson is a 'Jr level person' in their field. This could have easily have been published in a specialized journal and not have been refuted until someone with the right background came across it.
I guess in American universities, "researcher" is only an early career position. Later, you either get a professorship, or they kick you out. But this case is about a Swedish university, and there people can be "researchers" their whole careers.
To all the folks harping on an academic for writing and releasing a work in their field in a week, and for having no shame about releasing it on Twitter:
You’re not being very inclusive, folks. She wanted to post it on Twitter, not a blog. She did. Don’t waste all this thread time discussing Twitter. Discuss her work. Discuss her points. But please, stop wasting time and energy on the “meta” of her chosen communication platform in a thread about Viking textiles.
Therein lies the problem. Good research deserves good presentation, and 60 tweets where a Medium or Blogger or whatever post would've sufficed ain't exactly it.
Likewise, it's hard to discuss her work when the presentation is sufficiently distracting to preclude actually viewing said work in a reasonable manner.
Not just that, but in order for it to even read as any kind of Arabic it would supposedly have to be in a style of writing that wouldn't yet exist for over a century at the time it was woven.
So someone made a guess, it was wrong, that happens. But why did end up being spread around the news so much. So what, even if it said Allah? Vikings liked to travel, they might have been buying or copying decorative elements from various places.
I saw in the tweet she tagged Guardian, BBC, NatGeo and NYTimes. Was there just a slow news day that they all picked up that one claim and ran with it.
> But why did end up being spread around the news so much.
She explains it towards the end of her story:
Why does brouhaha over Arabic on Viking textile matter? Three reasons
One, context: story likely went viral because of recent events. Charlottesville revealed to all what has long been known among medievalists: that white supremacy uses medieval imagery & symbolism. At Charlottesville we saw medieval banners & chants with Crusader phrases like Deus Vult.
So the Viking Allah textile exhibits what Stephen Colbert once called ‘truthiness’ but is not supported by scholarship. But ‘truthiness’ cannot be enough for news media, especially in this age of accusations of Fake News.
And when medieval & particularly Viking age is used as ideological weapon by white supremacists & scholars are risking careers to fight white supremacist appropriation & not just white supremacists use medieval to further contemporary agendas: same tactic used by ISIS, alQaeda who kill thousands. Then it matters that we get this right. Media can report on diversity of Global Middle Ages w/out trumped-up scholarship. But we need news media to be our allies, consult experts, and get facts right.
It is kind of fun to see white supremacism discussed in the context of Sweden.
Sweden is historically inhabited by europeans who happened to settle there over the course of centuries, and then to their amazement later discovered they are "white". They probably just thought they were people back then.
I haven't heard about Swedes participating in slave trade (vikings aside) and there was nobody else for them to oppress (vikings aside), so it's kind of strange idea that Swedes now has to make up for centuries of white supremacism ("people supremacism"?)
A lot of things which make sense in context of history of USA (when european colonists overran the land and then imported black people agains their will to exploit them) doesn't extend on Northern Europe.
Slavery has been a characteristic of almost every human grouping at some time or another. It seems you are not aware of the large number of Europeans and Africans (and in East Asia) who were enslaved by Muslims in the 18th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Musl...
Speak for yourself! I've had quite a few conversations about this in the last year, about the Barbary slave trade in the late middle ages, or the treatment of black slaves in the Arabic slave trade. I saw a European TV programme about the latter. I also saw some artifacts related to it in a museum. If you're hoping to get a reasonable coverage of history from reading newspapers or watching tv news, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
Yeah, I don't think people in the US worry about white supremacy in Sweden so much. But racists in the US like to play up their so-called "pure" heritage by co-opting Scandinavian culture.
>And when medieval & particularly Viking age is used as ideological weapon by white supremacists & scholars are risking careers to fight white supremacist appropriation & not just white supremacists use medieval to further contemporary agendas: same tactic used by ISIS, alQaeda who kill thousands. Then it matters that we get this right.
What if medieval times more often than not were full of racists, irrational crazy beliefs, brutality, killing, hate, all kinds of xenophobia, sexism, and other stuff we find despicable today. Trying to paint that time as a happy period, where everyone was integrated, and they lived together peacefully will backfire unless there is solid evidence to prove it.
> Then it matters that we get this right. Media can report on diversity of Global Middle Ages w/out trumped-up scholarship.
Exactly. I think there were areas at the intersection of trade routes where cities had multiple nationalities and faiths living together. One distinct feature was that it was tied to economic prosperity. As long as everyone was not starving and had a place to live, and trade was flourishing, living together worked well. I think picking one of those example might have worked better in this context. But in general if the audience was white supremacists, it's better to just ignore them and not engage, it's waste of time debating with crazy people.
I guess here the idea wast to politicize this "discovery". It backfired, now the crazies will say "See, these scientists have to make up facts,what else are they lying about!"
So I thought, if politicizing and PR was the main purpose, there are better example out there to pick from than Vikings as an example of a peace loving integrated society.
Its not a slow news day, its fits their ancient europe is "diverse" narrative, which they have interest promoting now, with a immigrant crisis in Europe.
I'd love to know just how highly correlated opinions are on racism and sexism. I suspect in the United States people are comparatively more likely to believe things are racist, and in continental Europe people are comparatively more likely to believe things are sexist, but I don't have the data.
The swedish government has been trying to prove that it has always been multicultural and diverse. The Swedish government have paid 450.000SEK for an exhibition which purpose was to show that islam always had a place in Sweden (even though this is most likely for modern propaganda purposes and not really anything actually educational).
The same goes for the established media. Anything that will "prove" that islam belongs in Europe / Scandinavia gets regurgitated without much scrutiny because of ideological reasons.
They did the BBC did a program on Vikings and one rich pagan Viking had obviously collected different religious artefacts from India, Arabia and From the Cristian world
>So someone made a guess, it was wrong, that happens.
Not quite. What happens is that people pose hypotheses, based on available evididence, that are later strengthened or weakened by new evidence. What happened here was that the authour had the same evidence that we have, they just took the liberty to add data that wasn’t actually there, and drew conclusions based on that.
153 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] thread> It took a week to do the research and two days to write, which is basically like lightning speed in the academic world.
The effort is greatly appreciated, but having to then digest the content on Twitter really lets the content down.
That being said, where else would this kind of content have worked where the everyreader wouldn't have given up after the third or fourth paragraph of dense medieval historic record?
A Medium post or something would be more natural for this length of text, but it also deters people with the possibility of a ten-page story. 60 tweets might be absurdly long, but at least you know it's not going be 200. So the format is dumb, but I think you're right - it offers a guarantee to readers who don't want denser pieces.
I can look at the scroll bar on an article and decide if I want to continue after a couple paragraphs, I can't tell from a tweet that starts "5/" if it'll go to 8 or 60.
The 'benefit' though is that people automatically believe whatever they read on Twitter. You could copy and paste the exact same text into a Google doc, and the number of people who believe what this guy is saying would probably fall by 90%.
There's a reason why whenever there is a hoax about Justin Bieber or whoever having died, it's always Twitter where these things spread.
Woman. Her name is Stephennie Mulder.
https://tttthreads.com/thread/919897406031978496
Absolutely. And casts doubt on the quality of the research behind it, as well.
I understand that the limitations of twitter make it a difficult format to express it, but like most mediums with major limitations, these limitations can breed creativity and greatness.
There's a reason why a Facebook post goes viral on Facebook a lot easier than anywhere else. Same reason why twitter-chains are successful.
I'm sure blogger posts are popular on blogger though.
I'm sorry you had a bad user experience.
However your anecdote does not invalidate the reality that tweet chains are far more popular than blogs for spreading analysis of news today. They are extremely popular and successful, even if you have personally failed to use them as you would like.
This, IMO, is like someone experiencing motion sickness while using an Oculus Rift and then boldly proclaiming all of VR to be a complete failure.
Everyone who says ad-blocking is immoral is welcome to write me a check to help offset my power bill.
This also misses the main point. People try to argue, like you're doing here, that publishers need to survive and so you shouldn't ad block. I used to do that with reddit, until I started noticing page loads that wouldn't end and continuous network usage. Reactivating the ad blocker solved that. The reality of the situation is that ad networks are malicious actors and need to be handled as such.
If you want me to pay you, tell me to pay you, don't just reach into my pocket and start plucking out loose change.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=com.el1t.uBl...
Edit: To be clear, if it was opt-in, whereby you got to choose if you would rather pay money, view ads, or offer cpu cycles in order to view a site, I could see it catching on.
As I understand it, every two years, the length of characters we can tweet will double indefinitely.
In a few more years you will be writing entire paragraphs on the web.
280 is the depth, where thought and rambling begin. Imagine a facebook of incoherent mindset selfdefense rambling. Do you really want to lose the freedom from this freedom of speech?
(They really are doubling to 280)
Vikings conquered Sicily, south Italy and other meditarinian locations since 8th century. There was a slave trade. At some point Islam conquered 20% of Europe.
A lot of people don't realise that the high points of Islamic European expansion were Poitiers & Vienna — less than 800 miles apart.
So you know, Islam conquering parts of Europe happened.
And Vikings did attacked north of Europe and I think they ruled Russia basically at one point.
So I still don't know whether there are details that makes their meeting impossible or whether you just chalked away possibility of Turks and Islam attacking Europe in the past impossible without studying it.
Downvoting it for political reasons that have zero to do with history being discussed, because some unrelated discussions about tolerance something is textbook suppressing of historical truth for political reasons.
They were neighbours because they conquered Sicily and Spain
"Cultural exchange" in past happened mostly thanks to slave trade. Teachers were mostly foreign slaves, who converted young elite to their culture. For example Greek culture spread in city of Rome mainly by this.
Did the conquerors instigate Sharia, did they do the Mohammedean standard "pay jizya, convert, or die" offer to the populous? Did the conquered people convert and then seek to forcibly "convert" others?
They tried to convert people everywhere, there was resistance. Not in the ISIS style, I have to admit. But by hindering Christians and giving preferences to Muslim converts.
You think they were spreading atheism or christianity? Of course not, they pushed for their own religion.
The idea presented in the original article was that a Viking was buried with a piece of fabric carrying an Islamic design, which had been incorrectly copied by a third party. They in fact said a Muslim Viking "could not absolutely be ruled out" but was unlikely. How you go from this to "Viking-Islamic multiculturalism projected into the past" is beyond me.
Edit: Just googled around and did find a Guardian article with the subheading "University researchers’ ‘staggering’ claim appears to contradict theories that Islamic objects in Viking graves are result of plunder", although that wasn't replicated in the BBC article which was posted to HN.
Seriously. Allah, Viking textiles... Hacker News?
When does Hacker News get subreddits....err subhackers....
Second off, viking history is Hacker News?
Because reddit.com/r/history is a very appropriate place for this, and reddit.com/r/askhistorians would be a great place to talk to experts about this.
But Hackers News? 0 historians, 0 experts, wrong subject matter. It's just weird. It devalues this place greatly when it imitates reddit because it cannot out-reddit reddit.
Again, the reddification of hacker news is its demise.
You will always get better history discussion on reddit.com/r/askhistorians, a community full of verified historians, than Hacker News, a community of mainly programmers and those involved with modern tech industry. Specialization works. Diluting this website will destroy it, just as it destroyed reddit prior to subreddits.
Once in a while there's even a story about software and technology that makes it through...
[0] https://mainzerbeobachter.com/
Oh wait :X
oh wait!
Lowest-common-denominator democracy driving content into the gutter of popularity.
Oh well, I complain because I've been here for nearly a decade across accounts. This... isn't what it used to be like.
I complain because I remember a better time.
Oh well, really, oh well.
The NY Times and a few other press pieces really ran with this story and took some pretty out there liberties.
It's Bait Blindness. I claim the novelty of the naming
What about a single scholar's un-peer reviewed rebuttal? One of the fun things of social media is that something like this goes viral and everyone says "see I knew it" and the skeptics get shot down for "you're not an academic" but then another academic is skeptical and then we're back to "see, see I knew it." I don't see a solution here buts an amusing pattern.
Not sure who the authority here is, if anyone. I imagine this is the kind of thing that will need to be debated and 'solved' at a later time, regardless if Prof Mulder's skepticism is correct. There could be more to this story that she doesn't know, for example, but I'm personally leaning towards her thesis, but I'm naturally skeptical so I'm fairly biased.
Original claim: Annika Larsson, researcher at Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University http://katalog.uu.se/profile/?id=N1-483
This rebuttal: Stephennie Mulder, Associate Professor, Art History (Islamic Art and Architecture), University of Texas at Austin https://art.utexas.edu/about/people/stephennie-mulder
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You’re not being very inclusive, folks. She wanted to post it on Twitter, not a blog. She did. Don’t waste all this thread time discussing Twitter. Discuss her work. Discuss her points. But please, stop wasting time and energy on the “meta” of her chosen communication platform in a thread about Viking textiles.
Therein lies the problem. Good research deserves good presentation, and 60 tweets where a Medium or Blogger or whatever post would've sufficed ain't exactly it.
Likewise, it's hard to discuss her work when the presentation is sufficiently distracting to preclude actually viewing said work in a reasonable manner.
I saw in the tweet she tagged Guardian, BBC, NatGeo and NYTimes. Was there just a slow news day that they all picked up that one claim and ran with it.
She explains it towards the end of her story:
Why does brouhaha over Arabic on Viking textile matter? Three reasons
One, context: story likely went viral because of recent events. Charlottesville revealed to all what has long been known among medievalists: that white supremacy uses medieval imagery & symbolism. At Charlottesville we saw medieval banners & chants with Crusader phrases like Deus Vult.
So the Viking Allah textile exhibits what Stephen Colbert once called ‘truthiness’ but is not supported by scholarship. But ‘truthiness’ cannot be enough for news media, especially in this age of accusations of Fake News.
And when medieval & particularly Viking age is used as ideological weapon by white supremacists & scholars are risking careers to fight white supremacist appropriation & not just white supremacists use medieval to further contemporary agendas: same tactic used by ISIS, alQaeda who kill thousands. Then it matters that we get this right. Media can report on diversity of Global Middle Ages w/out trumped-up scholarship. But we need news media to be our allies, consult experts, and get facts right.
Sweden is historically inhabited by europeans who happened to settle there over the course of centuries, and then to their amazement later discovered they are "white". They probably just thought they were people back then.
I haven't heard about Swedes participating in slave trade (vikings aside) and there was nobody else for them to oppress (vikings aside), so it's kind of strange idea that Swedes now has to make up for centuries of white supremacism ("people supremacism"?)
A lot of things which make sense in context of history of USA (when european colonists overran the land and then imported black people agains their will to exploit them) doesn't extend on Northern Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Ireland
The comment that brought up Dublin was in response to a comment about Sweden.
http://i.imgur.com/HwlKPoE.gif
What if medieval times more often than not were full of racists, irrational crazy beliefs, brutality, killing, hate, all kinds of xenophobia, sexism, and other stuff we find despicable today. Trying to paint that time as a happy period, where everyone was integrated, and they lived together peacefully will backfire unless there is solid evidence to prove it.
> Then it matters that we get this right. Media can report on diversity of Global Middle Ages w/out trumped-up scholarship.
Exactly. I think there were areas at the intersection of trade routes where cities had multiple nationalities and faiths living together. One distinct feature was that it was tied to economic prosperity. As long as everyone was not starving and had a place to live, and trade was flourishing, living together worked well. I think picking one of those example might have worked better in this context. But in general if the audience was white supremacists, it's better to just ignore them and not engage, it's waste of time debating with crazy people.
Dubai is pretty diverse today.
The question, what happens when wealth runs out?
I guess here the idea wast to politicize this "discovery". It backfired, now the crazies will say "See, these scientists have to make up facts,what else are they lying about!"
So I thought, if politicizing and PR was the main purpose, there are better example out there to pick from than Vikings as an example of a peace loving integrated society.
I'd love to know just how highly correlated opinions are on racism and sexism. I suspect in the United States people are comparatively more likely to believe things are racist, and in continental Europe people are comparatively more likely to believe things are sexist, but I don't have the data.
The same goes for the established media. Anything that will "prove" that islam belongs in Europe / Scandinavia gets regurgitated without much scrutiny because of ideological reasons.
Not quite. What happens is that people pose hypotheses, based on available evididence, that are later strengthened or weakened by new evidence. What happened here was that the authour had the same evidence that we have, they just took the liberty to add data that wasn’t actually there, and drew conclusions based on that.
How are they different than someone with a blog on the internet?
Why should anyone pay any attention to BBC's cries of losing authoritative take on dependable news?
If anything, I am celebrating losing the "argument from authority" bias in the media.