Last week I posted about Your Archives, a wiki-based website set up by the UK National Archives to allow members of the public to share their knowledge of archival holdings in the UK. While I’m very excited about the possibilities of this site, I also expressed some major reservations about the terms of use, which place serious restrictions on the re-use of content published on the site. But I didn’t just solipsistically moan about it on my blog. I also contacted the NA and called on them to use a GNU Free Documentation License, as used by Wikipedia. I’m pleased to say that they responded quickly with a more detailed explanation of their position. This is what they said:
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Still catching up on things that I meant to write weeks ago. Last month there was a post at Glod’n'Epix about First World War computer games. Esther linked to this Guardian article about a planned WWI FPS and was rightly critical of its assumptions that there aren’t any WWI games and the spurious reasons for that. As she points out, there are loads of First World War games, but I’m going to attack from a different angle.
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Now that I’ve got a lot of other things out of the way I can get back to posting more regularly, and there’s a lot to catch up on (although I’m still slightly confused - this post was going to be about something completely different but wandered off in a slightly bizarre direction and isn’t very coherent!). Via Break Of Day In The Trenches there’s an update on Niall Ferguson and Muzzy Lane at Wired. Ferguson’s misplaced enthusiasm for the game Making History: The Calm and the Storm got a lot of attention in the history blogosphere last year (for example see Airminded, and my posts here, here, and here). There was some suspicion at the time that Ferguson was probably being paid by Muzzy Lane to big-up what is a pretty mediocre game, and now Wired reveals that he’s teaming up with them to design an ultra-modern counter-factual game.
It’s good that the Wired article focuses on chaos and complexity, but I think it’s a bit too optimistic. As far as I could see from the demo, Making History didn’t capture the chaos and complexity of war - it was simplistic and predictable. It’s true that strategy games can get people used to dealing with chaos, but Making History isn’t a very good example. If this is the main educational value of a strategy game, then that game doesn’t need to be historically accurate, and doesn’t even need a historical setting. There are plenty of commercial Real Time Strategy games available which are not based on historical research and which don’t claim to be counter-factual tools for historians. In my experience, this kind of game can be so complex and chaotic that even its designers don’t fully understand it.
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Last week the UK National Archives launched Your Archives, a wiki which allows users to contribute their knowledge of documents held by the NA/PRO and other archives in the UK. I first found out about it on a visit to the PRO in January, but I didn’t have time to look at it then, so I was quite excited about it finally going on the web. My PhD research gave me some very specialised knowledge of English Civil War records which would be valuable to other researchers but which wouldn’t fit into any kind of “scholarly” publication, so a wiki would be the ideal way of sharing that knowledge. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at Your Archives I’m half impressed and half disappointed. Although it has huge potential it needs some changes before it lives up to my expectations.
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Last night I went to see Stewart Lee, who was recently voted the 41st best stand-up comedian ever. Little did he know that in the audience was the 3rd most popular military history blogger, but anyway. The gig was in Lincoln Drill Hall, now an arts venue but once the home of 4th Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment. 4th Battalion was the Territorial Battalion recruited in the city of Lincoln and the south of the county, and during the First World War it formed part of 138th Brigade along with 5th Battalion (my great-grandfather’s battalion, recruited in the north of the county) and the two territorial battalions of the Leicestershire Regiment.
Although I connected drill halls with the Territorial Force, I wasn’t sure before whether this was the hall that 4th Lincs used during the First World War. But in what’s now the bar of the venue I saw a large stone memorial to the glorious dead of 4th Battalion. It’s described on the National Inventory of War Memorials but I can’t find a photo of it online. The thing that most struck me was the carving of the regimental cap badge on the top of the plaque: a sphinx sitting on a plinth bearing the word “EGYPT”, over a scroll bearing the name of the regiment. It was the “EGYPT” that I found surprising in this context. But why? Isn’t that exactly what you’d expect to find on a Lincolnshire Regiment badge?
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The second Military History Carnival is now up at Victoria’s Cross?. Gary has done a great job with this, journeying through space and time to come up with a very diverse selection of posts.
The next edition will be at Behind Antietam on the Web on 17th June. E-mail submissions to $bdowney$@$aotw$.$org$ (but remove the dollar signs!) or use the submission form. Remember our definition of “military history” is very broad. Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a military history blogger, you might have some interesting and relevant posts to share.
The second Military History Carnival is taking place at Victoria’s Cross? this Sunday (13th May). There’s still time to send submissions to $gary$@$breathinghistory$.$com$ (but remove the dollar signs!) or use the Military History Carnival submission form.
George Simmers is celebrating the first anniversary of his Great War Fiction blog. Meanwhile at Break of Day in the Trenches, Esther MacCallum-Stewart is thinking about the ethics of research blogging and the difference between personal and non-personal blogs. Gary Smailes at Victoria’s Cross? celebrates the new dawn of history blogs and calls on history bloggers to comment more, post about each others posts more, and get more involved in carnivals. And it’s just over 6 months since I started Investigations of a Dog, so you can probably see where this post is going…
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