Three years old
It’s now three years since I started this blog (by some coincidence I started the day before Tenured Radical). There isn’t much to reflect on since the last anniversary as it’s been a fairly quiet year. This year I seem to have got more political (but when is anything not political?). Looking back at my style of writing three years ago I can’t believe how reasonable and equivocal it is. I might also be slightly less postmodern. Since reading Judith Bennett I’ve realised that strident empiricism can be the perfect companion for strident feminism. The Military History Carnival seems to have more or less died, and it looks like history carnivals in general might be on the way out. Not organising a carnival is kind of a relief as it’s freed me from the shackles of even-handedness. For me, the most exciting development in the history blogosphere was the horse in history and culture group blog, which grew out of that most rare of things – a genuinely interesting and enjoyable conference. And all the cool kids are on Twitter now, but I’m not.
This week I decided to make a few changes to my blog. Most radical is that the blogroll is now gone. It occurred to me that it wasn’t much use because it kept getting out of sync with what I was actually reading, and I doubt that many people take much notice of it anyway. Instead I’ve imported my shared items from Google Reader, which should give a more accurate impression of what I’m reading and what I think is good. Also there’s now a Publication Archive in the page links on the sidebar. As it’s well over a year since my first article was published in War In History the terms of my contract allow me to publish a self-archived version. In this case you can find two versions: as well as the final version, which is more or less the same as the published version, I’ve uploaded the original submission. If you’ve got too much time on your hands it might be interesting to compare them to see how peer-review and revisions changed the article and made it better. If you want to cite the article you’ll still need to use the official version, not least because the page numbers are different. There’s always room for more improvement (I wish I’d engaged with Malcolm Wanklyn properly, mentioned more women, and not used the word “bias”), but I still think it’s not bad for a first attempt.
As for the future, the coming year could be the last year of Investigations of a Dog. After the fourth anniversary I might want to stop it and do Something Completely Different. Or I might not. In the meantime things probably won’t change much.
