Investigations of a Dog

There’s a new early-modern edition of Carnivalesque up at Mercurius Politcus. Nick has done a fantastic job of pastiching 17th century presbyterian bigot Thomas Edwards.

The next Carnivalesque will be an ancient/medieval edition  at The Cranky Professor in November. You can submit posts using the ancient/medieval nomination form.

The October Military History Carnival is now up at Chronologi Cogitationes.

I still need a host for the November edition, so if you’d like to do it please get in touch.

It’s now 2 years since I started this blog. In that time I’ve started a blog carnival, got an article published, and finally got a job. I can’t really think of much to say about this anniversary, but here’s an arbitrary selection of some of my best/favourite posts. They’re in chronological order as ranking them any other way would be too difficult. It at least gives a rough idea of what I’ve been doing with Investigations of a Dog over the last couple of years. I’m now moving towards shorter posts which get straight to the point as I don’t have time to write 2-3,000 word posts, and I doubt that many people have the time to read them either.

19 October 2006, Grand Narratives of Global War: Postmodernism that you can actually understand, illustrated by the problems of working out when the Second World War started.

5 December 2006, The Bing Bong Boys: The first time I posted about my great-grandfather’s experiences in the First World War. A little bit of family history led to me digitizing the battalion history and learning a lot about XML.

13 December 2006, Cavalry Charges: Shock: Destroying some myths about horses crashing into each other. I’ve changed my mind about some things in the light of new evidence, but this is still a good introduction to why the “equine battering ram” is impossible.

25 May 2007, Everyone knows you can’t make a World War I game: Some lazy journalist wrote some rubbish about computer games and the First World War. Esther found ‘em and fixed ‘em, then I flanked ‘em and finished ‘em. Maybe would have been better without the unsubstantiated “long periods of boredom” bit, but mostly bang on target.

18 October 2007, FPS is good for you: Just reporting what someone else said, but it’s really important. Gender differences in spatial reasoning are not fixed and can be changed easily by playing games.

6 December 2007, Book Review: Malcolm Wanklyn – Decisive Battles of the English Civil War: All about how Malcolm Wanklyn is coming out with some of the most exciting work on the civil war.

13 December 2007, Cows: A still unsolved mystery about Londoners who supposedly hadn’t seen cows before.

4 April 2008, Glenn Burgess On Revisionism: Maybe a bit too dense and esoteric for a blog post, but I think I made some good points about some very big historiographical issues.

10 August 2008, Saddlers Wills: A bit of a lazy post as it was just edited highlights from some documents I’d been transcribing, but I liked it and so did some other people. Shows some of the interesting things you can find in wills, and how digitization and wikis are making it easier to share interesting information.

29 August 2008, Cavalry Generals: Cromwell and Balfour: Comparing Oliver Cromwell’s early military career with the criminally ignored Sir William Balfour to show that they were both good at commanding cavalry.

And an honourable mention for “To the disgrace of all womankind”, which is the most popular post for Google searches…

The UK National Archives (or PRO if you’re old-skool like me) has announced a new project called Digital Microfilm. This involves scanning existing microfilms of original documents and making the whole reel available as a single (very big!) PDF file. These files are free to download. The aim is to eventually digitize all the microfilm records held by TNA/PRO and get rid of the microfilm readers at Kew. I think this a great idea as it’s a quick and easy way of making these records more widely available without the time and cost involved in indexing individual documents. Users can post their own indexes and transcripts on the Your Archives wiki. Although the quality of the scans obviously won’t be any better than the microfilm that they came from (and I know from experience that full colour high-resolution digital photos are much easier to work with) PDFs will still be more convenient than using a microfilm reader – no more holding a camera up to the screen to get a copy of the microfilm! I’m not sure whether this project will include records that have already been (badly) indexed and made available through DocumentsOnline and Ancestry, such as WWI service records and medal cards, but I assume records which aren’t currently available anywhere online will be the highest priority.

The next Military History Carnival will be at Chronologi Cogitationes on Monday 20th October. Please e-mail submissions to blakemore_9 [at] hotmail [dot] com or use the submission form. We welcome posts on any aspects of wars and armed forces in any part of the world in any period up to the end of the 20th century. Ideally submissions should have been posted since the last edition (12th September).

We also need hosts for November onwards. Please get in touch if you’d like to help out. Your blog doesn’t have to be primarily about military history, as long as you’re interested.

I’ve just got an e-mail from SAGE Publications advertising free trial access to their online journals. Thunderbird thought it might be a scam but I’ve checked their website and it seems to be genuine. Just go to this page and register, then you should get free access to all SAGE journals, including War In History, until 31st October. That means that my debut article is available for anyone who wants to read it but couldn’t get at it before.