1. To send your nominations to Laura for tomorrow’s History Carnival. You know the drill: email Laura, Laura4991[at]prodigy.net, or use the nifty submission form.
2. To nominate your favourite history blogging of 2005 (actually, since the beginning of December 2004) in the Cliopatria Awards. If you haven’t got around to it yet, you have just a few hours left to get over there!
Yesterday I read this interesting post by Nosemonkey at The Sharpener, about the British (political) blogging scene. He touched on a concern I’ve come across before, with the rapid expansion of the blogosphere(s?).
[There is] more and more of a closed circle. The better - or simply more popular - bloggers end up reading each other and linking to each other and, increasingly, finding themselves less able or inclined, due either to time constraints or the knowledge that their current blogrolls contain enough good people to find most things so they shouldn’t be missing much, to pick up on newer blogs. Equally, the more people that link to you, the harder it is to notice new ones, or new good ones…
It is a problem. There are a few things I like to do to draw attention to new faces here. I try to make sure that I pay a visit to all first-time commenters who leave a link to their blog (this is feasible, of course, because I don’t get vast numbers of comments). And when I find new blogs I like, especially the history-related ones, I do my best to make sure they get a mention in a post - but I don’t always have time.
I had been contemplating pruning my blogroll: now I’ve moved the full list off the main page to leave just the random dozen in the sidebar, I’m pleased to say that won’t happen (except to remove non-active blogs from time to time). At some point I’d like to organise it better, get some kind of categorisation and maybe add brief descriptions. But I don’t know when I’ll get round to that.
What I have done right now (another of those things that WP makes unbelievably easy) is to add a small section to the left sidebar called ‘New Friends’, which will show the last few blogs I added to the roll. They won’t all be brand-new (and sometimes they won’t even be new to me; it’ll just be that I forgot to add them before). But many of them will be, and if you like to keep an eye out for up-and-coming stars, watch that space.
The next History Carnival will be hosted on Thursday 1 December by Laura James at Clews, The Historic True Crime Blog.
Email nominations for recently published posts about history (a historical topic, reviews of books or resources, reflections on teaching or researching history) to Laura at: Laura4991[at]prodigy.net, or use the submission form provided by Blog Carnival.
The 11th edition of Carnivalesque will be on ancient & medieval history and will be hosted by Another Damned Medievalist on Saturday 3 December 2005. To submit entries, either: email another_damned_medievalist[at]hotmail.com; or
Use this submission form.
(Do check the carnivals’ webpages if you have any queries about criteria for eligibility.)
Crooked Timber has a seminar on JS & Mr N. And they have persuaded Susanna Clarke to participate.
Bookish has The Kama Sutra of Reading.
Jonathan Edelstein has the story of the maid’s revenge. And a great story it is too.
Watching games like these. I am a complete wreck AGAIN.
But considering I was on the verge of giving up this autumn season as a lost cause, I’m happy bloody ecstatic.
(Since Wales (at rugby) and England (at cricket) seem to be in some sort of weird up-and-down rollercoaster what-happened-to-my-fingernails synchronicity this year, this means that we’re going to win at Lahore next week, right? … Yeah, right.)
Almost forgot in the excitement: to New Zealand readers, congratulations. What a team.
The next History Carnival will be hosted on Thursday 1 December by Laura James at Clews, The Historic True Crime Blog.
Email nominations for recently published posts about history (a historical topic, reviews of books or resources, reflections on teaching or researching history) to Laura at: Laura4991[at]prodigy.net, or use the submission form provided by Blog Carnival.
The History Carnival is not just for academics and entries don’t have to be heavyweight scholarship, but they must uphold basic standards of factual accuracy. If you have any further questions about the criteria for inclusion, check out the Carnival homepage (link above).
You should include in your email: the title and permalink URL of the blog post you wish to nominate and the author’s name (or pseudonym) and the title of the blog. (I also recommend that you put “History Carnival” somewhere in the title of the email.) You can submit multiple suggestions, both your own writing and that of others, but please try not to submit more than one post by any individual author for each Carnival (with the exception of multi-part posts on the same topic).
‘Beer goggles’ effect explained.
(Plus: Wasn’t once around more than enough? Their careers must really be in trouble.)
Um, yes, I am supposed to be working on those book manuscript revisions, since you ask. How did you guess? (Only two paragraphs of the introduction left to rewrite now! … And then the conclusion. At the current pace of progress, I’ll be done by about, oh, December 2007 probably.)
PS: these spam comments just get more and more surreal…
“cavernous fineness obliterate Weinstein reproaching reader ah”
(Yep, still contemplating those paragraphs.)
And another spam-related thought: I keep wondering just how “p***s enlargement patches” are supposed to work, and whether they bear any resemblance to “embroidery patches”. (But I think answers to this mystery are unlikely to make it past Spam Karma.)
Noted at Science and Politics, everything you ever needed to know about carnival hosting.
And it’s worth taking special note of this:
One of the more poorly kept secrets of the blogosphere is that there is very little quality control in blog carnivals. For the most part, if you submit a post on topic, you’ll make the cut. This is as it should be. Few among us are really qualified to judge which writing represents the very best of the web. Furthermore, a great carnival appeals to a wide variety of tastes. So, you are not responsible for judging for quality, but you need to judge all the same.
I’ve read a few things lately that make me fear a little that enthusiasm for (academic) blog carnivals might start to outrun what they’re actually capable of delivering. Can they really become a significant form of academic peer review? (Not that I’m really criticising that if:book post; it carefully stresses that it’s not talking about the formal peer review of the academic journal.)
We might need to be careful not to raise expectations impossibly high, or to risk creating misconceptions about what is really possible with the carnival format - that it’s somehow authoritative, “the” place to find “the best” (the implication being that what is left out has been judged to be inferior, when it might equally be a matter of chance, a lost email, the peccadilloes of a particular host, whatever). This possibility makes me oddly uncomfortable. (And apart from anything else, I don’t want to frighten off new hosts…)
To be sure, some selectivity is applied by the host of an academic carnival (they’re not free-for-alls); and, as in the case of the latest History Carnival, some choices can prove controversial and that can lead to useful discussion and debate. That demonstrates that there’s potential for that kind of peer review function, to some degree. But there are limits to what they can achieve, I think.
Still, I’d be interested to hear from you if you have ever responded to something that was included in an edition of History Carnival or Carnivalesque (perhaps especially if it was something that you wouldn’t have read otherwise). Maybe you’ve had doubts about an included post and commented on it - at the carnival itself, in the post’s comments or on your own blog; or maybe something gave you a positive stimulus to write something in response (not simply a criticism). On the other hand, maybe you have experienced some disquiet about an inclusion but never actually said anything about it. (Why not?) What do you think?
(I need a new bookcase. I’ve been doing some mental contortions to work out where I might squeeze this hypothetical bookcase in.)
Just in case any of the postgrads who visit here haven’t already seen it: Eszter’s post on how to get your dissertation done, and there’s much good advice in the comment threads. A very useful resource.
As if one weren’t enough for you greedy buggers…
Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers anyway!
PS: Nearly forgot to point you to my tasty T-Day post from last year. (It occurs to me that there haven’t been nearly enough linkage posts round here lately, and I still have one or two outstanding requests from the summer. Need to do something about that, methinks.)
Some days, there you are in the archives wondering if it’s time to go home yet (for the 20th time since the coffee break), and then you turn a page and you get something to make you fall off your chair. Even though (for once…) nobody died.
It starts with a letter from a Flintshire JP, Thomas Hanmer, to the Chief Justice of Chester, Sir Richard Lewkenor, who’s about to open proceedings at the October 1607 Great Sessions in Denbighshire.
Now, it seems that a certain William Jones, a surgeon of Chirk (Denbighshire), has been bound over to appear at the Great Sessions (I don’t know what for yet; I’ll see if I can find out later). But Hanmer’s letter is about an apparently unrelated matter in Flintshire.
Jones, says Hanmer, “did undertake the dismembring of a foote from a poore woeman” in Hanmer (in Flintshire), which was paid for by the charity of a number of local people. But “ymediatlye after the finishinge of the said cure the said Johnes gotte the poore woeman wth child, whereof not long since she hath byne delivered”.
Then we have the petition of the woman herself, Elinor Evans of Hanmer, with a fuller version of the story. It really doesn’t get any better. (more…)
Natalie’s new venture: My London Your London.
There’s just over a week left before nominations close in the 2005 history blogging awards. Have you nominated your favourites yet?
Remember:
1. You don’t have to choose just one favourite in any category. You can make as many nominations as you like. The more the merrier.
2. You can do it anonymously.
3. You can nominate yourself.
4. Judges in each of the categories can only consider what you, the readers of blogs, have nominated.
(And now I’m going to be entirely selfish and ask in particular for your nominations in the two categories I’m judging: Group Blog and Series of Posts. We’ve had some good ones, but we want more.)
Perhaps there’s just too much to choose from and you can’t decide where to start? You might consider using the History Carnival as a resource to help you track down the memorable posts and authors of the year.
Please help us make the awards a success. If you don’t, they won’t happen again and it will be no good whinging that history blogs get overlooked in all the big Blogging Awards (as they often do).
There were a number of things I might have done this afternoon. (Including catching up with my judgely duties for the awards. I am going to have to start avoiding the other judges, because they’ve been far more diligent than me.)
What I actually did was to play around some with the site templates. There was just way too much crap in the sidebars and it’s been annoying me for weeks. So they’ve been slimmed down: the archives and the main blogroll and many links are going into separate pages that you can access from the new horizontal menu bar just below the header. The sections left on the main pages may well undergo some pruning too, although I will put a selective blogroll back here at some point. (PS: Going to try out a random selection, changing with every page load. Could be amusing.)
That fun may be enough to stop me from compulsively redesigning the entire site for a few months.
Alas, I had to take down the live comment preview. It was making something very odd happen to the comment box in Firefox in longer comments.
… And I knew there was something I wanted to ask about. I’d like to put a search box in the horizontal menu, but I couldn’t seem to find a way to make it display in the same line as the links. I’m sure this is possible and I’ve seen it elsewhere. Anyone know how to do it?
(To clarify: this is the view west, over Cardigan Bay, from my window here in Aberystwyth. Regular long-time visitors will have seen the view a few times, but I don’t think I’ve posted one of Aber’s pink sunsets before. They happen quite frequently, especially when we’ve had a cold clear sunny day like today.)
Having some trouble connecting to my university webmail this weekend: those of you who usually email me at that address should know that there might be a delay in getting a reply back to you. Use sharon@earlymodernweb.org.uk if you can, for the time being.
And anyone know what it means when you get an error message saying “The connection to (webmail) has terminated unexpectedly. Some data may have been transferred”? It’s been doing it on and off since yesterday. Should I worry about it?
Little Britain. Is. Not. Funny.
So I read eb’s comments on new forms of online-database serendipity (made in response to this post at Cliopatria).* You might remember that I posted about RSS feeds for e-journals last week. Now, I’ll check out the TOCs for several history journals to which the university has subscriptions, and I make a point of regularly downloading articles that sound interesting and aren’t in my immediate research area. (Right now I have this intriguing article to read about the meanings of “1066″ that I’d probably never have spotted otherwise.) I do the same kind of thing with JSTOR when something catches my interest. Great, eh?
The only thing is that I’m starting to accumulate the PDF file equivalent of that pile of books sitting over there that I know I’m never to going to get round to reading…
…
*I know this is heresy, but personally I think that this business of physically browsing the stacks is much overrated. Continually being interrupted by those annoying people who have the nerve to want to get to the same shelves as you in a library that’s either hot and stuffy or freezing cold (depending on which floor you’re on and which way the windows face, our library manages both) and lugging around piles of heavy journals to find a desk where you can take notes (many of our journals are reference only) or to the photocopier (and so many journals are so tightly bound with such tiny margins - bloody cheapskates - that you can hardly open them wide enough to get a readable photocopy anyway) where you run out of credit on your photocopying card with one page of the article left so you have to go down two flights of stairs to the nearest slot machine and you’ll probably forget to take the photocopying away out of the copier when you’re done anyway… pfffffft.
Andrew Groome was a swineherd from “Hills Coppy”, Shropshire,* who went off on business into Flintshire in May 1687, with his servant Richard Finney, expecting to be away for about 3 weeks. But he didn’t come home. At first his wife Sarah thought he had just extended his trip. But then she got word from a neighbour that a man had been killed near Bronington (Flintshire), and “by his cloathes shee feared it was her husband”. Sarah sent her brother to Flintshire to investigate.
They learned that Andrew’s body had been found in a cornfield by workers on 13 June, with the back of his head smashed in. The people in Bronington had not known his identity, except that he had told an alehousekeeper that he was a “dealer in swine” and lived near Nantwich (Cheshire). A coroner’s inquest brought in a verdict of murder (by person or persons equally unknown). He had already been buried by the time Sarah’s brother arrived: he was identified by his clothes and by a knife found in his pocket. What was not present, however, was any of the substantial sum of money that Andrew had taken with him when he went away.
So where was Richard Finney? (more…)
It’s time to make this again. With big chunky toast and cheese of course.
Curiously enough, according to my stats plugin, that onion soup post is among the most frequently visited on this blog, somewhere about number 6. Tells you something about how many people use the web to look for recipes, I suppose.* (After all, I do it myself. Better than a recipe book when you have a handful of assorted wilting stuff in the fridge and you want to find ways to use it all up.)
The two most popular pages, incidentally, are the ones on big words… and the history of underwear. You just never know what’s going to happen when you write these things…
………..
* And yet, on investigation, if you google “french onion soup”, the post is lurking somewhere down in the 60s. Surely no one looking for a recipe clicks through that many entries? So why it gets quite so many hits is still a bit of a mystery.
The next History Carnival will be hosted tomorrow (15 November) by Joanna at Tigerlily Lounge.
You can email your nominations for recently-published posts about historical topics, researching or teaching history, etc, to: mythicalbrit[at]gmail.com. Or you can use the submission form provided by Blog Carnival.