Investigations of a Dog

I’m taking a break from blogging because I probably have RSI.  I’m experimenting with voice recognition software but I need to use the computer as little as possible until I recover.

As for the Military History Carnival, I probably have a host for December but I’m not sure what will happen after that.  I might want to stop doing it. Maybe someone else will want to take over, but as it’s so difficult to get hosts and submissions this might be the time to let it die.

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…

…and then I found a job. But I am not in any way miserable now. In fact I’m quite pleased and excited. I now have a contract to do freelance data entry work for the Life in the Suburbs project. This will involve working from home transcribing parish registers of St Botolphs Aldgate (where the saddler Thomas Harrison lived) and Holy Trinity Minories. I’ll be under the supervision of Gill Newton, who has done some really exciting work developing a phonetic algorithm to match similar sounding names. The hours are short and flexible, the pay is really good, and the work is very well suited to my skills, experience and interests. This should make my life much easier in lots of ways.

Obviously I won’t be blogging about anything that goes on in the project, or posting any of the data, so you’ll just have to wait until the results have been published to see what the researchers have found. Apart from that there probably won’t be much change to my blogging - or at least my posts won’t be any less frequent than they already are.

Today I made my sidebar widget aware, made some other changes to my theme, and replaced my categories with tags. It’s all looking pretty good, and the tag cloud is quite an interesting representation of what I’ve been writing about (although it’s possibly ruined my feminist credentials).

The only problem is that I forgot to turn off pingbacks while I was going through my archives to add new tags to every post, so lots of blogs will have been pinged by very old posts of mine when I saved them. (Also Wordpress seems to have eaten a lot of COiNS metadata - so much for the editor that doesn’t mess with your code!)

Ralph Luker at Cliopatria has posted a list of 80 recommended history blogs. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the history blogosphere, this is a great place to start. Down in the I section is Investigations of a Dog. This would happen at a time when I’ve hardly posted anything for ages. It’s nice to get recognition, but all my usual reservations about ranking blogs apply. I like to think of blogging as acentric and non-hierarchical. I think some blogs are better than others, but better for me. It all depends on personal taste. Every history blog on the Cliopatria blogroll has something good in it. The only history blogs I consider completely worthless turned out to be worthless because they were sockpuppets for a troll.

So this is Ralph Luker’s top 80 and not necessarily anyone else’s. But Ralph Luker knows the history blogosphere better than anyone. I’m honoured that he thinks IoaD is in the top 8% along with the likes of Airminded, Digital History Hacks, In The Middle, Mercurius Politicus and all the rest. I just hope this isn’t a poisoned chalice - my Technorati rating went right down after I got into Brett Holman’s top 5 military history blogs! Expectations might have been raised at a time when I’m not posting much. But it might also encourage me to improve. I don’t think IoaD has ever been as good as it was in its first few months. I want to recapture some of that eclecticism and enthusiasm. I had already decided to stop posting about the historiography of the causes of the English Civil War. Those posts were necessary to help me with an article I’m writing, but I’ve nearly finished it now. I always thought those posts were a bit too esoteric. Although some of them were technically very good (and some of them weren’t) they were only ever likely to appeal to a small minority of readers (and that minority turned out to be even smaller than I thought). In fact even I’m not really that interested in the causes of the civil war! I’m still interested in the civil war but there are lots of other questions about it and early-modern England that I find more interesting. So no more “bloodsport”. In the coming weeks I might be revisiting some of the things I wrote about in the early months, as well as trying to think of new and different things to write about.

Future Retro is a new blog which forms part of the History Nexus site. “Future / Retro is concerned with all aspects of history, and not just on the web. It is also concerned with information technology, and in particular that which can enhance digital humanities.” It already includes tips on how to start history blogging, and an interview with Dave Tabler of Appalachian History.

I’ve just successfully upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1. You won’t notice much difference at the front end, but the admin area is much nicer than the 2.2 version I was using before. The best thing is that the editor doesn’t screw up HTML code any more which makes it easier to embed YouTube videos and Google Maps.

As part of the spring cleaning I installed a couple of new plugins. Maintenance Mode shuts down the front-end of the blog for everyone except admins and lets people know that maintenance is going on. This is a much better solution than password protecting the blog’s directory, which is what I used to do during upgrades.

TD Word Count is a cool plugin which counts all the words in your posts and generates a report in the admin area. According to this report I’d published 174,471 words before writing this present post. That’s quite a lot isn’t it? Even if you deduct the 7,000 word seminar paper which I posted in its entirety, and all the routine carnival posts and brief links to other blogs/sites, the substantial original content that I’ve posted here in the last year and a half still probably adds up to more than the average monograph. Of course if you just put all my posts together and printed them it wouldn’t make a very coherent or well-written book. But I’m increasingly getting used to the idea that writing little and often is the way to get things done.

The conference paper that I’m currently drafting has come together in short bursts of activity - maybe only a couple of paragraphs at a time - but that soon adds up. Partly it’s been easy because it’s quite an exciting piece to write, it’s intended to be very short, and it doesn’t need lots of detailed evidence, but I think making myself write for a short period (maybe only an hour or even half an hour) first thing in the morning then stopping as soon as I’ve made my target means less time staring at the screen thinking “there’s sooo much to write, I don’t know where to start, it’s too difficult”.

I’m starting to think that calling a post “Am I a proper historian now?” might have been a bad idea. It really wasn’t meant to be as self-pitying as it might have seemed, but of course text doesn’t always obey its authors intentions.

First of all I want to stress that I don’t feel inferior or excluded just because I don’t have a job in a university (or anywhere). The publication of my first article shows that I can get work published in peer reviewed academic journals as long as what I write is good enough, and that I can write pieces which are good enough. I don’t really have any problems getting speaking engagements either. I’ll be giving a paper on animals and early-modern society at the FORWARD symposium at Nottingham Trent University on 28th May. To the extent that I am excluded from things, many of these are things that people inside history departments might wish they were excluded from too: admin, meetings, petty rivalries, marking semi-literate essays etc. I’ve never really been interested in teaching, which limits the kind of jobs I can get. Concentrating on research is likely to mean a continuing cycle of short-term jobs and unemployment, but I thrive on adversity.

There are obviously some disadvantages to being independent and unemployed, and not just lack of money. I don’t have very easy access to a good academic library. Although I have graduate membership of Leeds University library, which is outstandingly good, it’s a 2 hour/£25 train journey away. Membership of the IHR gives me online access to some journals but not all the ones I need. With no ATHENS password most of the resources archived by the AHDS are off limits to me. The last two problems could be overcome by greater commitment to Open Access in the humanities. I want resources which are currently limited to academics to be freely available to everyone, regardless of who they are or what they want to do with them.

Self-publishing on the web, whether through blogs or other kinds of website, gives almost complete freedom (within the law of course). You don’t need anyone’s help to start a blog. You don’t need funding or qualifications or any kind of formal legitimation. You can just do it. I think this freedom is important. It would be terrible if blogs were formally peer reviewed and counted towards RAE. Instead of enthusiasm and risk the blogosphere would be full of safe but dull posts by people who didn’t really want to do it. Investigations of a Dog is my personal space where I can live under my own law and say “so I willed it”. As the Beckett paraphrase in the sub-title suggests, this is a place where I can try to fail in more interesting ways. I don’t always manage it. Sometimes I’ve embarrassed myself with an ill-considered post which could have done with more editing, and some of my posts have just been mediocre, but the possibility of getting something good makes it worth taking these risks.

The new version of Zotero makes it very easy to insert Zotero-friendly bibliographies into blogs. You can now drag and drop items straight from Zotero and it will automatically create a nicely formatted HTML bibliography with COinS metadata so that other people can grab your citations into their Zotero library (you need to change some preferences but it’s easy).

So I’m going through my old posts and adding bibliographies where applicable. I’ve got up to February 2007, but the rest shouldn’t take too long. Take a look at the post archives for 2006 to see it in action.

I’ve just installed Joe Tan’s Simple Spam Filter plugin. This is an extra line of defence which works alongside Akismet. The best thing is that it uses reCAPTCHA, but only for comments that are flagged as spam by the simple spam filter itself or by Akismet. That means that most legitimate comments will get through without having to jump through any hoops, but if the filters wrongly flag your comment as spam you get the chance to enter a CAPTCHA code (and reCAPTCHA offers an audio alternative if you can’t read the text). If you get it right the comment appears straight away. If you get it wrong the comment is automatically deleted. This should mean that I won’t have to waste any more time looking for false positives, and most commenters won’t have to waste any time solving CAPTCHAs.

[Edit: to make it work properly you might need to download and install a new version of Akismet. You need at least version 2.1.2 (the latest is 2.1.3) but as I haven't upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 I still had an old version which I needed to replace manually]