Investigations of a Dog

In my previous post about theories of digital text, I used Shannon’s communication theory to divide text into information and meaning, and then talked exclusively about text as information: a sequence of characters selected from a finite set. That allowed me to concentrate on one part of the problem, while excluding the more difficult problems associated with meaning. In this post, I’ll be trying to tackle some of the problems of meaning, while still trying to avoid as many as I can. I will also continue to avoid offering concrete definitions of “text” and “a text”, mainly because I haven’t found any satisfactory definitions yet, but I won’t be able to avoid using the word “text”.

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As the next stage of my Digital History Projects I’ve been doing background reading and thinking about the theory of text. This week I’ve read Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth A Companion To Digital Humanities (2004); Burnard, O’Brien, O’Keeffe, and Unsworth Electronic Textual Editing (2006); Susan Hockey Electronic Texts in the Humanities (2000); and C. E. Shannon ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ (1948). I can’t say that I understood everything (especially Shannon’s equations and Jerome McGann’s pretentious jargon) but it’s given me a lot to think about, and things are nowhere near as simple as I first assumed.

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Oh no! Bill Turkel has tagged me for a meme! Is this the end of civilisation as we know it? When I started this weblog I was determined to stick to substantial original content. There would be no room for memes or other self-indulgent timewasting — I already have a LiveJournal for that. However, Bill managed to turn this particular meme into some interesting analysis of memetics and the blogosphere. That’s inspired me to move even further away from the original meme and post some random thoughts about memes. I won’t be tagging anyone at the end, because I hope to demonstrate that history bloggers don’t need to tag each other.

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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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The promised posts about cavalry charges are coming up this week, but first I need to do some intellectual throat-clearing. This post is about epistemology: what can we know about the past and how can we know it?

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Objectivity and neutrality are very controversial topics in historiography. There has been lot of acrimonious debate about how the preconceptions we bring to history affect what we write, and whether it’s possible or desirable to leave those preconceptions behind. This is what I had to say on the issue when I wrote the introduction to my PhD thesis in 2001:

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Over the last 10 years or so, technology has brought huge changes to historical research and opened up new possibilities. Computers have solved some old problems, but also created some new ones. Meanwhile there has been an increasing focus on the problems of epistemology: what can we know about the past and how can we know it? The debate has mostly been about the relationship between textual sources and the reality of the past. Even if you reject theory and take a purely empirical view of what the sources can tell us, there are some potential problems with the transmission of the information that they contain.

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Review of Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006; ISBN: 000715061X).

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Beginning Shakespeare (2005; ISBN: 0719064236) is a brief and accessible introduction to Shakespeare criticism aimed at first year undergraduates. I had high hopes for it because it’s in the same series as Peter Barry’s excellent Beginning Theory (2002; ISBN: 0719062683), which I found very useful and informative despite (or perhaps because of) it being written for first year English Literature undergraduates. Beginning Shakespeare turned out to be not quite as good. Although I got some valuable things out of it, there are some shortcomings which can’t all be explained away by it being a basic introduction for 18 year olds.

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This is a brief introduction to one of my more experimental works in progress. Most people seem to think it’s a bit strange, and it could easily be a complete failure. The idea is to combine my interests in military history, gender, and eco-criticism by looking at a subject I’m familiar with (horses in early-modern war) from an unfamiliar angle.

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