It’s a great way to get a better idea of what things really looked like which is hard to do with choppy grainy footage. Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more connected with the past, so being all curmudgeonly on this doesn’t make sense.
No, Historians have the job of creating an accurate account of the past, their job isn't to connect you to anything, they're not Facebook for the past or the history channel.
Trying to turn everything into entertainment is a race to the bottom, because people will more and more demand that their scientific education is 'engaging'. That's actually how the history channel went from well, actual history to ancient aliens
The type of approach you suggest feels like the arguments about how people should just learn the CLI or low-level computer operations. The "We shouldn't bother with GUI's", "it's not important that we expose functionality with pretty UI", or "if people cared they would learn the CLI and be happy about it".
Making history/art/computers/etc more accessible is not a bad thing.
"Alter things to make them more popular" is fine in some contexts, but if everyone starts confusing that with the original study of factual knowledge... that's a huge problem.
There is a balance that can found that drives engagement from the public that fuels that historical work needed to be done.
They may not care that I redirect more funding towards more understanding of what happened. Or they may. Either way they are not in control. I am.
Interpreting the past is literally a subjective process. Previously we used a human neural net - famous for assuming relationships between individuals that do not exist and for denying ones that do.
In time I will use an artificial neural net and I won't need a gating human. It will paint me a picture of a place and time and its best possible interpretation of the evidence.
After all, knowledge that does not adjust my actions is worthless. So if there is truth somewhere that I cannot access and some less accurate information that is well accessible and which will move me closer to the truth then the latter is superior every time. I'll just multiply it appropriately with my prior probability on how accurate an ANN reconstruction can be.
You may have more understanding of something, but you have to be very careful to remember that it's not "what happened". Adding another layer of inaccuracies does not make something more accurate.
"In time I will use an artificial neural net and I won't need a gating human. It will paint me a picture of a place and time and its best possible interpretation of the evidence."
I wouldn't bet on it. In fact, if you do get an "artificial neural net" to do that, you might want to start worrying about what impressions it wants you to take away.
And as for what’s happened, it doesn’t matter that it’s less precise. Every piece of information only moves my belief tensor in some direction. It only has to move me in the direction of what’s happened and it’s already superior to an exact description of what’s happened that doesn’t move me in that direction at all.
You overvalue inaccessible truth. And you overestimate historians’ propensity to tell the truth. They have every incentive to lie. And they do. And it works because I suspect you value precision over accuracy. The net result is you have lies told to you by people with a vested interest in you believing a thing.
And I, I have a machine that I can make that makes mistakes. But you know what, you take your approach. I’ll take mine, we’ll see who wins in the marketplace of ideas.
Yep. That's the job of writers of popular history books and school history textbooks, which historians themselves sometimes write, and creators of historical entertainment such as novels, plays, movies, and TV shows.
Make your choice historians.
If these "enhanced" videos proliferate, then as a side effect there will be less desire for the original "source of truth" videos in grainy B&W and low framerates. I.e., this scenario: the original, primary-source video, based 100% on reality, gets 100 views on Youtube while the same video artificially manipulated to look better gets 100k.
Eventually the enhanced one has replaced the original, and possibly even the original gets lost, and in the future historians will only have our grossly-artificial reinterpretations of the video instead of the source of truth.
(but then again, YT is not exactly a historical archive, I'd imagine the originals should be archived properly to prevent this)
If the "improved" version didn't exist, how many Youtube views would the original get? 110? 200? 1100? It sure wouldn't be 100,100. On what basis would you assert that 10 or 100 or 1000 people viewing the original was better than 100,000 viewing the enanced version?
And eventually the original gets lost? What it if eventually gets lost anyway, and we don't even have the enhanced version?
It's not, though. It's a great way to get an idea of what a few people today think things looked like.
Enjoying the videos is fine, but it's not great to think they are more accurate just because they look better.
I cringe at colorized films for the same reasons. If you can't take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W. In the same way that Technicolor forced you to have one of their color advisors supervising everything. At some point some audiences decided that B&W was boring and the aesthetical appreciation of that whole graphical universe was lost, as a result the expectations are that everything has to look in a very definite way or else it's unwatchable. I find such way of thinking the most narrow-minded by far.
So the colorized versions are a Fantasy, but the original b/w versions were already a Fantasy.
When colorizing, sometimes they have color photos from the filming. You can try to match those, but that may not match the intent of the film. But you might not know the intent either, so you have to guess at that too. It might be easier to convince people to watch colorized films, but it's important to realize it's not really the same film.
The movie represents a directors vision, and how it looked in B&W was part of that vision. I agree, they should not colorize old movies.
But historical films are in B&W because that's all they had, not because they wanted to depict it that way. I'm sure if the creators of those films had the option of 4K HDR, they would have used it.
Maybe other people are different but I can't cross the imagination gap with b/w footage but this did it instantly.
10/10 best possible ad for these services.
But that's the problem. Is it what things really looked like?
I am a curmudgeon, so presumably I don't count, but I think you should feel free to enjoy the modified photos and videos. But don't forget that that is not what it really looked like.