Early Modern Notes

I started this post quite a while ago and never finished it, in part because I discovered that the more I found out about him the more I disliked its subject, Henry T Ford. (And also because I don’t finish a lot of draft posts…) But a comment in one part of Marc’s useful and interesting introduction to historical method series persuaded me to drag it out again. (And thanks to him for spurring me to make the effort…)

Modern critical investigation has actually caused many to question the validity of history as a whole, as seen by Henry Ford’s famous ” History is bunk” statement.

Well… I’d agree with the proposition, but unfortunately the Ford quote’s not a good example of it. It’s one of those quotations everyone knows, right? ‘History is bunk’. Guaranteed to bring out any good historian in a rash, and proof positive of the short-sighted, narrow-minded ignorance of the industrialist Henry Ford, yes?

Not really, no.

He did say those three words in one quoted source (if you rip them out of context), which I’ll come back to shortly. But it isn’t quite what he originally said, in an interview printed in the Chicago Tribune in 1916. And what he really said then, and what he thought about history, is much more interesting than you might expect. The reporter had asked Ford why he opposed the build up of American armed forces, and used the example of British naval resistance to Napoleon’s army more than a century earlier.

I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there (to England) and I don’t care. I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.

Ford’s attitude involved, then, an emphatic rejection of using the past to inform and justify present actions (a view with which most modern academic historians would agree). And secondly, he had a real dislike of the narrow political focus of academic history at the time (with which many modern academic historians could also sympathise). Some time after the interview, Ford sued the Tribune for libel (for a different story it had printed about him), and he was subsequently humiliated in court for his lack of formal history book learning (he had had only the most basic school education, after all). After that, he said something that doesn’t get quoted everywhere:

I am going to start up a museum and give people a true picture of the development of the country. That is the only history that is worth observing, that you can preserve in itself. We’re going to build a museum that is going to show industrial history, and it won’t be bunk. [That decision led to the creation of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.]

And here’s another less famous quote to finish:

As a young man, I was very interested in how people lived in earlier times; how they got from place to place, lighted their homes, cooked their meals and so on. So I went to the history books. Well, I could find out all about kings and presidents; but I could learn nothing of their everyday lives. So I decided that history is bunk. (1935)

There’s plenty to detest about Henry Ford - his racism and antisemitism just for a start. (He was a philanthropist, but a conservative, highly patriarchalist one.) But his attitude to history was not at all what is so often assumed on the basis of those famous, misquoted, words.

……………….

Henry Ford’s time machine
Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village
Henry Ford, short biography at Wikipedia

The next History Carnival will be hosted on 1 September by Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb. Entries may be focused on a historical topic, reflections on the particular challenges and rewards of studying, researching and teaching history, reviews of history books or web resources, discussions of ‘popular’ histories, etc. (You can find out more about the criteria at the link on the right.) Email your nominations for recently published posts (preferably since the last carnival on 15 August) to: jboggs AT gmu DOT edu (put ‘History Carnival’ in the subject line of the email).

The next edition of Carnivalesque is to be held on Monday 5 September, and it’s the turn of the early modernists. So please send on your nominations of quality blog posts (preferably posted since about the beginning of July), on any topic to do with the period between (approximately) 1500-1800 CE, to your host, of Rebecca by midnight 4 September, at: rgoetz{AT}fas{DOT}harvard{DOT}edu (put ‘Carnivalesque’ in the subject line).

The Carnival of Bad History will be on 1 September at Dodecahedron. If you’ve been debunking bad history lately, or read someone else who has, they’d like to hear from you.

GZombie is holding the inaugural issue of the Teaching Carnival on 1 September. This will focus on teaching issues in higher education.

The Good News: Dorothy Dunnett’s Game of Kings was right up there, in second place.

The Bad News: Lewis Grassic Gibbon won. (OK, I’ve never read any myself, but I have Scottish friends who swear they were scarred for life by being forced to read Grassic Gribbon at school… so I’m on their side.)

And how precisely is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone a ‘Scottish’ book? And where the hell is Iain Banks?

(Hat-tip: Bookish)

I could do some work on my annual progress report for the nice people who pay my salary. I’ve got a month to finish it. Nah, not today.

I could put a couple of hours in on my article, which really is nearly done. Well, three-quarters done.

I could play with my new installation. It looks fun.

Or I could just read my shiny new Reginald Hill.

The next History Carnival will be hosted on 1 September by Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb.

Email your nominations for recently published posts (preferably since the last carnival on 15 August) about history, which can be your own writing or that of other bloggers, to the host: jboggs AT gmu DOT edu (put “History Carnival” in the subject line).

I’m trying out a plugin called Bad Behaviour. The idea is to stop spambots from being able to access the site. I haven’t had any problems with spam commenting lately, but I’m getting quite close to my monthly bandwidth limits, and keeping the spambots away should help to cut bandwidth usage so I won’t need to upgrade my hosting package for a few more months.

By all accounts this is a very good and reliable plugin and it shouldn’t cause any problems for human visitors (or legitimate crawlers like Googlebot)…

And it’s not even tea-time (on day 4).

Think we’re going to go one better this time?

(Mind you, that lbw decision for Katich was terrible. Even I could see it wasn’t out. Er, sorry fellas.)

Over-by-over here.

Update 4.20pm: wobble wobble. Shane Warne Must Die.

6.30pm: OK, he gets to live. Bloody hell. What a match.

We are 2-1 up!! When did that last happen in the Ashes?

From a letter to Sir Thomas Myddleton at Chirk Castle in Denbighshire, from John Wynne, dated 25 Sept 1681:

…I shall give you a true & faithfull account of the message I carryed from you to Sir John Trevor… After that I desired to have private discourse with him he went wth me to a private roome, where I imparted your buisness to him in these very words (i.e.) Sir I am come to you upon a message from Sir Thomas Middleton he is informed by a gentleman that you called his father the sonn of a traytor, he therefore desires you just now to walke out with your sword in your hand to give him satisfaction, to which Sr John Trevor replyed truely Sir I never sayd that his father was the sonn of a traytor, but that he was a person that he much honoured & respected, & more to that purpose… [I] made reply to Sir J.T. in these words, Sir since you disowne ye speaking of ye words for which I am com to question you, I will rather endeavour to make a right understanding between you then promote a quarell…

(A little background: Myddleton and Trevor were not on good terms around this time. At the beginning of 1681, they had fought it out for the county seat in parliamentary elections; there were some serious disturbances (enough to alarm the government in London) and at the end a spot of sharp practice on Trevor’s part to take the seat. At almost the same time (no coincidence, I reckon…) Trevor had involved himself in a long-running dispute about enclosures between Myddleton and his tenants near Chirk, with both direct action in throwing down Myddleton’s fences and a number of subsequent lawsuits and prosecutions. There’s much more about all that in chapter 6 of my thesis, though somehow I missed this particular letter when I was doing my PhD research.)

Another thing in the literature on duels which causes me some doubt is the tendency to assume that once a challenge had been issued, a duel was inevitable, related to a broader assumption that duelling was virtually compulsory amongst upper-class men whenever an insult was given or perceived. (One of the things I like about Peltonen’s work is that it’s showing that the situation was much more contested than that.) Here, despite the intensity of political rivalry and legal disputes between Myddleton and Trevor at the time that this challenge was issued, and whether Trevor had said the words in question or not, he was ready to back down and deflect the challenge. (And I have noted down at least one more example in the NLW archives of a challenge refused, which I’ll be taking a look at soon.)

…..

Earlier posts:

A duel?
Thinking about duels
Duelling and honour

I happened to be going through some files recently that I’d looked at before very early on in my PhD research. Little new student me had left quite a few blanks and question marks in my original transcriptions, and now they nearly all just seem sooo obvious.

It’s not just because of more experience in transcribing the handwriting. It’s often about greater familiarity with context. Some of the gaps were place names; now I can not only recognize quite a lot of the places straight off, I also understand much better how Welsh place names are constructed, what’s possible and what isn’t. (Even with the irregular and inconsistent spellings that you get in these documents.) The same thing goes for the legal terms, abbreviations and contractions, bastardised Latin and archaic vocabulary.

(There were, more worryingly, also a) a few words I’d got hopelessly wrong but didn’t question mark at all and b) occasional unnerving gaps. I’d missed out a whole paragraph in one document. Which is the sort of thing that has me worrying about everything I’ve transcribed or recorded, ever. Ah, well.)

So if you are an early modernist (or medievalist) grad student who has just started archival research for the first time and you’re having real trouble deciphering the handwriting, I promise it will get easier as you go on. Just keep at it, leave the gaps first time around and come back to them.

But that leads to one other piece of advice, for students planning your first big and expensive research trip somewhere: you don’t want to be using up precious time there working out how to decipher the documents. (I was lucky: I lived a 10-minute walk away from my main archives.)

Especially if you will need to read handwriting in a foreign language: one of my biggest early stumbling blocks was that I’d learnt Latin (and Welsh too) from modern printed texts whilst my palaeography training had been done quite separately, and exclusively in English-language examples. Some of my biggest early difficulties came from trying to integrate the palaeography skills (at which I was pretty good) with the language skills (at which I was pretty useless… well, I still am). Especially as in court records, quite a bit of the Latin was often written in a rather archaic and formal hand at which I’d had less practice. (Not to mention all the horrible abbreviations and contractions.)

So, before you go away on that first all-important trip, try to get beyond the usual palaeography tutorials and manuals. The best thing is to get some real practice with a range of documents similar (in form, content, language etc) to the ones you’ll encounter on the research trip, either in a local archive or on microfilm (or online at archives’ websites, like 17th-century witchcraft case documents or parish lists or medieval charters). There’s nothing quite like the real thing…

But you can also start by getting a clearer sense of the documents you’re likely to encounter - just what sorts of physical objects do those neat lists under the ‘Archival sources’ heading in bibliographies really represent? Where you can get it, read information about the records that has been prepared by the archivists (such as the excellent TNA guides; TNA’s online catalogue also contains a lot of useful information about record classes, like this), and ask people who have some experience with researching those types of records what they’re like. Once you’ve done that, too, you can talk to your palaeography teachers about your specific needs; they might be able to provide you with extra practice material. It will be worth the effort.

(By the way, if you’re going to work with 17th-century English (or Welsh) court records and you want practice examples, I have plenty of jpeg images of documents…)

(Following on from my earlier thoughts about duels, I have taken a quite long and detailed deposition from the files and rather than just pasting it in, I’ve turned it into a first-person narrative in modern English so you can read the story more easily.)

On 26 August 1661, Kenrick Edisbury of Sonlli (Denbighshire), gentleman, was examined by two JPs in relation to the death of Roger Grosvenor, esquire:

On 21 August I was at Chester for a foot race to be run to Wrexham, between a footman of Mr Roger Grosvenor [of Eaton Hall, Cheshire], and a footman called Astyn, formerly my servant, now ‘maintained’ by Mr John Pulford of Wrexham. [NB: The title ‘Mr’ in this period always denotes a man of gentry status.] Shortly before the start of the race, Pulford asked me to ride along with Astyn, and I went to Grosvenor and asked him if I could do so, if Astyn went into the lead, in order to encourage him. Grosvenor answered, ‘Yes, yes, I care not if two or three do ride with him but I will not have a crowd to come between them’.

After the race began, the two runners were together for about half a mile and then Astyn drew ahead by about ‘a stone’s cast’, at which point I asked Grosvenor, ‘Now that the fellow is far enough ahead, may I ride up to him, without prejudice to your footman?’, to which Grosvenor did not object. I rode up to the front, along with Mr Hugh Roberts and Mr Francis Edisbury, my brother. Although we avoided the beaten way to avoid raising dust, about half a mile on Grosvenor sent someone to call back Roberts, saying ‘it was uncivil, unhandsome and not like a gentleman’ to ride in front of Grosvenor’s man and raise the dust. Roberts responded that he was doing no harm and he would not go back.

On being told this, Grosvenor rode up to us and demanded ‘with passionate language’ that Roberts turn back. Roberts refused, and Grosvenor swore he would stop the race, to which Kenrick answered that he could stop his own man if he liked, but Astyn should continue.

Grosvenor went to strike Astyn, who ‘forsook his way’, and Roberts rode between Grosvenor and the footman. Grosvenor struck Roberts with a stick, and then suddenly leapt off his horse and drew his sword. He went up close to Roberts as he sat on his horse, forcing Roberts to dismount from the other side, and go backwards 3 or 4 steps, when he drew his own sword. Grosvenor ‘made a pass upon him’ which Roberts ‘put by’ and they ‘closed’ together.

When I saw the swords drawn, I also dismounted in order to separate them, and came up to them with only my whip in my hand, and thrust my hands between them, saying ‘Enough gentlemen I hope there is no hurt done to you’, to which Grosvenor replyed, ‘Yes, he has wounded me in the belly’. I said, ‘I hope not’. Grosvenor got down on hands and knees, I asked to see his wound, he got up and let down his breeches to show the wound in his belly. Meanwhile another man named Mr Jockut[?] and the footman came up to us, each with a drawn sword. I drew my own sword and stood upon my guard and said, ‘Put up your swords, I fear there is too much hurt done already’, at which they put up their swords and then I left and rode towards Wrexham.

(Francis Edisbury also gave a shorter deposition to the same effect which adds the detail that after Grosvenor and Roberts had been separated, Grosvenor said to Roberts, ‘I wonder you would do so by me’, to which Roberts replied that ‘he was never so much obliged to any as to let him kill him in a humour’. I should probably add the slightly technical detail that in both examinations the words ’sayeth and confesseth’ were used at the beginning, which usually means that the examinant is under suspicion for something.)

……..

So, was that a ‘duel’? (To be continued…)

Is it a good idea to buy an otherwise possibly iffy-sounding thriller (mysterious medieval manuscripts and deadly secrets…) just because there’s a positive blurb on the front by an author you really like? Hmm.

Well, I wanted to make sure I have something for the weekend if my new Reginald Hill doesn’t arrive in time. And I still love the fact that at last I am earning a salary that allows me to just pick up new paperbacks on the off chance that I might like them, and it won’t matter if they turn out to be real donkeys.

CiteULike

I’m not quite sure why I didn’t know about this already. It is fabulous. Press one button to record the citation information of interesting articles picked up in those journals’ RSS feeds! (The one-step facility only works with some journal providers. But even doing it manually only takes a minute or so.) Then you can press one button to import the references into EndNote! And they give very clear and easy-to-follow instructions.

I’ve put a link to my library in the sidebar somewhere down on the right. (Bear in mind that most of the articles will be subscription-restricted. But you should at least be able to read abstracts, where there are any.)

I have always been terrible about remembering to keep a record of things I’ve read as I go along. It gets done eventually, but usually only after photocopies and printouts and scrappy notes have been piling up in the ‘To Endnote’ heap on the floor for several months… At last I might be efficient (yeah, right) and make proper use of the technology! (Welcome to the 21st century…)

It also gives me the opportunity to experiment with some alternatives to all those asterisks and footnotes when I’m writing more serious things here that need bibliographical citations. Cool, eh?

(I found it, by the way, in the comments to this post at Crooked Timber, which is about a pre-print resource for scientists called arXiv. We humanities people have so much catching up to do…)

Plus, I now have a copy of Nvivo to try out!

(And not for the squeamish.)

Can anyone direct me to studies that discuss the use of purging in early modern medicine? Or if you can suggest any contemporary medical works that would be likely to cover this, I could check whether they’re in Early English Books Online.

Here’s the story: I have a late 17th-century murder case on my books, where a wife defended herself against charges of poisoning her husband with arsenic by saying that she had been advised to administer it to him as a purging medicine. Her explanation must have been at least superficially plausible at the time, since she was acquitted. I certainly seem to remember having read that early modern people were heavily into purging [note to the uninitiated: stuff that makes you vomit, or has a laxative effect] and did often use pretty nasty substances for the purpose (and they liked their enemas too… no, let’s really not go there). But I don’t really recall where I would have read this, and I don’t seem to have anything helpful on the shelves here at home. So, anyone got any reading suggestions?

For those of you who might find it interesting, I’ll put an extract from the letter that the wife wrote from prison, which was presumably her line of defence at her trial, below the fold. I should add that the woman who had given her this ‘advice’ was herself convicted and hanged for poisoning her own son-in-law at about the same time. (There’s little doubt about her guilt, I think. It’s a really fascinating case.) I am personally a little sceptical about the wife’s protestations of innocence, but who knows after all this time?

(more…)

My archival research this summer has (at last) begun to develop some sense of direction, and one of the themes is masquerading under the working title of ‘Gentlemen Behaving Badly’. And I may well be writing a lot more about this, because it encompasses a lot of tasty topics: masculinity, ‘class’ or social rank, politics, litigation, violence, rioting, drinking… [Indeed, it looks like this is going to turn into a proper little series of posts: see here and here, and this earlier post as well. Not to mention this, too. Exciting eh?]

(I suspect that I shall not, however, be taking my cue from this book.)

And right now it has me thinking about the subject of the duel, on which there’s been a good deal of research since the late 1980s (perhaps especially in the mid-90s). I realised that I have quite a bit of catching up to do, in fact. So what follows here is very provisional. I’m just thinking my way around it, but I have some issues about the ways in which ‘the duel’ seems to be discussed in the work that I’ve read so far. Key problems: the research seems to me to tend to decontextualise the practice and not really think much about the relationship between theory and practice.

(more…)

Thanks to Tony for reminding me about this one, which I came across a while back. I might even have linked it before, but who cares.

Badger Badger Badger!

It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s completely stupid. It just cracks me up.

I still seem to be getting occasional troubles with my connection, which don’t seem to be directly related to the new router and wireless network, but I wasn’t having them before…*

Twice now my connection has suddenly gone screwy in a particular way: I can ping IP addresses, but I can’t get into sites using URLs. (I did get this once before, several months ago when I first installed my broadband setup, and that was a firewall issue. That does not seem to be the problem now.) Last week, I reset my IE settings and it seemed to fix it. This time, the ISP had to reset something mysterious at their end. I don’t understand what’s going on, I don’t want to have to phone them every other week and I don’t like not knowing if the connection will suddenly screw up again.

Additional: I’ve realised something. The two occasions have been at (almost) exactly the same time, same day, a week apart (just before midnight Tuesday). I don’t know whether to see this as a bad thing (seems all the more likely to happen again…) or a good thing (might make it easier to work out what the problem is).

If anybody has any ideas what is going on and can explain them very gently in non-computer-lingo, I’d be pathetically grateful.

*Yes Conor, I know, post hoc ergo propter hoc and all that, but it looks bleedin’ fishy to me. (But after all I still only just about get the thing with the goats and the doors. Phooey to mathematicians.)

I have mentioned Popcorn and Chainmail before: their thoughts on King Arthur might keep you amused for a bit…

I want to paste the following from the comments at the last post here so that they aren’t just hidden away there, to add to the various posts I’ve done before on getting into PhD research. I think it might be useful to some of you thinking of starting a PhD this year or next:

Anna wrote to say:

I am thinking of doing a phD at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine ‘A social history of dementia’ - not early modern history I’m afraid, twentieth century. I haven’t officially started it yet, but submitted a proposal which my ’supervisor’ has come back to me with.

She has said my proposal needs a ‘firmer grounding in sources’. What does that mean and how can I find them? Are there any institutional records which might help me throw light on this social history?

She has been really helpful and given me a plan to work to for my proposal, which other people might find helpful, but I have some questions that people might be able to help me with about her points.

There are 5 sections:
1. The proposed subject. Themes to be covered; questions to be explored. try to take this analytically [But what does ‘analytically’ mean in this context?]
2. Brief survey of the existing literature; where the project fits and extends this
3. Archive sources [what are these and where can I find them/help on this?]
4. Methodology/approach, including historiographical framework [don’t have much of a clue about this. Where can I get help on this?]
5. Training and preparation. [presumably she means research training I can do, but how do I find out?]

Many thanks

My thoughts:

Firstly, if you check the rightleft! left!-hand sidebar under favourite posts, you’ll see several links to posts I wrote earlier for students thinking of doing PhDs (Planning a PhD, etc). Do check those out for general advice if you haven’t already.

[Update: Ah, the pitfalls of changing the design of your site… that sidebar disappeared long ago! Instead, you can find all those posts gathered together under the category Postgrad Help.]

What libraries and resources are available to you? What I’m about to suggest probably requires access to university libraries - or public libraries with good Interlibrary Loan facilities - and specialist (sometimes subscription-required) electronic resources. You should try to get access (in print or electronic form) to the important journals like Social History of Medicine, if you possibly can.

Survey of the literature: you should do keyword searches of bibliographical databases etc to make sure that you know what’s out there that’s relevant to your topic. You don’t have to read all of it yet (!), but you need to know the arguments and approaches of what are considered the key texts, and what the most recent research is doing etc. (Review essays - the type that cover several books - in history journals are extremely useful for getting up to speed on the ’state of a field’ quickly.)

Then you can really sit down and think about how your research would do 3 main things: 1. fill gaps in empirical knowledge, be a resource for other researchers; 2. contribute to developing ideas and interpretations of the subject; 3. take issue with existing ideas, be prepared to argue a different line. Ideally, a PhD thesis should along the way do all of these things. Mainly, it should do 1 and especially 2, but sometimes it should do 3 as well.

Reading the literature will also help to clue you in as to what primary sources and methodologies historians are using. You have to start reading like a researcher rather than an undergrad: look more closely at the primary sources in footnotes and bibliographies, pay attention to the methodological sections in introductions. Also, it may help to find out what other PhDs on similar topics are in progress and recently completed.

Useful resources:

Wellcome Library resources
MedHist (a key resource for history of medicine)
Recent and current history PhD theses in UK universities
IHR Reviews in history: history of medicine
RHS online bibliography of British and Irish history

From Chris Williams:

Remember that most academics (even the lucky ones working for the Wellcome) like to supervise intelligent, interested, and prepared students. You’re in demand, if you play your cards right.

1. Analytically - essentially this means, don’t tell the story, unless absolutely necessary. Instead, try to answer some bigger questions. You need to think of some. On the other hand, you and your supervisor ought both to be aware that after 6 months you might need to revise some or all of them.

2. Survey - what it says on the tin. Are you really sure that nobody’s done this before? Get a list of all the books and articles on the topic, via the British Library website and various journal article databases. What are the three closest bits of work to it that exist? [NB - get hold of a copy of Michelle Winslow’s thesis about Poles and ageing, and search the bibliography of that. University of Sheffield History Dept 2000ish].

3. Sources - this is the big one. You need to find at least one but preferably less than 4 bodies of primary sources which between them can answer your questions. Go and find 2 of these, ideally take a look at them directly, then go back to your prospective supervisor and ask her to suggest any more. She is bound to know far more about this than you, so treat this as an intelligence and initiative test more than anything else.

Where you start looking for sources really depends on a whole bunch of things that I haven’t got time to list right now … But the best place to start is in other people’s bibliographies, and the NRA,* A2A and Archon websites.

4. Methodology . . . derive this from something else, preferably some work you’ve already done. Hodder Arnold have put out a range of books about this sort of thing recently…

5. Training - you ought to be aware that you’ll need some, and that the institution will be providing some. For they have an obligation to. If you want to read up on that, check out the websites of the ESRC and the AHRC. But assessing your training needs is something that they ought to be doing after you’ve started your PhD, not before, IMO. Their mileage may vary, though. Perhaps they are looking to see how far you are willing to go to sell yourself to them. If you see what I mean.

And if you have anything to add to our ideas, leave your comments here!

……..

*To American readers: National Register of Archives. Not that other NRA.

I have posted here before about web resources marred by usability issues. But Chris has found something way worse than anything I’ve encountered, at Edinburgh University’s Charting the Nation site for early modern Scottish maps. Read it and weep. (Especially as the maps themselves are lovely and deserve a lot better.)

GZombie is holding the inaugural issue of the Teaching Carnival on 1 September.

The aim is for it to be rather different from the existing Carnival of Education, as the focus will be on teaching issues in higher education, especially “bloggers’ thoughts about the college or university classroom environment, as well as musings on particular classes being taught”.

The Carnival of Bad History has announced a host for 1 September too. If you’ve been debunking bad history lately, or read someone else who has, send in your suggestions.

Mo died this morning. She was only 55. My thoughts and sympathy go out to her family.

Mo, we’ll miss you. We need more politicians like you.

Links

Tributes
The popular appeal
Guardian newsblog
The day I met Mo Mowlam

BBC obit
Times obit
Guardian obit

Photo retrospective
Life in pictures
In pictures
In quotes

PS: Note to the news broadcasters: you know when she got a standing ovation at the Labour Party conference… in the middle of Tony’s speech? Please, please, show that again.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the news about Mo since it was reported early this month that she’d been admitted to hospital and was in a critical condition. A few days ago she was moved to a hospice, which was hardly good news.

Now her friends say that her condition has deteriorated and, following the instructions of her living will, food and water have been withdrawn. It seems it can only be a matter of time.

Very, very sad news.

Has anybody here used Nvivo and/or N6 qualitative data analysis software? I ask because apparently I can get copies of them via the university for almost nothing, and I’m wondering just what they do and how easy they are to use. I currently have Idealist, a freetext database program (which I use a lot), and Endnote (which I don’t use half as much as I should) - what sort of capabilities would Nvivo/N6 add to those? Would they take much getting used to?

…

A few relevant things turned up by Google…

Product overview
Using Nvivo for your literature review
Get started with Nvivo 2
NVivo resources

I’ve noted this in the Latest Links section, but I really want to draw attention to it here too: Renaissance Festival Books from the British Library.

View 253 digitised Renaissance festival books… that describe the magnificent festivals and ceremonies that took place in Europe between 1475 and 1700 - marriages and funerals of royalty and nobility, coronations, stately entries into cities and other grand events.

Apart from downloading the texts, there are sections on background, links and resources etc, and expert analysis. It’s part of the Treasures in Full section, which also has Caxton’s Chaucer, Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare in Quarto and the Magna Carta.

(Hat-tip: Doblog, which looks like a library/information sciences resource blog in Japanese(?); the post just popped up in my Bloglines search filters.)

I don’t remember exactly when I set up my first website, except that it was some time in the summer of 2000. Now I note that the earliest archived page (don’t look, it’s rubbish) is dated 16 August 2000, so looks like I’ve missed it by a couple of days. Still, a baby compared to some others you might have heard of.

But it’s been a pretty interesting five years.