Early Modern Notes

New frocks for judges. The update’s only taken 3 centuries!

(Whatever would Bloody Jeffreys say?)

And then the BBC went and did a piece on their website with the title ‘Great-Granddad was a killer’. Oh, and there was a rave review on Radio 4 at the weekend (on Saturday Review; it’s on Listen Again).*

clunk… grind… thud…

Tuesday update

It turns out that yesterday we got over 3 million hits, and as far as we can tell, nearly all of that was the direct result of just the one BBC piece; nothing else was coming up in Google News (though there was some extra traffic on Sunday after the radio feature). It was genuinely popular, judging by its appearance in ‘top viewed’ and ‘top emailed’ lists on the BBC site.

By way of comparison, last week when we’d hit the publicity machine really hard and got pieces into all sorts of newspapers and media sites, we got a little over 2 million hits on our busiest day.

Last week’s publicity was largely an ‘official’ line: we supplied a press release, a few interesting cases and quotes from people who’d used the site, and journalists used that information to compile mostly pretty generic reports, often focussed on the famous cases - Wilde, Crippen, the Pankhursts. The message: here is a historical website with lots of stuff about notorious criminals and horrible punishments in the past. (Oh, and your ancestors might be mentioned in it.)

Yesterday’s piece was framed very differently. It tapped straight into the huge popularity of family history (which the BBC has done a lot for in recent years, after all): the personal and family angle, the potential for notoriety and scandal, or simply pathos and tragedy, much closer to home. The ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ approach. Publicity gold.

Result for us, unfortunately: website falling over again. But the simple lesson is that just one story that presses the right buttons with readers, that they can respond to personally and emotionally, can do more (for good or bad) than a massive publicity machine churning out stories-by-numbers and formulaic soundbites.

***

*I’ve finally got around to listening to it. Rave is an understatement. It gave me a nice warm fuzzy glow anyway.

Bill Turkel (who I get to meet in July!), has published The Programming Historian as an open access e-book. (Gavin Robinson, who actually is a programming historian, recommends it.)

And another resource you’ll want to have close at hand if you’re planning any kind of digital history project (large or small) is Jeremy Boggs’ new series on Digital Humanities design and development process:
Introduction
Part 1: figure out what you’re building
Part 2: information architecture and organization

The important thing I want to highlight about both of these resources is that they’re about making digital history, not just using the resources and tools that someone else already made. A lot of discussion of digital resources focuses on the finished products and what they can do for your research as an end-user (eg, this recent post). But if you can get involved in the creation of digital resources, you have the opportunity to influence what actually gets digitised, to get the resources you want.

Similarly, I’ve been coming to the view that it’s just not enough to champion blogging or writing on wikis, even though these activities are useful and stimulating in their own right (and people who dismiss them as worthless are big fat idiots who need a good slap). What you really need to be doing is learning how blogs/wikis work: how to install and maintain blog or wiki software and then tailor it to fit your own needs - and what it’s possible to do with these tools once you have them. The skills you learn in the process, to use the educationalists’ occasionally useful jargon, are highly transferable.

And there are going to be real job opportunities for those who take the initiative now and acquire the practical skills and understanding of what creating digital history needs. The generation of historians (and humanities academics more generally) in charge of hiring mostly doesn’t care about (or for) blogging. Wikipedia brings it out in a collective rash. But it’s well aware that there is quite a lot of grant money becoming available for digital history/humanities. And that’s something it does care about.

The technical skills needed aren’t taught in more than a handful of history departments (I don’t know of any in the UK): students and junior academics who want to exploit these new opportunities are largely going to have to teach themselves, with the help of resources like The Programming Historian. Get in ahead of the crowd now. Your career might depend on it.

Interesting posts that people have written following the launch:

African history in the Old Bailey? (History of Africa)

Suffragettes and Postboxes (Transpontine)

Lags and legacies (JISC digitisation blog)

Friday hoydens: suffragettes in court (Hoyden About Town)

Old Bailey Online (geoffreyrockwell.com)

What happened at the Old Bailey? (Research Buzz)

Old Bailey records online (Slaw.ca)

Just as well they didn’t have t’internet back then (Banditry)

Tales from the Hanging Court (Metafilter)

Sarah Ellen Procter, Charged with the Murder of Charlotte Whale, 5/28/1888 (True Crime Weblog)

Old Bailey 1674-1913 (Lawyers, Guns and Money)

New Online Old Bailey (The Corridor cricket blog)

Old Bailey Online (The Cat’s Meat Shop)

Old Bailey online (Vince Smith) (a comparison with the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which I’d not heard of before)

Light absorbing ovines (Ben’s Blog)

Old-fashioned trademark infringements (IPblog)

Getting big publicity (Available Online)

And some picks from news sites:

Old Bailey opens its unseen files (Observer)

Rush to search Old Bailey records of criminal trials (Times Online)

Global witness: Grim classics of Old Bailey go on internet (Yorkshire Post)

When hanging was too good for some (BBC magazine)

Booze, betrayal and death: tales from NZ’s past (NZ Herald)

Criminal historians crash London web site archive (Bloomberg)

In praise of… The Old Bailey (Guardian editorial)

London’s Old Bailey criminal court puts archive online (AP)

In the dock, and on the web (The Economist)

The dead shouldn’t have the last word

(Possible Sunday/weeklies to come:will update if I see them)

Have I missed anything of interest?

No, not Mayor Boris. That’s just absurd.

No, this is the shocker I discovered yesterday: Mel Gibson is to star in a movie remake of Edge of Darkness.

What I’ve been reading online lately…

Charles Tilly, May 20, 1929 – April 29, 2008
  personal memories of Charles Tilly

Old Bailey opens its unseen files
  nice feature on the project in The Observer

Observer Food Monthly April 2008
  a special anniversary edtion: loadsa Nigel Slater recipes

the moment cat lost…
  uh-oh

Hitler diaries scandal: ‘We’d printed the scoop of the century, then it turned to dust’
  on the 25th anniversary of the Hitler Diaries, the inside story

The Pirate Problem
  dan cohen on historians' reactions to digital history

I haz a shiny book!

Publisher’s catalogue. (Amazon UK; Amazon US)

There’s summat curious going on here - the publisher’s told me that the price is £45 (which is probably what I’d expect - the Amazon UK price is £46.99), but their online catalogue says £35. So if you want a cheap copy, you’d better jump in there and order it quickly before they notice. Just sayin’.

It feels so good to have it out. I NEVER EVER have to touch this thing again!

Yes, we have the Oscar Wilde trials. Exciting, huh?

…

Yes, that’s all we’ve got. No, we didn’t censor anything. The “details of the case are unfit for publication” bit? That was the original publishers. They did that all the time with sex cases. Bloody Victorians, spoiling our fun.

Should I blame our publicity people for including the case in the press release? I’d have left it out altogether, myself. It’s not like we don’t have plenty of sexy alternatives, what with Crippen and suffragettes and Irish terrorists (all of which were also in the press release). Or perhaps blame the journalists for bigging it up? (But it’s a notorious sex scandal! And it’s Oscar Wilde! What else are they going to do?)

What we said, buried in the middle of the press release, was:

Some of the most sensational cases ever to be tried at the Old Bailey are also now available for people to view, including the trials in which Oscar Wilde was convicted of indecency and the infamous Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, who killed his wife, was bought to justice.

And somehow you end up with Reuters (and hence newspapers round the entire fucking globe) heading up their report with:

The transcript from Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency at London’s Old Bailey Court went online for the first time on Monday alongside a raft of murder, robbery and abduction cases.

(And what that means is that I get a bunch of emails asking where’s the transcript and have we censored the material?)

Bah. I blame everybody.

Another perspective on Wikipedia (and check out the gin analogy…):

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus… She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.” [H-T]

And:

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. … Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

I’m watching a fraction of the TV I did about five years ago (there is only one programme I regard as a must-watch right at the moment). Instead, I read and write. I visit blogs and leave grumpy comments when they annoy me. I write amused, ranty, serious, light, posts on this blog about whatever catches my attention. I play with wikis and other software when no one’s looking.

I still like TV; I don’t buy the view that it’s all just passive mindless consumption. But the kind of activity you can do is sort of detached from it; conversations with friends (and on blogs now too!). Which is different from the direct participation of blogs and wikis. Don’t like it? Don’t get it? Change it. Add a comment. Jump right in there.

On the other hand…

Of today’s server-grinding-to-a-halt issues, the question has been asked - couldn’t this be anticipated?

To which the answer is: it was.

We knew that the publicity and the appeal of the subject would bring the site temporarily to its knees. But anticipation is one thing; being able to do something to stop it happening is another. Regardless of what you do to tweak the software, the database, and so on for more efficient performance - and the new site is much better than the old one - any site is ultimately limited by the capacities of the hardware on which it’s hosted. (In fact, the site coped pretty well on Sunday, and we had about four times the normal traffic. Update - Monday’s stats are in! We had about twenty times the normal volume of traffic [memorably described by one journalist as ‘crammed with digital tourists’]. Freakin’ ‘ell.)

But hardware is expensive (even though it has been getting cheaper in recent years); don’t forget this is a small-scale academic institution reliant on public funding. We can’t justify buying what would have been needed for today, even if we could have predicted how much that would actually be, and then have it sitting around doing bugger all for the next five years. That would simply be a waste of limited resources.

And speaking of which, there is one new addition to the site that I haven’t talked about so far, because I hate it like poison: advertising. Unfortunately, it’s the only real way for us to ensure long-term income to maintain (and develop) the site properly. (The structuring of academic funding for this kind of digital project doesn’t really take ongoing maintenance costs into account, beyond basic hosting costs.) It’s text ads only - and if you use Firefox and Adblock Plus (like me), you probably haven’t even seen them, so count yourself lucky. To everyone else: I’m really sorry. Please don’t hate us.