Investigations of a Dog

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.

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 (although my understanding of Crown Copyright could be wrong here, as it was earlier in the week!). 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.

I’ve had a reply to my last e-mail to the UK National Archives about the Your Archives terms of use. Your Archives is a wiki based website where users can share their knowledge of NA holdings and other British Archives. I’m very excited about the site, but I had some reservations about the terms of use (see here and here for more details of my objections and the NA’s first reply). The schwerpunkt is: I’ve received a satisfactory reply from the NA and no longer have any reservations, so I’ll be registering and starting to contribute as soon as I have time. But if you have too much time on your hands, here’s the more detailed version:

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Last week I posted about Your Archives, a wiki-based website set up by the UK National Archives to allow members of the public to share their knowledge of archival holdings in the UK. While I’m very excited about the possibilities of this site, I also expressed some major reservations about the terms of use, which place serious restrictions on the re-use of content published on the site. But I didn’t just solipsistically moan about it on my blog. I also contacted the NA and called on them to use a GNU Free Documentation License, as used by Wikipedia. I’m pleased to say that they responded quickly with a more detailed explanation of their position. This is what they said:

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Last week the UK National Archives launched Your Archives, a wiki which allows users to contribute their knowledge of documents held by the NA/PRO and other archives in the UK. I first found out about it on a visit to the PRO in January, but I didn’t have time to look at it then, so I was quite excited about it finally going on the web. My PhD research gave me some very specialised knowledge of English Civil War records which would be valuable to other researchers but which wouldn’t fit into any kind of “scholarly” publication, so a wiki would be the ideal way of sharing that knowledge. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at Your Archives I’m half impressed and half disappointed. Although it has huge potential it needs some changes before it lives up to my expectations.

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

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I’ve finally got round to sorting out a Creative Commons License for this blog (see the bottom of every page for details). I kept putting it off out of a combination of laziness and false modesty (why would anyone want to use my work in any way that isn’t covered by fair use?). I don’t know whether it’s going to make any difference in practice, but at least it demonstrates my commitment to Open Access, and my dissatisfaction with existing copyright law. There seems to be increasing dissent about copyright. I’ve just discovered (like Columbus: it didn’t exist until I’d read it!) CopyrightWatch.ca: a Canadian blog devoted to exposing myths about copyright and fighting for wider access to historical material. I’ve been trying to write about my thoughts on copyright in more detail, but it keeps coming out as incoherent rubbish so I’m just going to make an unsupported assertion:

Copyright serves no useful purpose for historians and is detrimental to the study of history.

Make of that what you will.

My next post will be the 46th History Carnival on Monday 15th January. I’ve had lots of good submissions, but there’s always room for more. Use the submission form, or e-mail me at hc46@4-lom.com, but try to get them in by Sunday as I want to compile the carnival ahead of time and post it at midnight if possible. And a quick recap of the rules:

No polemic on current affairs without substantial historical content.

No posts published before the last History Carnival (15th December 2006).

No multiple submissions of the same blog by the same person. If you submit more than one post from the same blog written by the same author, I will only pick one of them. Same blog different authors is fine, as is same author different blogs.

No folk etymology.

Apart from that, anything historical goes. You don’t have to be an academic or a well known blogger to contribute, and you can nominate other people as well as yourself.