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.

Excellent idea from The Guardian: Datablog, and the associated Data Store.

Everyday we work with datasets from around the world. We have had to check this data and make sure it’s the best we can get, from the most credible sources. But then it lives for the moment of the paper’s publication and afterward disappears into a hard drive, rarely to emerge again before updating a year later.

So, together with its companion site, the Data Store – a directory of all the stats we post – we are opening up that data for everyone. Whenever we come across something interesting or relevant or useful, we’ll post it up here and let you know what we’re planning to do with it.

How to get data out of the Data Store

Mmm, data…

Update:
There’s more: Get your API hats on. Could be really interesting to see how this develops.

Data Visualization is one of the most exciting growth areas on the web. Who wasn’t captivated by Wordle and blown away by this graph of Box Office Receipts 1986-2008?

So one of my favourite new blog discoveries is FlowingData. Where I discovered that the Box Office visualization is powered by Stream Graph.

If you want to try out a wide range of visualization options without needing to install any software, Many Eyes is absolutely fab.

More data visualization tools.

Who the hell writes Wikipedia anyway? asks Henry Blodget. (H-T.)

Jimmy Wales has asserted that Wikipedia is overwhelmingly the work of a fairly small core Wikipedia community. But it seems that’s only true if you count numbers of edits. If you look at content, Aaron Swartz argued, it’s a different story.

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

That is perhaps particularly striking in the light of the many complaints I’ve read from academics and other specialists who’ve contributed their knowledge to Wikipedia and then painfully seen their work trampled, chewed over (and sometimes spat out) by people with far less understanding of the subject in question – but far more understanding of how Wikipedia works.

If Swartz is right (and NB that it does appear to be based on a very small sample of pages), then this is a crucial dynamic, and I suspect not just for Wikipedia but for many wikis and similar Web2.0 sites. Which is of particular interest to me right now for reasons that I meant to post about before Christmas and, um, forgot. (Watch this space.)

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies is now online!

Well, I was a little cryptic the other week, but tomorrow it all goes public (and we kind of expect it to crash at some point – I’ll be almost disappointed if it doesn’t…),* and today there is a pretty nice feature in the Observer.

[Monday update... creak... groan... thud... Sorry, folks. It should get back to normal in a day or two...]

So here it is: the Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online 1674-1834 is now the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and Central Criminal Court 1674-1913.

This doesn’t only mean that you can now search for 200,000 trials held at the Old Bailey over a period of 2 and a half centuries. The other new set of goodies is the full text of (almost) every Ordinary of Newgate’s Account between 1690 and 1772 (in the next few months this should expand to a full archive of every known surviving Account from c.1674 onwards).

I’ve written here before about these grimly fascinating pamphlets. They’ve been used by a number of historians, including Andrea Mackenzie and Peter Linebaugh, but the surviving pamphlets have been scattered across a number of different libraries and archives. From now on they’ll be together in one fully searchable digital archive. Plus, I’m in the process of completing a database that links every convict mentioned in the Accounts to their trial, providing it has a surviving report (perhaps 3/4 of the links have already been made).

This should make for some interesting research possibilities. For example, historians often argue that women who successfully ‘pleaded their bellies’, ie had their death sentence postponed on grounds of being pregnant, usually escaped hanging. In fact, we say that in our own background section. But I’m not so sure. Through the process of cross-referencing trials and Ordinary’s Accounts, I’ve already discovered several women whose sentences were respited for pregnancy but subsequently carried out (eg in September 1695. So what I’ll be asking (once I’ve finished making the damned links) is: how many were executed and how many were permanently reprieved? Have we historians been getting it wrong? Answering those questions wasn’t impossible before now, but it would have been extremely difficult. And there will, no doubt, be many more possibilities like this.

***

The other news, because I haven’t been plugging it enough and you’ve probably all forgotten, is that we’re holding a conference in July to celebrate the relaunch: The Metropolis on Trial, in the throbbing metropolis of… Milton Keynes. If you’d like to attend, registration is open and you can download a booking form at the website. If you want to book the accommodation we’ve arranged at discount rates, you need to send the form in by the end of May at the latest and preferably as soon as possible. There is a 2 person room sharing option which is really good value (if you’re skint and looking for someone to share with maybe we can put people in touch here – leave a note in comments).

***

Linkage…

(Note that old links will continue to work for a few months, and we may well set up proper redirection at some point.)

Old stuff on OBP at this blog: Old Bailey category and the Old Bailey Symposium.

Old Bailey Files at The Head Heeb.

—

*Already this morning some searches have been very slow, which is not a good sign.

Here is a cautionary tale for students using online sources to do important assignments.

Last Thursday afternoon the Old Bailey Proceedings Online (along with other resources hosted in the building) broke in a fairly major way. Our tech staff couldn’t fix it and had to pass the problem up the line to the university computing services; it took all day Friday to get it working again. In fact, at about 4.30 on Friday afternoon, emergency notices were being prepared for the weekend.

By then, I’d already had a number of panicky emails from students who were trying to use OBP to write essays. (Monday deadlines?)

The OBP has gone down at night or, worse, over a weekend before. It’s database driven, and one downside of databases compared to static web pages is that there’s more to go wrong, especially with a big database. We’re not in a position to provide technical support outside office hours, and I’m sure this is true of many free online resources provided by academic institutions: if it falls over at 6 o’clock on a Friday evening, it won’t be getting back up before Monday.

Just because those online sources seem to be open all hours, students shouldn’t assume that they will always just be there.

The Times they are a-changing!

At what used to be The Times Higher Education Supplement, anyway. Now it’s Times Higher Education, it’s no longer owned by Murdoch, and it’s got a shiny new website full of FREE content – past and present. Woo hoo!!

(The print version has also become much shinier, although apparently the ink still rubs off on your fingers.)

Thanks to Alun for the hat-tip.

The latest Carnivalesque is up at Serendipities, great work by Kristine. I haven’t had much time to peruse the carnival yet, but this list of 250+ killer digital libraries and archives looks like a stunning resource.

It’s the 300th [or 360th, or something] anniversary of a neglected landmark in British democratic history, the Putney Debates of 1647. Yes, it’s all very Grauniad, and Tristram Hunt gets awfully excited about it, but don’t let that put you off.

Alternatively, you could try the official fan website of Charles II…

* The announcement of a Humanities Research Network, intended to provide “a comprehensive online resource for research in humanities, providing scholars with access to current work in their field and facilitating research and scholarship”. It’s starting with just three networks: Classic, English and American literature, Philosophy. Let’s hope History follows along soon…

* I posted a few weeks ago that the Arts and Humanities Data Service was losing most of its funding and was in danger of closing. Fortunately, however, King’s College London is establishing a new Centre for E-Research which will take over responsibility for the AHDS next year.

* The 19th-century British Newspaper Website has been launched: “a virtual library of nationally, regionally and locally important digitised British newspapers from 1800 to 1900″, which will be free for folks in UK HE/FE institutions.

A good piece by Allan Kulikoff in the latest Common-place, on Early American History on the web. It’s relevant beyond American history: for a start, his description of the process of tracking down source materials should be useful for teachers and students looking for useful online primary sources in any historical field. One thing that stands out is how surprised Kulikoff was at just how much he found:

The Internet contains everything from newspapers and magazines to travel accounts, from maps to sheet music, from woodcuts to oil paintings, from novels to critical essays, from the proceedings of governmental bodies to the intimate details of family life. Searchers can find materials on every imaginable topic: Civil War hospitals; the Salem witchcraft trials; Revolutionary and Civil War battles; proceedings of the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the U.S. Congress; slave resistance; Indian battles; the abolition and proslavery movements; the beliefs and religious practices of Evangelicals and Unitarians; the Lewis and Clark expedition; westward migration; economic development and immigration; and the writings of Cotton Mather and Walt Whitman, to name but a few. In sum, there are far more primary sources on the Web than in public libraries (except the greatest) and community college libraries, though many fewer than in the libraries of research universities.

But, as the discussion shows, these can still be difficult to find. Information multiplies endlessly on the Web; we have rapidly gone from scarcity to abundance. But locating that abundance is often a hit-and-miss affair.

Moreover, there is a thoughtful rumination on what these primary sources, the choices made in digitising history, tell us about history and memory.

Putting materials on the Web is a time-consuming process: they must be discovered, digitized, indexed, and uploaded. Historians, archivists, librarians, curators, genealogists, and institutions like the Library of Congress all put historical sources on the Web. These individuals and institutions have competing interests and hold widely contrasting views of American history. As one looks in detail at Web primary sources, one senses great conflict and contests over the meaning of our past, over the historical memories they wish to sustain or suppress. Who holds the keys to our history—historians, archivists, preachers, politicians, ordinary citizens?

Kulikoff notes how – unsurprisingly – trends in historiography influence the sources put online. The unfashionable, such as ‘quantifiable’ materials like probate inventories, doesn’t get as much attention as images and narrative texts. (Mind you, it doesn’t help that digitising sources like these in a way that will be of real use for quantitative analysis is one of the hardest tasks going: it’s easy to put images of manuscript sources online, but converting them into searchable texts or databases is difficult, labour-intensive and expensive; and you can’t just dip a toe in the water: you’ve got to do them en masse.)

This is not a bad time for historians to be giving more thought to these issues. The Web has achieved some maturity as a serious academic resource, although on the technical side there’s a long way to go. It seems strange to me that you can still encounter people whose understanding of what’s available seems not to have changed since about 1995 (I don’t know whether this is a failure of outreach or whether these are just the unreachable); still, the dinosaurs are in the minority.

Nonetheless, there are many historians who need to become more savvy about how to make history digital; what is possible and may become possible, how to get it done, how to get the money to do it. Learn these skills and you have the opportunity to influence public perceptions of your field as well as contributing to scholarly research.

Digital History: a few Essential Resources

Digital History: a guide to gathering, preserving and presenting the past on the web (also in dead tree format)
Digital History Hacks – Bill Turkel’s indispensable blog
Center for New Media and History
Dan Cohen
Companion to Digital Humanities

The chief executive of the British Library warns of the potential damage that could be caused by cuts to its budget. (Those are the cuts resulting from overspending on the 2012 Olympics, including, of course, that dire logo.) Not just in terms of acquisitions and access to reading rooms; there is considerable emphasis on digital resources and access too:

If the suggested cuts to the nation’s greatest library go ahead, large parts of the UK’s digital output will be lost. Gaps will open in the intellectual record of the nation. As our global competitors forge further ahead in the digital world, the British Library will be marooned in the analogue era, ceasing to be relevant for future generations.

The proposed BL funding cuts have been well publicised. Meanwhile, the news that the Arts and Humanities Data Service (the UK’s central support and archiving service for humanities digital resources) is about to lose its funding has barely been noticed. It has been warned that we could rapidly go “from having an exceptionally strong system of national infrastructure support for ICT in Arts and Humanities research… [to] almost none at all.”

…the end of the AHDS may be decisive in the history of digital scholarship in the UK as this may be the end of national support. It is national support that has defined digital scholarship in the UK for many years and has helped the nation to become one of the world-leaders in the field. Without a national approach, the field may flounder or return to the dark days of scattered digital scholarship with little coherence or ambitions as a field.

For fans of the great 13th-century Welsh poet, a lovely new online edition and translation of the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym.

Incidentally, looking up Dafydd’s biography led to the discovery that the National Library of Wales has vastly improved the usability of its Welsh Biography Online. (Believe me, it used to be truly awful.) And the ever-expanding Digital Mirror has also had an overhaul of its user interface fairly recently.

The sparkly new all-singing all-dancing criminal bibliography.

It’s been quite a learning experience. As it turns out, there are quite a few free applications out there that will publish bibliographies online, as long as you can handle databases. (If you’ve ever installed Wordpress on a server, you already have an inkling; if phpmyAdmin is installed on your server, it makes it much easier than you might think.)

(This is a long and rather geeky post, so I’ll put the rest below the fold…)

(more…)

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.]

Does anyone still think that wiki = Wikipedia? I fear they do and it’s one of the downsides of Wikipedia’s mindboggling success. Truth is that Wikipedia is just one particular instance of a wiki, and the software has far wider uses than for online encyclopedias (although it is cool for that too).

Wikis and blogs share certain characteristics, particularly in terms of ease of use, encouraging participation and dialogue. But wikis and blogs have different strengths.

Remember: the default format for blog software is linear and dominated by chronology; that can be subverted with some blogging software, but it takes effort. A wiki is different. It doesn’t scroll, it branches. You can just keep creating one page from within another, thanks to the simplicity of wiki markup. No HTML to learn.

If you need to produce detailed documentation for (and of) a project and you want to encourage communication and input from the workers on the project, straight-out-of-the-box wiki software offers many benefits.

The projects we’re working on involve people based at two different universities (Sheffield and Hertfordshire) and working from home around the country. We can’t just meet up in the office each day to discuss queries and resolve problems. Moreover, the nature of the main task at this phase of the project creates a particular challenge: there are nine people marking up the texts with XML code and we need them all to be as consistent in their decision-making as possible. Our wiki has proved a tremendous resource for this process.

Our first wiki, for this project, includes plenty of ‘official’ how-to documentation (which the workers were specifically asked not to touch, and they’ve been very well-behaved about that, but it would have been quite easy to put extra passwords on those specific pages to restrict editing privileges).

This was infinitely better than, say, distributing a Word document to the staff, for a number of reasons. Firstly, that particular document is a monstrous carbuncle, not far off 50 pages, full of opaque section cross-references, utterly unwieldy and horrible to navigate. Wikification enabled it to be broken into short, multiply interlinked sections that are easy to move around and use, and to keep up to date. And, for the members of the project who prefer to work from a hard copy of the instructions, there turned out to be an awesome little plugin that would turn connected wiki pages into a single, nicely styled HTML file that can be printed out.

The other main use so far is for more informal feedback from the scattered project staff. We set up an area of the wiki for them to post queries about files they were working on, leave comments, etc. We could have done all this by email, but the wiki has the major advantage that once queries and answers are recorded there, they’re accessible to everyone with a quick search, and I think it has helped to cut down a lot of repetitious questions. (The downside of that is that any inconsistencies in answers by either me or my deputy, who gets lumbered with most of this from day to day, so I can blame her if anything goes wrong, naturally) have a tendency to get picked up and commented on… Well, at least it keeps us on our toes. And better to catch these things early on rather than later, right?)

Now our other project is getting underway, I’ve set up a new wiki. (And yes, it is addictive, before you ask.) This is a more complex project in some respects, and for some of the staff it moves into less familiar historical territory, so I’ve started putting much more historical background and resources on this wiki. It will also later have similar documentation and feedback areas to the first wiki, and perhaps much more that I haven’t thought of yet.

That’s the beauty of it. There is something infinitely flexible and expandable about wikis. People are using them for all kinds of business purposes including project management, for research projects’ discussion and feedback, for teaching, and much more. Feel free to highlight any you know of in comments!

I frequently think my job is way too much fun to be classed as real work.

A growing trend in the last year or so is for academic or related institutions to set up blogs to publicise their activities and news. Some are more interesting than others, but I think they’re becoming less bland and, well, institutional than they used to be. (I don’t think I’ve seen any academic department blogs yet though. But then, most departments’ webpages seem to be stuck in the ’90s. Boring boring boring.) Here are a few of interest to historians and other humanities scholars.

AHDS blog. The AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) is the UK’s central organisation concerned with the long-term preservation of digital resources and data in Humanities fields. It’s recently set up a blog, which has some useful and interesting links (plus a debate on digital cameras).

Intute Arts & Humanities is a UK-based subject-specialist web portal. The Arts & Humanities Blog is more lively and personal than these sort of blogs tend to be.

AHA Today. The recently-established blog of the American Historical Association has good articles and plenty of news.

Academic publishers’ blogs seem to be springing up all over. Here’s the OUP blog. It’s OK. You can find several more at Cliopatria’s History Blogroll.

On a smaller, more informal scale, a number of history societies have blogs. The Alcohol and Drugs History Society Blog has been around for quite a while. (Can’t imagine why I would be especially aware of that one…) Google suggests that, unsurprisingly, Local History Societies are grasping the possibilities of blogging with some enthusiasm.

Got any more?

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.

There haven’t been enough linkfests around here lately, and my EMR drafts folder is bulging with great stuff (I will get around to doing them properly… eventually).

I sometimes pause to wonder how long it can be before the never-ending expansion of the WWW makes EMR pretty much obsolete as a resource. It was never comprehensive, but once upon a time (c.2003, maybe, after 3 years of PhD-procrastination), I might have been able to claim that the site was never more than a couple of clicks away from all the important English-language resources for early modern Europe and north America (much less so for other regions). But now? I fear that searchers are probably better off with Google. The one advantage EMR might have is that there has been some basic screening of content for relevance and quality. But it is basic, especially on the quality.

So, I do ponder where I might take EMR over the next few years. Perhaps towards more specialisation in my areas of expertise, covering fewer resources in more depth. And/or I could head in the direction of collaboration (since EMR uses blog software, it would be easy to add extra contributors… if there are any willing volunteers out there) and even ‘wikification’. Suggestions would be welcome.

But, on with the linkage!

Southeast Asia Visions: European travellers’ accounts of premodern south east Asia.
Imperial robes in the Ottoman empire
Islamic Manuscripts from Mali
Pantomime and the Orient in the 18th century

Susan Burney letters project (pilot project): a source for music, literary, social and women’s historians of the late 18th century.
William Camden’s diary
Letters of William Herle

The Herle resource is hosted at the AHRC Lives and Letters project, which has (at present) an overwhelmingly early modern focus in its projects and seems to me to be extremely under-publicised. For example, google Robert Boyle: the Lives and Letters’ Workdiaries of Robert Boyle doesn’t appear until the bottom of the second page of results (and it went online nearly two years ago). That’s frankly pathetic for a major primary source. By way of contrast, the Susan Burney project is the first hit in a Google search on her name, and it’s just a small-scale pilot.

Some more science:
The ‘Analyst’ controversy (George Berkeley squares up to Isaac Newton)
Linda Hall Library History of Science collection: a range of primary source texts
The Newton project
The Chymistry of Isaac Newton
The English Physitian 1652

Like growing numbers of universities, St Andrews has several major digitisation projects completed and underway. These are just a couple with early modern content:
The French vernacular book project: a major bibliographical project for books published in French before 1601.
Digitising the Acts of the Scottish Parliament, 1235 – 1707

Coin and Conscience: popular views of money, credit and speculation
Blackbeard the Pirate and the wreck of Queen Anne’s Revenge
Materialising Sheffield
French and Italian painting of the 18th century