Investigations of a Dog

This is the 14th Military History Carnival, with a special theme of Contested Boundaries. Today is also the day that Bloggers Unite encourages bloggers to write about human rights (hat tip: Mark Stoneman). I might post something on that theme later today if I have time (and I probably won’t have time), but this carnival edition gives plenty of attention to human rights issues.

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While trawling (not trolling) for more posts that I can include in the next MHC, I found something interesting via Muhlberger’s Early History:

The Soldier in Later Medieval England is a major research project directed by Anne Curry (who was my personal tutor when I was an undergraduate at Reading). They now have a pilot database online (with free access) with details of thousands of soldiers who fought in the Hundred Years War. This should be really useful for anyone interested in medieval military history, not least because the financial records that the data comes from give much more accurate figures for army sizes than the estimates in chronicles.

Last week I read:

1. Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire (Allen Lane, February 2008).
2. Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1652 (Longman, March 2007).

Both are very good books. And the Dauphin’s horse “is a most absolute and excellent horse”. That is, they’re as good as books which attempt to synthesize the state of the field at the time of writing can be. But can we do better than that? There are at least two problems with this genre which might be solved by using the web instead of print.

First, it’s impossible to keep a printed book up to date. As both authors acknowledge, there will always be something more to be said. It’s inevitable that other people will be saying some of it while the book is going through the process of typesetting, proofreading, printing and distribution. Just one example: Gentles and Braddick both take a traditionally hostile view of the Earl of Manchester. In April 2007 Malcolm Wanklyn published an article which reassessed Manchester’s generalship and concluded that the traditional view is largely based on lies that Cromwell told after the events. I’m convinced by Wanklyn’s arguments, but even if other people aren’t, it’s obvious that this new interpretation needs to be discussed. It wasn’t possible for Gentles or Braddick to discuss it because the article came out too late. If books were published on the web instead of print this wouldn’t be a problem. There would be no physical limit on updating them like there is with printed books.

Second, history books, especially ones intended to be accessible to non-experts, generally need a coherent linear narrative. But this conflicts with the need to explain things to non-experts. This is a general problem with all history books. A more specific problem that Braddick and Gentles have to deal with is explaining complex interrelated events in three kingdoms. Both authors are good at dealing with these challenges, but there’s no reason why these things even need to be challenging. Hypertext can free us from the constraints of linear narrative to a certain extent. A web page which contains a basic outline of some events can also contain links to other pages giving background details of people, places, and related events. Just look at the internal links in Wikipedia, and the way that blogs often link to Wikipedia.

This isn’t just fantasy or wild speculation about the future. It’s happening now. Bill Turkel and Alan MacEachern have published The Programming Historian on the web instead of in print, and are making full use of the opportunities that web publishing offers. Let’s hope more people try it soon.

Yesterday Bill Turkel announced that The Programming Historian is now available. This is a book, but not as we know it. It’s published in the form of a website and is completely free to access. As the name suggests, it’s an introduction to computer programming aimed specifically at historians. The tutorials will get you doing useful things as soon as possible, even if you have no previous experience of programming. If you do know programming it’s also worth a look. I found lots of useful tips in it.

By enabling more historians to make better use of digital technology the book is helping to change the way that we do history. And it’s also helping to change the way that we present our research, because it’s a concrete example of the advantages of open access publishing on the web. This means a whole lot more than not having to pay to read it. Although the book has been published, it’s still a work in progress. New chapters will be added in future, and existing ones can be improved in response to feedback from readers. Any typos, factual errors or unclear sentences can all be corrected very easily. Comments from reviewers are displayed on accompanying discussion pages so you can see how the text developed and what people thought of it. The book can keep growing to meet the needs of digital historians: there doesn’t ever have to be a point when it’s finally finished like there is with a printed book.

Go and read it. Now.

Via Archaeozoology, an interesting but difficult to spell blog about about the archaeology of non-human animals, I discovered another interesting archaeology blog. Middle Savagery is written by Colleen Morgan, a PhD student at UC Berkeley. She’s doing lots of innovative things with Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Second Life (don’t let the Goreans get you!).

I think maybe historians and archaeologists don’t talk to each other enough despite supposedly having a common interest in the past. My BA was originally going to be archaeology but I was bored with it after two terms and switched to history - I don’t think I would’ve done very well if I’d stuck with it. That bad experience has affected me for far longer than it should have done, and it’s about time I got over it. I was similarly disgusted with history after finishing my PhD but it only took me 5 years to get over that. (Disgust is a vice.) Studying the non-human is one obvious place where historians and archaeologists need to get together.

The web could well offer a way of breaking down barriers between disciplines. Since getting involved in blogging I’ve come into contact with lots of different ideas which I wouldn’t ever have thought about if I’d just been doing history in the traditional way. Reading blogs has given me easy access to literary theory, philosophy, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, various feminist perspectives and much more. Writing my blog allows me to try out ideas that are outside my specialist area without investing too much in them. And trying to think differently benefits my “proper” work.

Mercurius Politicus linked to Gilbert Mabbott, a new blog about print culture in the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. From this blog I discovered that Calendar of State Papers Domestic is starting to appear on Google Books. There’s a James I volume available with full access. I’m hoping that the rest of the series, particularly the Charles I volumes, will follow soon. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t as they’re all in the public domain. Since the original documents were under Crown Copyright and the calendars were published by HMSO in the 19th century the copyright must have expired by now. Despite that, British History Online are trying to charge money for access to digital versions of the calendars for the reigns of James I and Charles I. I always thought that was a bad decision. If all of the volumes end up being freely available on Google it’s going to look even more stupid.

Last week I posted about experiments with Python to automatically identify places mentioned in lists of horses donated to parliament’s armies in the English Civil War. The initial results were very encouraging. Using the difflib algorithm to compare a selection of places with a list of Buckinghamshire parishes gave very encouraging results. Since then I’ve scaled it up and also tried some different approaches. The results are less clear cut when comparing bigger lists, but I’ve been able to write a program which should save me a lot of time compared to the manual methods that I used during my PhD.

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Never mind the scary theory, here’s some empiricism. And computer programming. The piece I’m working on is an analysis of lists of horses donated to the parliamentarian army in the First Civil War. There are some figures derived from these lists in my forthcoming article in War In History and in the seminar paper that I posted in November, but I’m trying to write an article which examines them in much more detail. This article will be related to debates over allegiance and the causes of the war, which is why I’ve been trying to explore the historiography and think about theoretical issues, but the substance of it will be fairly straightforward empirical stuff with lots of numbers. That’s not to say that this kind of analysis is easy. If it was someone else might have done it all years ago. John Tincey was the first person to try it, but he only did the smallest of the three account books, which is a fraction of the size of the other two. Following his lead I decided to do all of them.

In 1999 I spent about 2 weeks in the PRO typing these lists into an Access database. I’m still using that transcript as the basis of my work now, although I’ve converted it to XML to make it more flexible and checked a selection of the entries against digital photos of the manuscript. I’ve been using the Python classes that I developed for representing uncertainty to calculate totals of horses and values. Some pages are damaged, meaning that exact totals can’t be calculated – this is something that was difficult to deal with in Access but the combination of XML and Python has enough flexibility to cope with it. Getting totals for days and months is fairly easy, but I also want to group by the social status of the donors and the counties that they came from. Before I can group by counties I need to identify place names given in the manuscript as although some entries specify a county in the address, many more give a place name without a county.

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Exciting news via Read Write Web: Yahoo announced last week that their search engine will start searching semantic markup. Initially they’re concentrating on Microformats but eventually they will be supporting lots of other metadata standards using RDF. This opens up a lot of possibilities for finding information and making information easier to find. Although Yahoo Pipes previously offered powerful tools for doing things with structured content, one of the drawbacks seemed to be that you had to already know where to find the content you wanted to do stuff with. Once Yahoo search results take metadata into account it will save an awful lot of work.

For historians, learning new search techniques to take advantage of this development will be vital, but that’s the easy (or at least less difficult) part. There is even more work to be done on the side of creating metadata: putting adequate metadata into the digital resources we create ourselves, encouraging organisations to provide metadata in their digital collections (that means you, CWGC!), and above all helping to define standards for historical information so that the metadata is as useful as possible. This is exactly what Tom Scheinfeldt was getting at in his recent post at Found History. Although I took issue with some of the things he said about ideology, his central points were spot on: history hasn’t always been done the same way and won’t always be done the same way; digital technology is changing things right now; organizing, cataloguing, and collaboration will become more important than lone researchers working on monographs.

Yesterday I tried uploading some material to the Great War Archive (which I previously posted about here). I’m pleased to say that it was very easy to do and that the site works very well. It took me less than one hour to upload about 27 items, so about 2 minutes per item, but that would vary depending on how many pages each item has. These were all letters and postcards with only two images per item. Most of the time was spent waiting for the files to upload, which depends on the speed of your connection (my ADSL is 8Mb downstream but only 500Kb upstream). Although there are several pages to click through during the submission process they all load very quickly, and there is an option to remember your personal details so you only have to enter them once.

There’s surprisingly little opportunity to enter structured metadata, but I think the idea is to make the submission process as easy as possible for people with no technical skills. This is likely to be a big advantage - I’ve previously mentioned that the UK National Archives wiki Your Archives requires an unusual combination of skills and experience which probably limits the number of people who can contribute. The important thing with the Great War Archive is to get hold of previously unseen material and make it accessible to the public (access to the archive will definitely be free for everyone). This means not making too many demands on the people who hold this material. It’s important to recognise that even uploading photos can be difficult for some people - many new users on the Great War Forum have problems with this, although that’s partly down to the 100K file size limit. The GWA allows each file to be up to 25MB, which should mean that contributors don’t have to worry about resizing or compressing images.

The submission form asks for as much information as possible in a human readable form. It will then be down to the project staff to convert this into structured metadata. It looks like they have the time, budget and expertise to do this - project director Stuart Lee said in a comment on my previous post that 60% of the timetable is devoted to cataloguing, and that the Centre for First World War Studies is involved in the project. The result should be very different from Ancestry’s sloppy indexing of service records. Now we’ll just have to wait until November to see how it turns out.