Early Modern Notes

Seriously – I realised earlier today that I hardly ever use the Bookmarks folder in my browser these days, except for the handful I keep in the quick find tab straight above the browser screen and an even smaller handful of others. I’m far more likely to go to the Google bar and look for websites that way. For blogs, I mostly use my own blogroll, and for research-related stuff I’ll probably start by searching EMR. (What’s the point of having a website if you don’t use it?)

It’s funny how your computer use can gradually be transformed without you really being aware of it. In the B. F. (Before Firefox/Before Feeds) era, just three or four years ago, I relied heavily on my IE Favourites folder. I hardly ever add anything new these days, but I still have hundreds of links in my FF Bookmarks folder going back years (I’ve always kept transferring my old bookmarks across to new browsers and new computers, out of habit). Half of them are probably dead. (There’s an entire folder of blogs from around spring 2004, most of which are by now part of the ancient history – and legends, in some cases – of the blogosphere.) When I first hosted a carnival, I put all the interesting posts I found in a bookmarks folder. Now I just right-click and ‘Send Link’ on the page and email it to myself.

What changes in other readers’ internet habits in the last couple of years have crept up on you without you even noticing?

In my working capacity as the Oracle of the OBP Online, I was recently asked a question that went something like this (details changed):

I’m confused by all these results. If Robert Scott was hanged in 1765, who are all these other Robert Scotts? And some of them are after 1765?!

This is at first glance a slightly daft question – well, obviously, they’re all different people but with the same name, aren’t they? (The question also contains a common misconception about the source, which I’ll come back to in a moment.) And yet, at the same time, it’s not really silly at all.

They might not all be different people. In our database of the names in the OBP there are 142 instances of the name ‘Robert Scott’ (including slight spelling variations). (Mind you, this is nothing compared to a name like John Smith, which occurs more than 4000 times.) How do you decide whether one Robert Scott is the same person as another Robert Scott, or someone else altogether?

And this is without even starting on the problem that a significant proportion of those appearing at the Old Bailey were known by more than one name, and some had a string of aliases and nicknames. Oh, and the reporters (or printers…) sometimes got people’s names – even those of defendants – just plain wrong.

In other words, identifying the relationship between names and people in early modern sources is often extremely tricky, and the question ‘who the hell are all these Robert Scotts?’ isn’t so daft. Which is just as well, really, because this is precisely the kind of problem that’ll be keeping me in work for the next couple of years.

This isn’t just of concern to family historians trying to work out whether someone is really their ancestor or not. Most historians have to make these linkages, ask these questions, at some time or another in the course of their research. Most of us do it on a small scale by hand; a more select group do it on the large scale with computers and algorithms. I’ll hopefully post about both of these later. But in both cases, the process relies on weighing up and ranking probabilities.

Sometimes the answer, either way, is so obvious that the question doesn’t even need to be consciously formed. But at the other end of the scale, there are times when it’s impossible ever to know because you simply don’t have enough information, especially if a name is very common and you have very little contextual information besides the name itself. And I’m sure other historians will have encountered those frustrating borderline cases: if those documents are all referring to the same person, you have a great story. But are you certain enough to rest a serious argument on that identification?

It’s true, for example, that death is a clincher: if you know this Robert Scott died in 1765, then he can’t be the same person as that Robert Scott mentioned in records as alive and well in 1775. (At the other end of the life-cycle, birth is equally conclusive, of course.)

But are you sure he died?

The OBP doesn’t in fact tell you that Robert was hanged (this is the misconception I mentioned above); like archival records from early modern criminal courts, it normally records only the sentence that was passed. But many people sentenced to death in the 18th century were reprieved or pardoned. Unless you have corroborating evidence that the execution was carried out (this does occasionally appear in OBP), you need to be cautious.

So a Robert Scott in the database after 1765 could be the same guy after all. Told you it was tricky.

(To be continued…)

A few links (because the place just isn’t the same without them):

The linkage of historical records by man and computer (JSTOR subscription required)
A discourse on method, historical knowledge and information technology
Reconstructing historical communities
AHDS guide

(X-posted at The Long Eighteenth.)

I’ve spent a fair bit of time playing with PhpBibliography now, and I think it could do what I need. Here’s a trial run:

Early modern women bibliography

But it’s not for beginners. As is often the way with open source software, the instructions are minimalist and assume levels of understanding that I can only just scrape together. I can install a database using my web host’s control panel and phpMyAdmin, but when I get SQL syntax errors, I start to panic. (They had something to do with the slightly elderly version of SQL installed on my web server, I think; if you have SQL5, there should be no problem. In the absence of, well, actually knowing what to do, some trial-and-error hacking fixed it, but at the expense of a little functionality. One of these days I will get around to learning PHP and SQL properly…)

If you have a large number of citations you want to import into a bibliography, you’ll also need to learn a bit about using BibTex. But that’s a good idea in any case, and it’s pretty easy to get up to speed.

I should probably add that PhpBibliography is also not ideal for scholarly perfectionists. It has some unexpected limitations: entries are ordered by date, and there’s no option to order them by author name (I find this quite bizarre, actually) unless, presumably, you have the expertise to hack the code yourself. The same goes for the formatting of the entries – you get them title first rather than author first and like it or lump it. Also slightly odd is that it doesn’t treat editors of books as authors if you use the list by author function.

Still, these are all things that I can live with in an online bibliography. (If, of course, I can be arsed to put it together to start with. We shall have to see.) Others may find it useful too. On the other hand, if you just want an easy way to create and manage a conventional bibliography in HTML format, Zotero will do a great job for you.

Some of you will remember that I have several online bibliographies over at EMR, all published as static HTML files. Well, this works fine with short lists, but when you get a research-generated bibliography like this bugger, there’s a point at which it inevitably becomes unmanageable. It hasn’t been updated for months because I just can’t face the job any more.

So I’ve been looking for a better way to do it. As I found with EMR in general, converting to a web database format is initially time-consuming but tends to save a lot of time on future upkeep, and makes it possible to do useful things like assigning multiple categories to each entry.

I think I may have the answer: an open source program called PhpBibliography. I’m trying out a local installation (using MAMP, one of my favourite little Mac apps; XAMPP works for Windows users, before you start feeling left out). The best bit so far was importing instantaneously an entire BibTex bibliography. Not quite sure at the moment if I can work out how to manipulate the formatting for web presentation, but it’s fun to play with. (Using some locally generated definitions of ‘fun’, of course. Ahem.)

What have other people done along these lines? (I have work-related motives for asking this question as well as personal curiosity.) And maybe there are online services to save messing around with PHP/SQL installations? I’m familiar with the cuteness of LibraryThing, but I need to cover journal articles, book chapters, unpublished theses, etc, as well as books. Could Zotero be used for this purpose? [Update: you can generate Zotero bibliographies as HTML files, which would certainly be easier than editing HTML files by hand.]

This Food Timeline is great fun. (H-T.)

Wow: Providentialism is alive and well in the Church of England. Oh yeah, and it’s all the fault of the gays.