Investigations of a Dog

8th March is International Women’s Day, and March is National Women’s History Month in the US (it would be nice if there were more of them in a year, otherwise we have 11 men’s history months and 364 men’s days by default, but you can’t have everything, especially if you’re a woman…). The theme of this year’s Women’s History Month is Writing Women Back Into History. I’ll probably write some posts about women’s and gender history later in the month. But right now seems like a good time to announce a new website/blog:

They Really Do Exist “aims to be a directory of women who are active in traditionally male arenas”, “for all those people who are sick of hearing ‘But there ARE no women in that sector!’ when they ask why the media or other publicity downplays the role played by women in any given area”. The site was the idea of Jennie Rigg, a female political blogger who is, in her own very apt words, “FUCKING SICK” of being told that there are no female political bloggers. What I find most striking about this situation is that many male political bloggers (even liberal ones) try to delegitimize feminism by claiming that it isn’t really politics. In contrast, anti-feminist academics are more likely to delegitimize feminist history by asserting that it is political and therefore doesn’t meet their standards of (false) neutrality. This double standard gives patriarchy the best of both worlds and makes things even more difficult for feminists. Maybe part of the problem of patriarchal equilibrium is that feminists are intellectually honest and abhor hypocrisy, whereas patriarchy thrives on it. Anyway, if you know of a woman who should be included in the list, leave a comment at the submit page.

Inspired by Jennie’s example, I’ve expanded the scope of the War and Gender Zotero group to include works on any aspect of military history written by women. There are now two sub-collections in the group library: one called “About Gender” which includes any works about the intersections of gender and sexuality with war written by anyone (which is what the group was originally limited to), and one called “By Women” which includes anything relating to wars and armed forces written by women. The new collection is still in its early stages. So far it only contains works by women that were already in the group library. There are lots more items in my personal library which need to be added. I’ve almost certainly made some embarrassingly wrong assumptions about people’s gender based only on their forenames, despite being trained by the Cambridge Population Group not to do that.

And finally, here’s a photo of a nurse and some “munitions girls” from the First World War:

Last year computer programming was out, but now it’s back in. For me anyway. Having finished my data entry job in October I’ve got more spare computer time, which means I can be more active in digital history again. Some things are different now. Zotero has groups and syncing. The Programming Historian has moved since the last time I looked at it. I can finish my digital edition of Sandall’s history of the 5th Lincolns because Major Teall’s epilogue came out of copyright in the UK at the start of this year. But the biggest change is that I’ve switched my operating system from Windows to Linux. When I built my new desktop PC (codenamed Zen) I installed Ubuntu, and I love it. My laptop (codenamed Orac) still has Windows Vista, but I don’t use it much.

Changing to a completely different operating system might sound like a big step but it was actually really easy. This is partly because most of the applications I use are cross platform. I use Firefox more than any other application (and possibly more than all other applications put together). Don’t think that I spend all my time idly browsing the web: Firefox is vital for my historical research and writing. I use Zotero to store, sort, and access all the bibliographic data plus associated notes and PDFs for my research projects. These can all be synced between my PCs via the Zotero server and my own WebDAV server. My works in progress are now drafted on a private wiki which is also necessarily accessed through my web browser. This is much more powerful and flexible than writing in Word like I used to. Every page has an edit history so I can easily compare versions and revert to an earlier one. Wikilinks make it easy to fit sections together in different orders and link to supplementary information. Thanks to Google my e-mail and RSS feed reader are also on the web. When I’m not using Firefox, I still mostly use cross-platform applications. For the last few years I’ve used oXygen for XML editing and jEdit for find and replace operations, both of which are written in Java. Python can run on Linux, Windows and Macs, and although that doesn’t necessarily make individual scripts cross-platform it doesn’t really matter when I’m writing them for myself. The only Windows specific app that I’ve relied on in the last few years is MS Access. Even that was mainly because I was getting paid good money to put data into it for someone else. For my own research I’ve got some old databases from my PhD research, but all I ever need to do with them is export data into other formats.

Given all this, changing to Linux was not likely to be much of a problem, but that would be understating things. In fact it turned out to be a big advantage. Ubuntu is actually much quicker and easier to install and set up than Windows. It just works out of the box and comes with most of the things that most people need to get started. Open Office, Firefox, and even Python are all pre-installed. Once I’d added my favourite Firefox extensions and synced my Zotero library I was ready to do most of what I need to do. The only tricky things were manually installing a proprietary graphics driver and setting up DVD playback, but even this wasn’t too hard. If you don’t have a powerful new graphics card and don’t need 3D performance out of it, the pre-installed open source driver will be adequate for desktop stuff. Even setting up a network printer was completely painless.

Adding new applications is generally much easier than on Windows. Instead of buying a CD or downloading an executable file you can just access software repositories via a menu and tick boxes to select apps you want to be downloaded and installed. Because most of these apps are free in every sense of the word (like Ubuntu itself) you won’t have to pay money or agree to a licence that sells your soul to the devil. Via the repositories I could easily install Geany (a code editor which I now use for Python programming: I actually like it more than Komodo), gFTP (FTP client), the aforementioned jEdit, and the BeautifulSoup library for Python. It only took a few simple commands at the terminal to install and set up an Apache server with PHP and MySQL for local testing. oXygen had to be downloaded and installed manually as it’s a proprietary application, but the academic licence is cheap and cross-platform: I originally bought it for Windows but my licence automatically carries over to Linux. To get it working properly I had to install the proprietary Sun version of Java, but that was easy to do via the repository. There is a thing called WINE which lets you run some Windows programs in Linux, but so far I’ve only used it for listening to music with Spotify.

With everything set up to my liking, Ubuntu has made me fitter, happier and more productive. It’s faster, more secure, more stable, and less annoying than Windows. You can start using it as soon as the desktop appears on the screen instead of waiting for it to finish starting, or dealing with a patronising storm of pop-ups about how your anti-virus might be out of date or how you’ve got unused icons on your desktop. The Blue Screen of Death is now just an unpleasant memory. Linux users generally don’t have virus scanners or software firewalls because we don’t need them. The only major problem I’ve had so far is when an upgrade to a new version didn’t agree with my proprietary graphics driver and made it impossible to boot to the desktop from the hard disk. Even that was surprisingly easy to recover from, as being able to run the operating system from the LiveCD makes it very easy to rescue any files which aren’t already backed up before doing a clean reinstall (and the reinstall process is quicker and easier than for Windows).

So those are my reasons for preferring Ubuntu to Windows. If you haven’t tried Linux before you can download Ubuntu, burn it onto a CD, and then boot from the CD, which gives you an option to try it out without actually installing it on your PC. And it won’t cost you anything. Meanwhile I’ll be getting on with my research, writing and programming. And blogging about those things…

It didn’t take long before I decided to start a Zotero group. It’s called War and Gender and is dedicated to collecting and sharing any material relating to the intersections of these two very important things. There are no limits on period or place, membership is open, and all members can add to the group library. So if you’re interested, and if you’re using Zotero 2.0, get stuck in.

You can see from my profile that the groups I’m involved with so far are all quite specific and tend towards things that relatively little has been written about yet. I think we’re all still finding our way and sticking to things that are likely to be manageable. In the future it’ll be interesting to see if more general groups appear and whether they work out. I could start a British Civil Wars group, but it would be potentially huge. I already have over 900 items in my library tagged with “english civil war”, and these are mostly biased towards my research interests in England 1642-46. I don’t have very much on Scotland, Ireland, the Second Civil War, the Commonwealth or the Protectorate. Maybe more specialist sub-fields will be the way to go, but we’ll see eventually.

Ian MacInnes has set up a Zotero group for The horse in history and culture where we can pool references to horses. This was the incentive I needed to finally sort out my collections and upgrade to Zotero 2.0. I’ve set up my profile on the Zotero website, added a CV and shared my library so anyone can browse it. Although it looks like I’ve got an awful lot of collections, I’ve simplified the hierarchy and started making better use of tags. I’m not sharing notes at the moment, but maybe I will later. (NB: if you uncheck the “share notes” box in the privacy settings it only hides notes that are attached to items, not standalone notes.) There’s also another group for early-modern animal studies where you can find stuff about other species as well as horses. Now I’m wondering what other groups would be useful, but I’m not sure if I want the responsibility of owning a group yet.

A while ago I was wondering whether there were any good social networking sites for academics, and whether I really needed one. Now it looks like Zotero is going to fill the gap. Zotero 2.0 is now in beta, and Dan Cohen has given a rundown of the new features. Users will get a personal page on the Zotero site allowing us to network and interact with people with similar research interests, and users will be able to create and join groups to make sharing of bibliographic data easier. This all looks really exciting. I’ll probably try it once I’ve got my Zotero collections and tags in better order.

The new version of Zotero makes it very easy to insert Zotero-friendly bibliographies into blogs. You can now drag and drop items straight from Zotero and it will automatically create a nicely formatted HTML bibliography with COinS metadata so that other people can grab your citations into their Zotero library (you need to change some preferences but it’s easy).

So I’m going through my old posts and adding bibliographies where applicable. I’ve got up to February 2007, but the rest shouldn’t take too long. Take a look at the post archives for 2006 to see it in action.

The Great War Forum now has a sub-forum called Using The Technology devoted to discussions of how to apply IT to First World War research. This could be a good place for digital historians to reach out to amateur researchers and show them new tools and techniques. It should also be a valuable source of ideas about how to use computers for research, and examples of how technology can make a difference in practice. I’ve already been telling everyone there about how cool Zotero is.

Since my last post I’ve been doing some more experiments to see how Zotero can be used for cataloguing previously uncatalogued administrative records from the English Civil War. I’ve now put some more of my ideas into practice in demo form and they seem to work. Linking images to Zotero items and adding metadata went very smoothly. The idea of adding extra data by putting XML tags in notes also works, although this is just a stopgap until they implement custom fields. Once you have data in Zotero it’s very easy to export it as XML and do whatever you want with it. More details below, but it gets a bit technical and even includes some sample code (formatting code in Wordpress is hard, and it’ll probably screw up the layout for some people). If you’re not A. Nerd and you’re not doing the shopping for your mum you might want to stop reading now.

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In a previous post I mentioned experimenting with taking photos at the Public Records Office/National Archives. Getting good photos is only part of the problem. The real work starts when you get them home. How do you organise them and make sense of them? It should be no surprise that Zotero is really useful for this, but I’ve discovered a few tricks to make it even better.

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Another not quite proper post – just a round-up of some things I’ve been doing.

The most important thing is that I’ve more or less finished the switch to Zotero. I managed to fix the bug in the MODS translator, which allowed me to import the 1,000+ records (along with associated notes) from my old database without any trouble. That success encouraged me to have a go at writing an Adlib XML translator so I could scrape records from the RHS Bibliography. It’s actually not as difficult as I thought before. I managed to get a working demo but then I gave up because the XML that the RHS site outputs isn’t very good. First, Adlib XML isn’t as detailed as MODS XML, and second, the RHS people don’t seem to have applied the tags very consistently. That means that any records scraped into Zotero would still need quite a bit of manual adjustment. Today I tried getting some new records from the RHS without a scraper, using the links to COPAC and getCopy which appear on most records. Although this was slower than scraping the records directly off the page it worked reasonably well. Books are no problem because they can nearly always be found on COPAC with one click. Journal articles are more hit and miss. Sometimes getCopy leads to a page that Zotero can scrape, sometimes it doesn’t. Essays in collections are the worst as they have to be entered manually. Today’s test was just a simple keyword search for “animals” which only returned 250 results. Over the rest of the week I need to find everything I can about the causes and outbreak of the English Civil War. I already have several hundred ECW related works on file from my PhD, but there will still be a lot of stuff which wasn’t relevant to that which I need to track down now.

Meanwhile over at Early Modern Notes, Sharon noted the death of bookmarks. I still use bookmarks a lot more than some people, but it is true that I’m using them less than I used to. RSS has played a big part in this decline. I use WizzRSS to subscribe to the blogs that I read regularly. Zotero is also taking over from bookmarks as it’s a much more powerful way of keeping track of webpages – you can keep a snapshot of the page (or several snapshots taken at different times), tag it, add it to collections, attach notes, relate it to other items.

I also got excited about the release of CommentPress, a Wordpress theme which allows paragraph level comments. One thing I’d like to use this for is putting my PhD thesis online. I could just let people download a PDF, but apart from giving readers the chance to comment on it, I’d like to comment on it myself first! It might also be useful as a feedback mechanism for the digital edition of Sandall’s history of 5th Lincs that I’m working on. I really want some way for readers to be able to suggest corrections, and something like CommentPress would be easier than programming something myself. So I downloaded it to try it out on my local server setup, but I couldn’t get it to work! It might be something to do with Windows, so tomorrow I’ll try to run it on my web host, which is on Linux.

I’ve had more success with Python. Getting to grips with it has been on my to do list for a long time, but I finally got round to downloading and installing the Python interpreter. I haven’t done much with it yet, but it looks like a good language. I used to be prejudiced against it because it doesn’t have curly braces (which are the mark of a “proper” programming language!) but its syntax is actually more concise than that, and nothing like the horrors of Visual Basic. I should be having lots of Python based fun over the coming weeks.