An Estonian entrepreneur Jaanus Vihand (pictuted) has come up with a clever idea – he wants to blend the best features of Wikipedia, Google Earth and computer games. And establish a fun, entertaining and interactive historical online-environment called Histrodamus.
One of the ideas is to popularise history among fun-loving teenagers and students. Although the history is often considered dull and overloaded with facts, it doesn’t necessarily have to be so.
A sexy way to narrate the history
Vihand, who calls himself a big fan of history (especially antique ages, warfare history and migrations) called together Estonian historians from The Tartu University and software developers from Webmedia to “narrate” the stories of historical events and personage, migrations etc in a sexy way, using maps, pictures, videos, time-axis etc.
Histrodamus is currently in beta-version only. Too bad I was not granted an access to the demo-version yet (hope I will soon). But I saw that there are some stories already made – one for example about the historical battles most critical for Estonia, the other about the most controversial murders in Estonian history.
And of course, the biography of Lennart Meri, the former Estonian president is also being portrayed.
Everyone can establish their stories
Vihand claims Histrodamus being one of a kind. Well, there are some slightly more sexy attempts to popularise the history - for example a nostalgic and patriotic Russian site Pobediteli.ru, showing us the victorious battles of The Red Army during The Second World War. But that’s a needle in a heystack compared with Vihand’s plans concerning Histrodamus. It will even have an editorial desk, since it will work using similar principles as Wikipedia. Soon everyone can “narrate” their own stories in Histrodamus.
“I’ll bet Google would be able to finish a project like that in a finger snap. But for us it takes time,” Vihand jokes. He plans the public launch of Histrodamus later this year.
Pobediteli.ru – an insufficient but rare example to illustrate the idea of Histrodamus
Photo: Tiit Blaat/Eesti Ekspress
