Early Modern Notes

Strange Soviet Buildings. You will probably love or hate. (H-T.)

Coming on 1 February: the History Carnival will be hosted by by Nonpartisan at Progressive Historians. Email: nonpartisan@progressivehistorians.com or submit via the usual form.

The Asian History Carnival will be [somewhere?] on 2 February: nomination form.

How to Disco Dance. In Finnish. (H-T, in comments. And check out the rest… Not least this. Nearly wet myself.)

I’m at home for a couple of days doing those final revisions to the book MS (so expect a flood of posts as I cheerfully procrastinate). Anyway, I was surfing around blogs and encountered one of those familiar comments along the lines of ‘no one ever reads dissertations’.

Well, this reminded me that my own PhD dissertation has been online at the site for quite a while, more recently joined by a number of my other pre- and post-PhD scholarly gabblings (see here). So is anyone reading them?

I checked out the 2006 stats. The PhD was viewed more than 1500 times during the year. (I am dumbfounded. I thought it’d be at most a couple of hundred, you know?) Even my MA thesis (which has only been up since about May 2006) got over 100 page views. The published articles I put online at about the same time as the MA got variously between 80 and 190 (but in any case, most of the people who’d be interested in those can probably get them quite easily in their university libraries).

So: it is possible to get your dissertation read by quite a few more people than your supervisor and examiners (advisor, committee, etc, depending on your university system). All you need to do is make it into a PDF, post it on your highly visible disciplinary website, and plug it shamelessly at every conceivable opportunity. Easy. (I always knew this website would come in handy.)

And quite seriously, if you have a PhD dissertation on an early modern topic (and in a suitable format - ie, word-processed file(s) - for turning into a PDF file) gathering dust somewhere and you think it deserves more readers, get in touch with me. I can probably find space for it on my server and link to it for you.

Of course, in an ideal world, we’d all have free-to-access online thesis repositories like the Canadians. But that’s another topic, and I’d better get back to work before I start ranting.

Unfogged notes some bullshit in a newspaper story (about a library). But here’s the big question, in comments:

Has anyone here ever read a newspaper article about something they had firsthand knowledge of, and not noticed substantial inaccuracies in the article?

Well? Anyone?

This is the real cost of that cheap milk in the supermarket.

Posted today: Carnivalesque #23, an ancient/medieval edition at Memorabilia Antonina.

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Coming on 1 February: the History Carnival will be hosted by by Nonpartisan at Progressive Historians. Email: nonpartisan@progressivehistorians.com or submit via the usual form.

Robert Burns celebrations tonight! Someone is unimpressed (and gets trashed in comments).

So I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1. All went fine (and like the look of some of the new features!), except that it would have been nice to have been warned that the upgrade would automatically renumber all my blogroll/link categories (appending them to the main categories series, which presumably is meant to streamline the database tables a bit). So, you know, it all ended up a bit broken on the pages where I’ve specified which link categories are to be displayed where and I didn’t know why. (Fixed now.)

Update: well, I discovered today that my old miniblog plugin doesn’t work properly in 2.1 (it’ll display existing posts, but something’s jiggered in the editing page so I can’t add any new ones), and I don’t think it’s being supported any more. So rather than fart about looking for a replacement plugin - and the miniblog was never entirely satisfactory anyway - I’m trying a different way of making quick ‘n’ dirty announcements posts. Some of you might have noticed the News page, which used to list entries from the miniblog and also aggregates stuff from various announcements blog and other site feeds - early modern-related conferences and seminars, CFPs, items in the news, that kind of thing. I’ve now set up a new blog purely for this purpose, Early Modern News, and added it to that page. (Wordpress bloggers who want to know how to do this kind of thing: you can use WP’s own rss-functions code, or there are various plugins.)

Posted: one specially for the archaeologists and anthropologists, the 7th edition of Four Stone Hearth is up at Aardvarchaeology. Lots of good things from your genial Scandinavian host Martin (who will be hosting a History Carnival in the next month or two).

Coming up: Tony Keen will be hosting an Ancient/Medieval Carnivalesque at Memorabilia Antonina on or about 25 January. You can submit nominations of blog posts from the last couple of months on anything to do with ancient or medieval history using the submission form at Blog Carnival, or by sending an e-mail to keentony AT hotmail DOT com.

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Speaking of History Carnival hosting… I’m on the lookout as usual, for hosts, from mid-March onwards. The Carnival has been all around the world in the last few months, and the diversity has been great - academics, non-academics, even people in English departments. But there has been one notable absence: where are all the women? We haven’t had a female host since August, and there’s only one on the list for the next couple of months. And I know you’re out there!

So as usual, if you’re interested, email me: sharon@earlymodernweb.org.uk

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PS: I only just caught this: the latest edition of the Science blogging carnival, the Tangled Bank, has an 18th-century history of science theme.

That Scottish debate is warming up nicely. (So it seems appropriate that I have Arab Strap playing on iTunes as I write this…)

The 46th History Carnival is up at Investigations of a Dog. It’s a bumper edition because of the Xmas break and Gavin has done a smashing job.

The next Carnival will be on 1 February and will be hosted by Nonpartisan at Progressive Historians.

The news that Britain and France discussed a merger has made my day.

Brett Lee, Pop Star

iThinkiWantOneofThese…

The next History Carnival will be hosted on 15 January by Gavin Robinson at Investigations of a Dog.

Email nominations for recently published posts about history (a historical topic, reviews of books or resources, reflections on teaching or researching history, etc) to hc46@4-lom.com, 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).

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Would you like to host a History Carnival? I’m always on the lookout for volunteers… You don’t need to be a professional historian, you just need to be interested in history and have some familiarity with the history blogosphere; you could be either an established or a newer blogger (it’s a great way to bring in new visitors!). New faces are always especially welcome but any previous hosts who’d like another go will be much appreciated too. If you want more info, check out the carnival homepage, and get in touch with me: sharon@earlymodernweb.org.uk

1607: Founding of Jamestown, Virginia

1707: Acts of Union between Scotland and England (who’d take any bets on reaching the quatercentenary…?)

1807: Abolition of the Slave Trade

Got any more?

Funniest newly-discovered blog ever… (see also… [tip])

Yep, yet another new journal. But this is one that I’m involved with in a backstage sort of way, and is concerned with issues that I feel are vitally important for academics in all fields (but perhaps especially for us rather backward humanities types):

We have recently started Open Access Research (OAR) [http://ojs.gsu.edu/oar], a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that will enable greater interaction and facilitate a deeper conversation about open access, including topics such as:

• open access journals
• institutional support for open access
• open access publishing services and software
• open access repositories (both institutional and subject-based)
• electronic theses and dissertations
• the impact of open access on scholarly research and communications.

If you are engaged in research relating to open access, or if you have an article in mind, please contact us. OAR’s first issue will be in August, 2007 and will subsequently be published three times a year. Submissions received by March 31, 2007 will be considered for the August issue; subsequent submissions will be considered for future issues.

Send inquiries to:

William Walsh
Head – Acquisitions
Georgia State University Library
100 Decatur St. SE
Atlanta, GA 30303
wwalsh@gsu.edu

Editors-in-Chief: John Russell (University of Oregon), Dorothea Salo (George Mason University), William Walsh (Georgia State University), Elizabeth Winter (Georgia Institute of Technology). Please see our website for a full list of editors and editorial board members. Open Access Research is published by the Georgia State University Library using Open Journal Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs) software.

If you don’t know what Open Access is about (and really, you should), here are some useful sources of information:

Open Access Overview
Open Access News, Peter Suber’s blog
Open Access links
Directory of Open Access Journals

RIP Magnus Magnusson; obit (Thanks)

According to the Cliopatria Awards, which have just been announced.

Congratulations to: David Noon of Axis of Evel Knievel (which makes me wish we could also have a ‘Best blog name’ category); all at Civil Warriors; Bill Turkel of Digital History Hacks; John Jordan for the post For a Canadian Wikipedia (this a new blog to me); Chris Bray for the series Historian as soldier: shadows and fog; and Alan Baumler for his writing at Frog in a Well.

While I’m still honking hysterically from the previous scene. Sadly, looks like it’s our last dose of Green Wing (repeated tonight on More4 thankfully, since the first showing while was while I was staying with my parents who don’t like these “modern” comedies… Bless).

Anyway, it’s that yummy-new-schedules time-of-the-year again! So, don’t try to get hold of me at:

Sunday/Monday 9pm: Waking the Dead. TV doesn’t get much funnier (unintentionally, I mean) than this.

Monday 10pm: ER. Yeah, it’s a bad habit after all these years. What is it about fake blood and guts?

Tuesday 9pm: The OC. They killed off Marisa! Huzzah!

Tuesday 10pm: Shameless. Yay yay yay! Even if it isn’t as good as the first two series, who cares? It’s still better than 98% of everything else on the telly.

Wednesday 10pm: Desperate Housewives. Looking very promising, what with Kyle MacLachlan being sinister ‘n’ all. (But does clash with the repeat of The Thick of It, which I also missed last week. [What’s this I hear about iPods?] Will have to work this out.)

Friday 9.30pm: Ugly Betty. Yep, I was sceptical. But this is shaping up to be deliciously wicked stuff.

A few burning questions. When is Life on Mars back? Sarah Jane (please nicely Auntie Beeb)?

Oh, and there is an outside possibility I might watch the odd minute or two of Celebrity Big Brother. If only because it’s bloody hard to avoid.