Happy New January
As everyone who studies early-modern England knows, the new year doesn’t really begin until 25th March. But apart from the halls still being decked with cheap tat, the “festive season” is more or less out of the way. Can we talk about “getting back to normal” when christmas itself is such a normative ideological hegemony? Anyway, this post is just a round-up of some things I’ve been doing, or am going to do.
First, I’m hosting the 46th History Carnival here on 15th January. I’ve had an encouraging number of submissions so far, but I still need more. I’ll take quality blog posts about any aspect of history (the more diverse or unusual the better), but no submissions that are just about current affairs with no historical content please. Use the official submission form or e-mail them to me at hc46@4-lom.com.
After that, the most important thing is that I played and finished Brothers In Arms: The Road To Hill 30. In some ways it was very impressive, and in others it was quite disappointing. Expect another post about gameplay, realism, and genre in First Person Shooters. There’s also a new demo of Muzzy Lane’s Making History: The Calm and the Storm. I haven’t tried it yet, but they say it’s an improvement over the previous version.
The other day I wrote my first Wikipedia article (but it’s so esoteric that no-one will ever find it!). This will almost certainly lead to the obligatory post on the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia which every history blogger has to go through. I’ve also started proofreading at Distributed Proofreaders. As well as “giving something back” it’s giving me a useful insight into the creation of digital texts.
As if all this isn’t enough of a distraction from my core task of trying to get esoteric articles published in peer reviewed journals, I joined the Great War forum. So far it’s paid off, as within a few hours of posting other forumers had supplied me with lots of new information about my great-grandfather, which will probably be turning up in a future post. Discussions there have raised some interesting questions about digital history, as there are many amateurs compiling databases of First World War soldiers. I’m thinking about a couple of small projects that I could carry out on my own: digitising and publishing my great-grandfather’s papers, and producing a digital edition of the published history of his battalion (now out of copyright, I believe). These projects would give me good experience, demonstrate the uses of TEI XML, and be useful for other researchers. If I actually do them, I’ll try to blog them as I go to give people more insight into digital history projects.
In addition to all that, there’s still my Horses, War, and Gender project, which I haven’t done much about recently, my ongoing journey into critical theory (or insanity, depending on your point of view), learning latin (amorem faciamus et mortem desuper audiamus!), a couple of conference proposals which I’ll need to turn into papers if they get accepted, an article under consideration which will probably need revising when it finally comes back from the reviewers (unless they say it’s so bad that it should be burnt by the common hangman), and various ideas about computer games. Maybe it’s actually a good thing that I don’t have a job.
