Investigations of a Dog

There has been some bad news for historians recently: the RHS Bibliography of British and Irish History has lost its direct government funding and is being privatised in a move disturbingly reminiscent of PFI (and to add insult to injury the IHR claims to be “delighted” about this!); the UK National Archives (or PRO to most of us who use it) can no longer afford to open on Mondays or offer free parking.

But it’s not all bad. There’s also some good news from the National Archives which has got much less attention than the bad news – in fact I’m not even sure exactly when it happened. They are now allowing and encouraging users to upload photos of public records held at Kew to Flickr and similar photo sharing sites. Crown Copyright had already been waived to allow republication of the text of public records but previously publishing images of documents didn’t appear to be allowed. Now it’s confirmed that uploading images to Flickr is allowed (provided that you’ve taken them yourself – this doesn’t cover documents bought from DocumentsOnline or Ancestry). This is a win situation for everyone, because these documents will be made freely available without it costing the archives anything – a major advantage when budgets and funding are being cut drastically.

The NA has its own Flickr account, and a group for visitors. Combined with the Your Archives wiki this could lead to some really exciting stuff. Some people are already using Flickr and Your Archives to publish Metropolitan Police leavers’ registers. The possibilities are endless. I’m certainly going to upload all the photos I take in the course of my research. To start with I’ve put up the service record of my ancestor Tom Wenham from the First World War (photographed from the screen of a microfilm reader).

Still to come are some indemnity cases from SP24, and sooner or later I’ll have loads of SP28 to share. It would be fantastic if other archives would do this too, although some will probably be too conservative to try it. The British Library still doesn’t allow digital cameras, which just makes me not want to bother with BL manuscripts.

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.

Having decided to leave my 5th Lincolnshire First World War project for a while, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse: someone from the Great War Forum sent me a transcript of the battalion’s medal citations from the regimental archive so that I could publish them on my site and link them in to the index of people that I’d created for the book. The document contains information that can’t be found elsewhere, as although awards of the Military Medal were listed in the London Gazette, full citations were not normally published. There are also three awards not mentioned in Sandall’s list, and citations for 10 people who were recommended for awards but turned down.

I received the list as a Word file with no semantic markup on Wednesday morning, started working on it on Thursday morning, and published it on the web this afternoon. It looks very basic but it’s not bad for two days, and it’s all linked in to the index of people for Sandall’s book. First of all I copied the text into jEdit and used Find and Replace to insert some basic TEI XML markup. Then I pasted it into a new TEI document in oXygen. With the automatic validation it was easy to track down and correct errors in the markup, so by lunch time I had a completely valid TEI file. In the afternoon I spent about 3 or 4 hours on linking records by inserting key attributes into <persName> tags. In most cases I already had the keys that I used for linking names in Sandall, but sometimes I had to change them in the light of new evidence from the citations, such as full names of people who I previously only knew by their initials. This also allowed me to clear up some ambiguities . This morning I finished the linkage by creating new keys for the 13 people not mentioned by Sandall, then got started on writing some XSLT. That was easy as I could copy or adapt a lot of the code from the style sheet for Sandall. As well as generating the HTML version of the citations, this XSLT generates an extra JSON file which is imported into the Sandall index of people to allow linking the citations. Again this only required some minor adjustments to the Exhibit page. After some testing and corrections I had a live site up this afternoon.

This demonstrates the potential value of the techniques I’ve been using for marking up texts, but it also raises some problems for digital history. I decided to trust a transcript from a random person off the internet. I have no way of knowing how accurate the transcript is, or even if the source document really exists! It could be Hugh Trevor Roper and the “Hitler Diaries” all over again. Therefore I’m going to think more carefully before putting myself in this situation again. There’s also a possibility that I’ve miscalculated the copyright situation. Based on internal evidence and comparison with other documents my best guess is that the list was created by the army and is therefore under Crown Copyright (and being unpublished and available for inspection in a public record repository should come under waiver of Crown Copyright), but without seeing the original it’s hard to be sure. I might be wrong, and even if I’m right the holders of the manuscript might not agree. So technology makes some things easier, but there are other problems that it can’t solve.

Nearly a year ago I started a project to digitize T. E. Sandall’s history of the 1/5th Lincolnshire regiment in the First World War, and in summer I published an interim version. I would’ve finished it a long time ago if I didn’t have anything else to do, but original work in peer reviewed printed journals has to come first because it’ll look better on my CV. Now I’ve got time to do some more work on it, and having had a break from it I can reassess what I’m trying to do. Below is an update on what’s new.

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It’s been a long time since I wrote anything about my First World War digitization projects, but I now have some progress to report: today I published an interim version of Sandall’s History of 5th Lincolnshire Regiment. It’s still a work in progress, and there’s a lot more to be done, but you can see it here. It’s just a plain HTML version (and not strictly valid HTML), and the whole text is on one page (at least it makes it easy to search the whole text with your browser’s Find feature!), there’s no name linkage yet, no page images online, and no mechanism for submitting corrections. However, even in this form it should be useful to people who are researching the battalion and can’t get hold of the original book. More details on what I’ve done and how I’ve done it below.

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The latest early-modern edition of Carnivalesque is up at Blogging The Renaissance.

I’ve turned off the comment timeout plugin, so comments on most old posts are open again, and should stay open as long as they don’t attract huge amounts of spam. I’ll be manually closing comments on posts which are getting spammed too much but I hope most of them will stay open.

Good news: Calendar of State Papers Domestic, one of the most important printed sources for British history, will be available online later this year. Bad News: it’s a paid subscription service. It remains to be seen how much it costs, but it’s particularly annoying because the project is funded by a charity, and the material is probably in the public domain, having been published by HMSO more than 50 years ago. More details at the IHR website.

Battle Through Time was a computer game released for the Commodore 64 in 1984. It featured a time travelling car and levels based on World War 1, World War 2, Korea, and Vietnam. Just another example to bring up when lazy journalists say there aren’t any WW1/Korea games, or that WW2/Vietnam games didn’t start to be made until this century. And to emphasise the links between cinema and gaming, the background music included “Suicide Is Painless” for the Korea level and “Ride of the Valkyries” for Vietnam.

And I’m still looking for Military History Carnival Hosts for September and afterwards. If you’re interested, e-mail me or leave a comment.

This is a progress report on the First World War digitization projects I outlined previously in my post on planning.

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In my New Year post, I mentioned that I’m thinking about carrying out a couple of digital history projects in connection with my First World War research. These projects are very small and should be relatively easy to carry out on my own, but there will almost certainly be challenges. Overcoming these will give me more experience of carrying out a digital history project (this is starting to sound like a job application again!), and produce useful resources. After that, I can move on to consider some more advanced issues, such as collaborating with other people, and dealing with seventeenth-century manuscripts. To make the experience even more useful, I’m trying to blog it as I go. This post is an outline of my plans so far. Now that I’ve published my plans I’ll have to carry them out!

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