Ancient/Medieval History balance

[Restitutor27]

I'm looking for some input on balancing ancient and medieval history in tournaments (mostly a question focused on how much of these there should be relative to each other, rather than relative to modern).

Is ancient a bit cramped?
It is a bit difficult to delineate between what counts as "ancient" vs "late antiquity" for some questions but in a few sets I've worked on, even having roughly 0.67/0.67 ancient feels quite cramped:

• there's a general expectation for a certain amount of Greco-Roman content in the set which seems to be what people know the best, and you need to cover a range within it rather than just the classical periods every time

• to not give Egypt/Ancient Near East content ridiculously short shrift relative to importance/how much there is to ask about, you really have to set aside a fair bit more space than like 1 question a tournament (I'd argue 2/2 isn't too much)

• ancient world content (interestingly recent sets seem to have gone quite heavy on Americas)

• archaeology-focused questions, which sometimes have a tendency to play like geography in disguise if made too extracanonical for the difficulty as it is very easy to make them too hard

Considering how most teams don't play more than 10 packets a tournament this may well be ~12 questions in total, which has felt a bit limiting in the sets I've worked on before.

Early medieval
In my experience when sets have 1/1 of each of European, World, US, and Ancient/Other History it often leads to skipping over late antiquity/early medieval periods (especially 600-1000, but also c.300-600 to some extent) unless a lot of care is taken, especially since people tend to gravitate towards writing classics for ancient, world often skews very 19th-20th century, and there's so much late medieval and Renaissance/early modern-onwards European content that comes up that it is easy to miss early medieval altogether.

I'm not trying to say early medieval needs to come up disproportionately more than it does now, rather that it's important that people don't hear (almost) zero questions on it when playing a tournament, and that it should probably therefore be blocked out in the distro. I'm aware that for a lot of this there are fewer contemporary written sources but maybe this just demands a slightly different approach to writing rather than merely a neglect of the category. The two COOTs I've worked on have had a "pre-1100" and "pre-1000" category which groups in early medieval with ancient but it seems arguable either way that space for early medieval could equally be grouped in with High/Late Middle Ages and might be more thematically consistent there.

So, some questions I'd like input on:

• How good a job do you think the standard 0.5/0.5+ ancient history per 20/20 packet does at covering a range of content (i.e. "the canon", plus a good number of things that need to come up more)? Would it feel terribly egregious if this were increased a bit?

• Do we need to explicitly make room for slightly more early medieval, and if so does it make more sense for this to be at the expense of ancient, or at the expense of later medieval? This fundamentally involves a very small number of questions in a set, but seems worth keeping track of to avoid certain periods coming up zero times.

• I've seen a few sets (like some NASATs) have very wide-ranging "medieval" categories such as a subcategory of European History that goes from 476-1492, which intuitively feels like a bit much to fit into 1/1 to me (but is possibly okay for sets with significantly more than 13 packets); is there much argument to be made for taking such a broad approach to one temporal category?

[Cheynem]

I see your point on "Early Medieval." I would guess the sticking point, which you touch on, is...

those questions are hard to write. There aren't as many sources of note, especially on lower levels, and the time period isn't as widely touched on as modern or classical. Even the course I took on early medieval history, we generally focused more on broad trends and social life, which are interesting but not especially helpful for quizbowl writing that likes more specific details and names.

I'm not certain of mandating some early medieval content would work or would result in the same topics being further plumbed to oblivion. I think one way to start might be to mandate it at very high difficulty tournaments that have more freedom to go harder or ask about stuff--I think trying to do that at anything Regs or below wouldn't work very well.

[The Blind Prophet]

I haven't worked on enough sets to know to what degree this is standard practice, but for the ARCADIAs the history editors have always sub-distributed by time period, and certainly the early medieval period is one of those time periods. It seems not at all unreasonable or difficult to mandate 1 or 2 questions for both European and World History be on the early Medieval period; even if there is a lack of interest in writing those questions the editor should bite the bullet and write that content themselves. Reliable source are certainly an issue but not on such a level that this level of distributional representation is much of a problem.

[RexSueciae]

I support greater coverage of ancient history topics, broadly defined -- my upcoming Clarke Memorial Tournament is guaranteed to have at least 1 ancient or classical history question per packet (and if it crashes and burns, hopefully it will still serve as the nucleus for another question set). I didn't make any specific allowances for early medieval history besides basically eyeballing it; counting things up in my planning spreadsheet, there should be about a half-dozen such questions scattered throughout.

I know that other people make very specific subdistributions for themselves, but I've never much been comfortable with it. Tossups and bonuses should be on different countries / periods, and if something comes up in round 1 then maybe similar things shouldn't come up immediately in round 2. Sometimes I'll leave notes for myself to space things out, that I'll need another question on e.g. "France" or "Southeast Asia" (keeping in mind that if I did medieval France before, I should do not-medieval France later). Which is to say, I'm planning out which question goes in which round from the very beginning, not generating X number of questions and then packetizing them only at the end.

I have vague thoughts about the intersections between ancient / classical history, literature, and mythology, and whether there could be a cross-category "classics" distribution instead.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I see your point on "Early Medieval." I would guess the sticking point, which you touch on, is...

those questions are hard to write. There aren't as many sources of note, especially on lower levels, and the time period isn't as widely touched on as modern or classical. Even the course I took on early medieval history, we generally focused more on broad trends and social life, which are interesting but not especially helpful for quizbowl writing that likes more specific details and names.

I'm not certain of mandating some early medieval content would work or would result in the same topics being further plumbed to oblivion. I think one way to start might be to mandate it at very high difficulty tournaments that have more freedom to go harder or ask about stuff--I think trying to do that at anything Regs or below wouldn't work very well.

Anecdotally, a noticeable change in the canon since my undergrad days is that there seems to be less medieval history overall, in part because the kinds of content that most readily became medieval history questions -- name this monarch, name this pope, name this battle, name this dynasty, name this Crusade -- has fallen out of fashion. (More generally, and also anecdotally, it seems like most player interest and energy is going toward writing more recent history, so there's also less ancient, less Renaissance, less early modern...)

[Mike Bentley]

I see your point on "Early Medieval." I would guess the sticking point, which you touch on, is...

those questions are hard to write. There aren't as many sources of note, especially on lower levels, and the time period isn't as widely touched on as modern or classical. Even the course I took on early medieval history, we generally focused more on broad trends and social life, which are interesting but not especially helpful for quizbowl writing that likes more specific details and names.

I'm not certain of mandating some early medieval content would work or would result in the same topics being further plumbed to oblivion. I think one way to start might be to mandate it at very high difficulty tournaments that have more freedom to go harder or ask about stuff--I think trying to do that at anything Regs or below wouldn't work very well.

Anecdotally, a noticeable change in the canon since my undergrad days is that there seems to be less medieval history overall, in part because the kinds of content that most readily became medieval history questions -- name this monarch, name this pope, name this battle, name this dynasty, name this Crusade -- has fallen out of fashion. (More generally, and also anecdotally, it seems like most player interest and energy is going toward writing more recent history, so there's also less ancient, less Renaissance, less early modern...)

I think part of this is also due to a general compression of how much European history is asked about. Lots of tournaments used to have 2/2 dedicated for Europe (maybe also including "European" countries like Canada and Australia). These days, at least 0.5/0.5 and more commonly 1/1 are carved out of that to make space for more world and misc. history. And world history in general tends to skew more recent unless editors really put in a lot of effort to find good, accessible content from these earlier periods.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Totally with Mike here.

For the non-Olds - back in 2014, it was normal for most tournaments to have 2/2 European history; US got 1/1 everything else got 1/1, with Canada/Australia/NZ ending up in European or World depending on the editor's preference. Marshall Steinbaum and I agreed when working on [url]Cane Ridge Revival[/url=viewtopic.php?p=265287#p265287] that this needed an overhaul and decided to compress things to 1/1 Continental European History post-500 CE, setting aside 1/1 for Commonwealth, ancient history (including non-European), archaeology, and miscellaneous content. I've used a similar history distribution since then in sets I've worked on - though now Britain/Ireland often goes in the European section as well - and I'm very happy that most tournaments do as well!

As far as I'm concerned, quizbowl is fine on ancient history - with dedicated space in the distribution, it usually gets pretty good representation, and gets close to to 0.5/0.5 in many events. Much like medieval history, I think Ancient Near East get disfavored heavily because, if you don't have a broad background in the area, it's hard to shape into something that's difficulty-appropriate and compelling without going right for the kind of political and military history that is unfashionable these days, as Matt pointed out.

The same feels especially true of the 500-1000 CE era. Plenty of folks will know about Alfred the Great, Charlemagne, Justinian, the early caliphates, the Tang, Heian Japan, and some of the Merovingians and Maya cities, but the famous, easy-to-dig-up material there is either very well-trodden or falls into the aforementioned "unfashionable" style of cluing. Meanwhile, venturing outside those areas can feel dauting difficulty-wise, even to three-dot sets, or the material is so unfamiliar that writers won't have much of an idea of what their middle and mid-late clues should be.

I'm further guessing part of this sentiment stems from being across the pond. I'm guessing that Europe, and especially Late Antiquity and medieval Europe, isn't something that American and Canadian writers feel as compelled to ask about because it's not nearly as at-hand.

There's plenty of room to theorize about what kinds of questions to write or why people don't write them, but a much better idea is to join sets and actually write them. And importantly, write them well - because that is what's going to compel others to do the same. Take archaeology! People barely wrote archaeology questions until various writers started showing that you could shape the content there into interesting, pyramidal, playable questions. Now, it's so popular that writers are scrambling for new content and we're almost back to the original concern about archaeology questions, that they have a...

tendency to play like geography in disguise if made too extracanonical for the difficulty

So yeah, go write some good questions! And if you're not sure about your work, get feedback from someone experienced! If people see examples of good questions that play out well on a given topic, they'll automatically feel that such questions are worth including in their set. Archaeology, contemporary literature, film that wasn't 1950s foreign directors, science that isn't named things...it's all happened before!