Early Modern Notes

The RHS Bibliography of British and Irish history will cease to be a free resource as of next January.

This is really pissing me off.

Example 1: Facebook. I came out against Facebook quite a long time ago, and that was even before I knew about the privacy and data issues, and how difficult it is to get out once you’re in. Facebook: still saying No.

Example 2: Twitter. I’ve been resisting signing up for Twitter for a while. Not because I didn’t like the idea. Quite the opposite. It looked thoroughly entertaining and addictive - but not, perhaps, all that useful, and I waste quite enough time playing with foolish things on my computer as it is (*cough* damn Sudoku *cough*). How can you possibly do anything meaningful with 140 characters?

And yet, what is Twitter if not another manifestation of the adaptability of the blog as a medium of communication? You can use it for crowdsourcing. You can use it to protest against political repression. The famous can use it to stay in touch with their fans. The non-famous can use it to stay in touch with each other.

Twitter’s genius is not the 140 characters. It’s the hash key. Oh, and the @. Tagging rocks, and metadata rules our world, baby.

So I’ve given in.

@sharon_howard is probably going to regret this…

Survival of the fittest tag: Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization

Axiis: Data Visualisation Framework

Perspectives (special issue on History and New Media)

Barriers to institutional digital history

Euromachs blog

Keeping Time: a digital commonplace book

Sad news: Patricia Crawford has died.

Well, I’ve been neglecting this blog something terrible.

I went off for a quiet week in Aberystwyth and was a bit busy eating and drinking and taking photos. Dunno what happened to the rest of the last month or so though. I didn’t drink that much. I don’t think.

Oh, and I’ve been growing some herbs from seed to plant out on my patio. They haven’t died yet.

The latest issue of AHA’s Perspectives on History magazine has a special section devoted to digital history.