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Airpower: a bibliography of British aviation history

11 August 2009 in Books, Periodicals, Tools by Brett Holman | 6 comments

One quite inadequate response to the paywalling of bibliographies is to set up your own, which I’ve made a start at here. It’s a little narrower in focus than the RHS bibliography, being limited to works relating to the history of British aviation up to 1941 which I looked at in the course of my PhD research. However, it also includes primary sources. I’m still pruning it — there might be some things in there which don’t have ’significant’ aviation content, for example.

It’s running on WIKINDX, a content management system specifically designed with bibliographies in mind. (Thanks to Alun for the tip!) It was pretty easy to set up; most of the work I did was playing around with the templates and CSS to make it look a bit like Airminded. As a LaTeX user I was pleased to find that I could import my bibTeX bibliography files fairly painlessly, but if I was working in the Endnote world WIKINDX can handle that too. Just as importantly, it can export bibliographies in both formats, along with RTF, RIS and HTML. There plenty of other bells and whistles, including an integrated word processor which I can’t ever see myself using.

There are a few different ways to view the database. One is to just list all the resources (i.e. books or articles), sorted by creator (author) or year, perhaps. Another is to browse the creators, which is done via a combined heat map and cloud. Or there’s a quick search and a ridiculously capable power search. It talks to Zotero, and there’s an RSS feed for recently-added resources. And so on.

What is the point of this? Is it going to be actually useful to anyone? Should I keep control of it myself, or open it up to others to edit? Should I be using citeulike or Mendeley instead? I don’t know! But I’m already thinking about putting up a future war fiction bibliography …

The best things in life were free

1 July 2009 in Tools by Brett Holman | 33 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

The Royal Historical Society has for some years maintained an online bibliography of British and Irish history, updated three times a year. It currently has over 460,000 records. It’s a fantastic resource for scholars interested in any aspect of the history of the British Isles, not least because it’s free. But from 1 January 2010 it won’t be: it will be rebranded as the Bibliography of British and Irish History which will be sold by Brepols, with subscriptions available for institutions and individuals.

This is a shame, of course. A resource which was freely available to anyone with an internet connection will now only be open to those who can afford to pay. Presumably that includes big universities and libraries (although even librarians at Yale, of all places, are complaining that digital resources are getting to expensive, according to this H-Albion post), but what about smaller universities, local libraries, schools, independent researchers? There is the individual subscription, but there’s no information about pricing yet and it seems unlikely to be cheap.

The reason for this move is the end of government funding for the bibliography. That’s understandable; the money has to come from somewhere. The fact that it has been funded by British taxpayers does raise the question of why a commercial entity should be allowed to profit from that expenditure. But as I’m not a British taxpayer it could equally well be asked why I should benefit from that expenditure. So I don’t really have a basis for moral outrage here. It’s just … a shame.

But it seems to me that must be some other way to do this — crowdsourcing, scraping, some combination of both? There are some sites which show the potential of crowdsourcing by way of people uploading and updating their own bibliographies, such as Librarything, or in a more academic context, CiteULike and Mendeley. Given a critical mass of users, a crowdsourced bibliography would be close to up to date. Scraping could be used to automatically feed in journal articles via RSS (books would be harder — though maybe not). There are many difficulties inherent in such an approach, but I’d rather see something like this be the future than an ever-increasing array of paywalls.

There were giants in the earth in those days

31 March 2009 in Links, Tools by Brett Holman | 14 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Recently, I followed Gavin Robinson’s lead and tried out the British Library’s EThOS beta. EThOS stands for Electronic Theses (dissertations) Online Service, and it’s just what you’d expect from that — an electronic thesis delivery service. There’s not too much new about that, but EThOS does have some very impressive features. First is the scope: nearly all British Universities are participating (with two very major exceptions, unfortunately: Cambridge and Oxford). What’s more, any thesis ever accepted in Britain is eligible for inclusion in the database, possibly going back to the 1600s, according to the FAQ. This could become a rich vein of primary source material for intellectual historians. Second is the fact that the theses have been OCRed, not just scanned. This means that you can do keyword searches on the PDFs, for example. Third is the fact that they are free! Mostly, anyway. If you only want an electronic copy, it’s free (hardcopy costs, obviously). If the thesis you want hasn’t been scanned yet, then you may be asked to contribute towards the cost of that, but in most cases, not. And it doesn’t appear to matter whether you are in the UK or not (which is good, because I’m not).

As for the cryptic title above, one of the theses I downloaded was one I’ve long wanted to read but have never seen until now: Howard Roy Moon, The Invasion of the United Kingdom: Public Controversy and Official Planning 1888-1918 (London University, 1968). It’s quite widely cited and I wondered why it hadn’t been published. Now I know why: it’s 735 pages long! I am suddenly feeling rather inadequate. Clearly, historians back then possessed superhuman powers. Or at least very strong arms, and hands adapted for furious typing and scribbling.

The canals of Mars, 1962

15 March 2009 in 1900s, 1920s, After 1950, Before 1900, Maps, Pictures, Space, Tools by Brett Holman | 10 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Mars map (1962)

Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell’s maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi’s more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick’s brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I’ve seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.

A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor’s old observations to compile MEC-1. So it’s no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn’t live to witness Mariner 4’s flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.

Clouds

21 February 2009 in Plots, Thesis, Tools, Words by Brett Holman | 8 comments

Thesis wordle

Partly in lieu of the thing itself, but mainly just for fun, here are some word clouds of my thesis (generated with Wordle). So the above image shows the 75 most frequent words in the entire document, with the biggest word being the most common. (So it’s something to do with air and war and London then …) Below are clouds for each chapter. I just copied the text from the PDF file into Wordle; it works pretty well, except for some reason that process introduces weird breaks in some words. I don’t really spend a significant chunk of chapter 4 talking about counter-os and ensives!

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Trust but verify

20 January 2009 in 1900s, 1910s, Phantom airships and other panics, Tools by Brett Holman | 4 comments

A question about the phantom airship scares which has bothered me for a while is, how accurate are the press reports of people seeing something strange in the sky? That is, did people actually see something strange in the sky, or were the press reports made up or otherwise distorted? There is some evidence from other countries that this happened. One case in New Zealand in July 1909 involved a teacher and 23 schoolchildren, who gave their accounts to a journalist and even drew pictures of what they saw. In the late 1960s, three of the now-elderly witnesses were re-interviewed. But although they could remember the fuss at the time, they could not remember having seen anything out of the ordinary. Then there are the American mystery airships of 1896 and 1897, which were sometimes just completely fabricated. For example, the supposed crash of an airship at Aurora, Texas, in April 1897, which was almost certainly a hoax by a town-boosting journalist.

But there are also reasons to think that in the British case, at least, most press reports were accurate enough. Unlike the United States or New Zealand at this time, Britain had many competing national (or at least London) newspapers. I don’t think it was usually in a newspaper’s interests to just make up a story, because a rival could easily enough check it out (through its own reporters or a local stringer — both were done) and cry foul. It might then be argued that all the newspapers were in on the lark, that they were all selling too many newspapers to spoil the fun. But newspapers were divided politically too. Liberal-supporting newspapers were generally much more sceptical than Conservative-supporting ones, and were quick to accuse the latter of credulous scaremongering — but not lying. And the sceptics often reported the same stories bought into the phantom airships, albeit only briefly. This doesn’t seem to fit with widespread fabrication (though of course, it could have happened sometimes).

There are other arguments I could make, but won’t because I want to finish this post sometime. But they basically are enough that I feel I can trust that the phantom airship scares did actually have a reality outside of the press. Now comes the verify bit. Recently, the National Archives released the 1911 census data two years early. Unfortunately, you have to pay to see the full returns (I guess there aren’t too many taxpayers left from 1911 to complain about having to pay again for something they had already paid for a century ago!) That’s a pity, but you can still get some useful information for free: name, age, sex, location. As it happens, 1911 is right between the two phantom airships scares in 1909 and 1913. So there must be a good chance that any witnesses were living in the same place in 1911 as they were when they saw the phantom airship. Hopefully, then, I can take names from the press accounts, feed them into the census search engine and find somebody in the right location. This would at least verify that somebody of that name did exist in that place, and presumably did see something strange in the sky (or else they’d complain when their names were used in vain).
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LaTeX for Humans

16 October 2008 in Blogging, Tools by Brett Holman | No comments

LaTeX for Humans is a promising new blog, aimed at humanities-types who want to write in LaTeX, rather than Word or something equally maladapted. Since it’s a subject which I’ve written on several times before, and since switching is not easy, despite the advantages (sorry Sarah!), I’m glad to see a dedicated resource on the topic.

Australian Newspapers Beta

7 August 2008 in Australia, Periodicals, Tools by Brett Holman | 10 comments

Sydney Gazette

Recently, the National Library of Australia opened up Australian Newspapers Beta to the public, free of charge (though whether free as in speech or free as in beer is unclear). This is part of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program and promises to be a fantastic resource. They are digitising newspapers from every state from 1803 (when the first newspaper was published in Australia — see above) through to 1954 (after which everything is still under copyright). Both images and text are available, and it’s very easy to zero in on particular articles of interest, by date, newspaper, category, state or keyword search. Indeed, the interface is very attractive. The articles can be downloaded as JPG or PDF (though whole pages can only be saved as the latter, for some reason). Bearing in mind that this is only a beta, there are some problems. Coverage is very limited (most of the First World War is available, for example, but only the end of the Second), and the OCRing looks pretty dodgy from what I’ve seen. But this is where it gets clever: users can correct the mistakes made by the OCR software, either anonymously (verifying sapience by way of captcha) or by signing up for an account. They can also leave comments on individual articles or tag them. Well done, that library.

Web 2.0 seems to be something Antipodean institutions are latching onto fast. The NLA is very up-to-date: it also runs Picture Australia, which aggregates a number of image archives and hooks into Flickr. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is also a bit of a web 2.0, well, powerhouse. The Australian War Memorial is not quite as advanced, perhaps, but it blogs, and I think there are things happening behind the scenes. And as I’ve previously noted, New Zealand has long been digitising its newspaper archives, with completely free access. It seems like comparable British institutions aren’t embracing web 2.0 in the same way — the British Library, the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum are all looking pretty staid in comparison. I’d love to be proven wrong though!

‘Hansard online’

30 April 2008 in Tools by Brett Holman | 5 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I stumbled across this by accident: a pilot digitisation of Hansard, funded and operated by Parliament. What an excellent thing! It’s functional, but based only on a subset of 20th-century Hansard material:

What’s on this site? This site is generated from a sample of information from Hansard, the Official Report of Parliament. It is not a complete nor an official record. Material from this site should not be used as a reference to or cited as Hansard. The material on this site cannot be held to be authoritative.

This warning should be heeded — it’s only a prototype and should not be relied upon for any purpose. It’s easy to find omissions, such as Baldwin’s ‘the bomber will always get through’ speech, even though there’s quite a number of entries for the day in question. The text itself appears remarkably uncorrupt, given the volume of data that’s been OCRed: I’ve only found a few errors (most amusing one: the Marquees of Londonderry — I guess it must rain there a lot). There are certainly a few minor problems — for example, once I managed to get the search engine to tell me that a debate in 1958 happened earlier than one in 1944. At present there’s no disambiguation between different people with the same name — so the earliest utterance recorded for Mr. Winston Churchill is on 19 March 1941, and the latest on 11 March 1997 — nor combinations between (possibly) the same person with different names — such as Churchill, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Churchill (by private notice), Mr. Churchill (Stretford) and so on. It’s all experimental at this stage, so these issues will presumably be addressed in future. (LibraryThing lets its users do a lot of the work for similar problems, but I doubt a HansardThing would ever reach the critical mass needed for that to work.)
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Things

28 January 2008 in Tools by Brett Holman | 6 comments

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been using the free preview of Things, a task management application for OS X. I’ve just entered the final year of my PhD — or rather the final year of my PhD scholarship, which may not be the same thing — and so keeping track of everything I need to do is going to be critical. I’ve been looking for something like Things for ages, actually. Nearly all of this type of software seem to be based on Getting Things Done (GTD), a system for task management which is hugely popular, at least among techie types. But I’ve never been able to wrap my head around it, it seems too strict and hierarchical. The applications designed to help you follow it seem just as bad — you’re forced to fill in a bunch of text boxes or select from drop menus or whatever, and it’s all just too annoying for me.

That’s why I like Things, so far — you can fill out as little or as much info as you want for each task. The organisation of tasks is logical (at least to me), the interface is polished but unobtrusive and the program lightweight. It just gets out of the way and lets you get on with things. Apparently it does actually conform to GTD principles, but doesn’t force you to follow it if you don’t want to. The data is stored in an XML file so you can retrieve it if something happens. Tags are used throughout, which is a nice touch. Tasks can be organised by time priority (eg ‘Today’, ‘Next’) or as part of a larger project. When you’ve completed a task, you tick a box on its pane and it will eventually vanish out of sight into a log of completed tasks. It’s probably not the place for detailed notes (I use VoodooPad for that) but works well for jotting down things you need to do, when you think of them.

Things is only a time-crippled beta at the moment, but I’ve found it to be completely stable (there are features which aren’t implemented yet, however, such as collaboration with other Things users). I’ll almost certainly be buying the full version when it’s released; but I have to say the price seems a little steep at US$49 for what, after all, is not a huge program. Being able to get things done is probably worth that; but I’d rather pay US$39, which is the price you can get it for if you sign up to their newsletter before 31 January (which I did a while back and haven’t received a single email yet). Hopefully this doesn’t sound like an ad (NB: I am not connected with Cultured Code in any way), but perhaps there are some Mac users out there who need task management as much as I do right now — if so, Things is worth looking at.

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