About Martialis

Martialis is an index of martial-arts lineages and styles. It traces how knowledge and tradition passed from teacher to student, across centuries and continents, and cites a source for every claim it makes.

Visualizing martial arts links

The graph at the centre of the site is the main way in: click on any person to see their biography, their teachers, their students, and the styles they practised or founded. Double-click to centre the graph on that person's immediate tree.

The JudoForum trauma, or the obsession with openness and durability

Many years ago, there was a site called JudoForum (JF, and that I'm not linking to it is a hint of what comes next), a web forum during the peak of that format. JF was somewhat special, since it accumulated a wealth of knowledge almost entirely driven by users – users who shared first-person accounts, scholarly information, rare documentary evidence, on top of open-ended debates about anything in and around Judo.

Some topics went on for pages and pages, since the web forum format (like Usenet before it) made long, in-depth discussions possible.

One day, JF was sold, and without going into the sad details, closed, and the entire database was lost. In a matter of weeks, the accumulated knowledge of years (including insights and testimonies of users that are no longer with us) was lost forever.

Everything on the Internet is forever is not true, and is becoming less true by the year. Private groups in Facebook behave more like AOL communities of old, fenced away from the internet, unarchived and inaccessible. Social media rewards the immediate, and changes visibility policy at a whim. Forums like JF are not integrally archived, and can stop being used and slowly rot away, eventually disappearing completely.

Martialis is born out of this knowledge, of this shared trauma about information loss. All decisions have, at their core, a guideline: how can this survive and be useful regardless of my efforts, independently of any funding, irrespective of infrastructure costs?

The ancile

Our symbol is directly inspired by the ancile, the shield which - myth has it - fell down from the sky by order of Jupiter himself, and was kept in the Temple of Mars. A voice declared that Rome would endure as long as the shield was preserved, and so King Numa had eleven copies made, so alike that no thief could tell the true one from the others. The twelve shields were entrusted to the Salii, the leaping priests of Mars, who carried them through the city every March, striking them as they danced.

A thing kept safe by faithful copies, and by the people who carry it forward: that is what Martialis hopes for its own record.

Sourced data, full transparency

The data comes from the Martialis Database, a YAML corpus that anyone can read, download, and reuse. Each claim carries a reference to the source it came from, and an assessment of how well attested it is.

See Licensing for how the data, the code, and the vocabulary are licensed, and for the database rights reserved over the data. To cite the database as a whole:

Martialis: Martial Arts Lineage Database, Frederico Muñoz (ORCID 0009-0000-9488-3542), https://martial.is - CC BY-SA 4.0

Contributing

Corrections, additions, and new lineage data are welcome: the best route is the Martialis Database Discussions, where you can participate directly in the discussions of any entry (requires a GitHub account). Additionally, you can send suggestions through the built-in “Suggest a correction” section in each entry's details view: this will send your comments to the project for review (only available after signing in).

If you would also like to support the project financially, see Support Martialis.

Technical notes

Martialis is written in Common Lisp using Hunchentoot, Snooze, Spinneret, Datastar, Cytoscape.js, and Beer CSS.