[posted by Gavin Robinson, 11:24 am, 16 October 2011]
Today this blog has made it to five years, although there have been some significant gaps so it’s not exactly five years of continuous blogging. My book has now passed peer review and I’ve got until the end of November to make the final revisions, so I’ll be able to post a bit more frequently now. For now here are some quick links and random thoughts:
- Brett Holman has made a free ebook version of his series of posts on the Sudeten crisis. Highly recommended: going through newspaper reports day by day gives a very different perspective on events.
- TARDIS Eruditorum is blog which offers intelligent and entertaining critiques of Doctor Who stories. It started working through them in chronological order from An Unearthly Child and is now into the Tom Baker years. There’s also a forthcoming book compiling expanded versions of all the Hartnell era stuff.
- Meanwhile Andrew Hickey has just started blogging his new book about Doctor Who, and has nearly finished another one about The Monkees.
- I’ve finally got the hang of the British Library’s computer ordering system for manuscripts, but I wish they had card readers like the PRO. I still don’t get what makes the difference between select manuscripts and normal ones. It seems completely arbitrary.
- I’ve found out that I have ancestors from the Isle of Man who can apparently be traced back to the 17th century. Plenty of material for future blog posts there.
- I’m not sure what to make of this Daily Telegraph report about a jug supposedly made from the skin of Oliver Cromwell’s horse. I’m usually sceptical about Cromwell relics, not least because it seems unlikely that puritans would have approved of something so idolatrous. Also the names of warhorses in the civil wars are almost never mentioned in contemporary records.
- The Common Swings has a new serialized story in progress involving a mysterious 1970s TV series.
- The National Archives are planning to digitize all of the WW1 war diaries in WO 95 and are looking for volunteers to help sort them out.
- Bench Grass continues to be brilliant.
[posted by Gavin Robinson, 1:00 am, 10 July 2011]
This week, something a bit different: an interview with Andrew Hickey. Andrew has his own blog at Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! and has just joined the group blog Mindless Ones. He has self-published (as both ebooks and print-on-demand) books about various combinations of music, science, liberalism, comics and Doctor Who, as well as a collection of short stories. You can find his work at:
Andrew’s latest book, An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers, will be released soon, and to celebrate he’s doing a blog tour. Yesterday he was interviewed at Deep Space Transmissions, and today I have an interview with him about self-publishing and ebooks, which I hope will be interesting for digital history people. For a list of the rest of the tour, see here. And now, the interview itself…
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[posted by Gavin Robinson, 2:16 pm, 5 May 2008]
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.
