Investigations of a Dog

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…

In October 2006 I set up Wordpress and started Investigations of a Dog, taking the name from an obscure short story by Franz Kafka. At that time I thought the blog would be a bit more literary than it turned out to be, but unlike printed publications, blogs can change quickly and respond what’s going on around them. I was soon inspired by Mark Grimsley to pay more attention to military history and to go back to self-identifying as a military historian. So far my PhD thesis hasn’t featured as heavily as I was expecting. Some people base their blogs much more closely on PhD research that they’re doing or have done, and I was never intending to do that, but I thought that as the only “proper” research project I’d done it would be one of the few things I could write about with confidence. Experience has shown me that blogging is also very different from peer reviewed journals in that respect. You don’t have to be the leading expert or have something totally original to say. Independent thought, the ability to make unexpected connections, and an accessible style of writing are more important than a command of masses of detailed evidence. Although in professional terms I’m an English Civil War expert, I soon found myself writing about the two World Wars, often in response to posts I’d read at other blogs (Airminded first inspired me to write a post about the Second World War). Some of my best early-modern posts were based on my BA and MA dissertations rather than my PhD thesis. Blogging has given me more confidence in addressing different topics and having opinions, while not taking my opinions too seriously. Considering the eclecticism which blogging has brought out, I’m pleased I chose a vague and enigmatic (and alright a bit pretentious too!) name, as something more descriptive like “Civil War Horses” would have been very limiting. I also considered calling it “Histor’s Eye” after Lee and Herring’s one-eyed history pirate crow, but decided that might be a bit too flippant.

Blogging the progress of my experimental digitisation projects fits perfectly into the way a blog works. Posting my progress as it happens and describing issues as I deal with them gives a unique insight into digital history. I always intended to include works in progress, but as Esther says, it’s difficult to decide how much or how little to give away. Even without an employer to worry about, this has been a difficult decision for me, and although I like the idea of openness, I’ve ended up keeping a lot of things secret. I haven’t given away very much about articles and conference papers that I’m working on. It doesn’t seem fair to editors/organizers to “spoil the surprise”, but on the other hand getting published takes an absurdly long time and it seems like a waste of the blog’s immediacy to keep everything under wraps until the journal comes out. That’s assuming I get accepted of course. A blog could be the ideal place for rejected pieces - they might still be interesting to someone, and might spark off some useful debate. I’m not quite in a position to try this as although I have a growing collection of rejected conference proposals (who doesn’t?) I’m still hoping to do something with them. I have used the blog to publish some bits and pieces which I cut from an article because I didn’t think they were good enough or relevant enough. That seemed to work well as I got some interesting feedback. My posts are more often things which I wouldn’t consider submitting for publication because they’re not substantial or original enough, or are outside my area of specialisation. Another favourite topic is examining my own approaches to history, something which every historian needs to do, but which isn’t quite appropriate for a traditional print journal.

My work on cavalry drill books is an exception to the policy of keeping academic works in progress secret. It started out as blog posts which were vaguely based on my BA and MA dissertations, and I didn’t even think about doing any “proper” work in that area until I saw a call for papers for a conference where it would fit in very well. I went on to write a post about preparing the proposal, which helped me to get my ideas in order. It remains to be seen whether this was a good idea. If the paper gets rejected then it’ll probably stay as blog posts, although I might write some more posts on the subject in future.

After six months, I still don’t know what the ideal frequency of posts is. Should you keep posting as often as possible to keep people interested, or do RSS feeds make that idea redundant? I know that I’m not currently posting as often as I’d like to. In the first three months I usually posted at least two or three times a week, and sometimes every day. In the early days I felt like I had to work hard to win an audience, and now that I’ve achieved that (third most popular military history blog in the world… from a certain point of view) it’s easy to get complacent. But the real problem is time rather than motivation. I still want to post more, and I still have plenty of ideas, but I’ve been busy with other things, from rewriting an article to setting up the Military History Carnival. I agree with Gary Smailes that more academic historians should start blogs, but I doubt that many of them have enough spare time to keep it up.

I’ve been very pleased with the comments I’ve had - nearly always intelligent and encouraging, apart from a few thousand spam comments, (but they rarely get past Akismet) and one or two kids demanding help with their homework. George Simmers has had a similarly pleasant experience in his first year of blogging, in sharp contrast to Esther, who has attracted some very vicious flames from Wilfred Owen fans and others. I’ve also promoted the revisionist view of the Great War and made disparaging remarks about Wilfred Owen but so far I’ve escaped. There are many possible reasons for this. BODITT has been going for 5 years, and when it started blogs in general, and history blogs in particular were much less common than they are now. It could be that Esther was the forlorn hope, and I’m benefiting from security by obscurity (despite Brett saying that I’m number three in the world…). BODITT is also more obviously about the First World War, whereas IOAD has a bit of everything.

But I can’t help wondering whether there’s some sexism involved here. Maybe it’s sexist of me to notice Esther’s gender and assume that it’s the most important difference between our blogs and the major cause of the differences between our experiences of blogging. However, some trolls have commented on her appearance and speculated about her sexuality in a way which seems quite specific to women. You just don’t see that happening to male academics and/or bloggers. George also has a photo in his sidebar, and while I don’t, there is one on my about page. Are George and I authentically ugly enough for people to believe that we’re real academics? Or is it that nobody assumes a brains/beauty dichotomy with men?

Another factor is that BODITT might have a higher Google ranking for search terms which attract Great War trolls. For example, it’s currently ranked 16 for “trenches”, whereas IOAD isn’t even in the top 100. A lot of the Google hits on my Great War posts are looking for specific units and places. And an awful lot of them are looking for a dog. Obviously the blog name comes into play here, but I’m curious about this as I don’t know of a famous dog associated with World War I. It seems to be Americans more than anyone else, with search strings like “what was the name of the dog that was in world war i” or “the dog that they found in the trenches”. It just shows that the myths of the Great War are different in different countries. In Britain we remember it (rightly or wrongly) as being all about mud, blood, death, donkeys, futility, shot-at-dawn, gas attacks, homoerotic poetry, and poppies. In America it’s “that famous dog”! Not quite famous enough for anyone to remember its name, but you know, still famous…

The name of the blog, my interests in animals and gender, and a certain post about Old Bailey sodomy cases have all combined to bring in lots of Google hits from people who seem to be interested in having sex with animals (if any of you are reading this, try Second Life, but hurry before the new identity verification thing comes in!). I’ve also had hits from people searching for “reasons why the holocaust didn’t happen” and “the difference between fantasy and reality”!

Not having a job has given me a lot of freedom for blogging, both in terms of free time and limits on what I can say. This week, for the first time since I started this blog, I’m applying for a job. That’s got me thinking about how employers will view my blogging activities. I like to think that this blog demonstrates my analytical and communication skills, and my knowledge of and enthusiasm for history, but not everyone sees blogs like that, or even knows what a blog is. Esther talks about the difference between personal and non-personal blogs, but doesn’t find the distinction very useful. I certainly wouldn’t know how to classify IOAD in those terms. Does blogging under my real name make it more or less personal than a pseudonymous blog? I’m nothing like the bloggers who just moan about their colleagues/students, or post pictures of their cats. I try to only post substantial pieces about historical topics (with the occasional pieces of carnival news) but it seems almost inevitable that these pieces will be more personal than an article published in a peer reviewed journal. I’m satisfied that I’ve kept up the quality of my posts and not descended too far into solipsism, but I’m also wondering whether potential employers will be influenced by the topics I choose to post about. Of course, if I let that influence me it’ll all be about my prejudices, not theirs, because I can’t possibly know what will impress them. So I’ll just carry on and try not to worry about it too much. I’m hoping that I’ll get back to posting more often soon, but if I get the job I could be posting less often.