Investigations of a Dog

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.

Via Archaeozoology, an interesting but difficult to spell blog about about the archaeology of non-human animals, I discovered another interesting archaeology blog. Middle Savagery is written by Colleen Morgan, a PhD student at UC Berkeley. She’s doing lots of innovative things with Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Second Life (don’t let the Goreans get you!).

I think maybe historians and archaeologists don’t talk to each other enough despite supposedly having a common interest in the past. My BA was originally going to be archaeology but I was bored with it after two terms and switched to history – I don’t think I would’ve done very well if I’d stuck with it. That bad experience has affected me for far longer than it should have done, and it’s about time I got over it. I was similarly disgusted with history after finishing my PhD but it only took me 5 years to get over that. (Disgust is a vice.) Studying the non-human is one obvious place where historians and archaeologists need to get together.

The web could well offer a way of breaking down barriers between disciplines. Since getting involved in blogging I’ve come into contact with lots of different ideas which I wouldn’t ever have thought about if I’d just been doing history in the traditional way. Reading blogs has given me easy access to literary theory, philosophy, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, various feminist perspectives and much more. Writing my blog allows me to try out ideas that are outside my specialist area without investing too much in them. And trying to think differently benefits my “proper” work.

I’ve just finished clearing out my bookmarks folder and putting my links onto del.icio.us. I don’t know why I haven’t done this before as it’s much better than keeping over 300 links in my Firefox bookmarks. From now on bookmarks are only for the few sites that I access most regularly. Zotero is for pages that need to be dealt with in more detail, with snapshots, notes, and annotations, or which need to be kept together with bibliographies for projects that I’m working on. And everything else goes on del.icio.us. While I was rearranging everything I took the opportunity to add some of the best sites to History Nexus.

Some other cool things:

Operator is a Firefox plugin which detects and displays Microformats. Microformats are a simple way of embedding metadata in web pages using only HTML.

Firebug is another Firefox plugin, a bit like the Web Developer toolbar but much more powerful. It lets you inspect the code of a webpage with expanding and collapsing tags, highlights the current element on the page, displays all CSS styles which apply to an element, debugs Javascript, and even lets you rewrite the code on the fly! I’ve found it very useful for developing Exhibit pages, and it would also make it a lot easier to design or modify WordPress themes.

Yahoo Pipes is a set of tools for data mining and mashups. It’s kind of what I was wishing Google would do in a previous post. It looks complicated, but still easier than programming from scratch, and very powerful. I’ll be trying it out whenever I get time.

History Nexus is a new social bookmarking site which focuses on history websites. It uses similar technology to Digg, allowing users to vote and comment on websites as well as post links to them. Although it seems to be in its early stages it has huge potential both for promoting your own history site and for discovering other sites, so I hope it attracts more users. For example, there’s a link to an innovative First World War site which I didn’t know about before:

The Christmas Truce is a collaborative project to collect reports of the Christmas 1914 truce from local newspapers. I know from my own research that local papers are a very valuable source for the Great War but that finding the information you want involves spending hours searching through microfilm, so I’m definitely in favour of any attempts to make that information more accessible. This project would be even better if it used a wiki – so far it looks like it’s based on e-mailing newspaper transcripts to the editors – but it’s good that the work is being done.