Blogging, tweeting and podcasting

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Our targets are the following archives...

That's right...

Gloucestershire, TNA, LMA, SHC...

... I'm going on a research trip...

Tower Hamlets, Kent, IWM, ESBHRO.

... to the UK!

(I suppose this post should technically be called Archivwochen, but that's a little too pedantic even for me.)

It's been nearly a decade since my last visit, and that was long before I started working on Home Fires Burning. So I've built up a large pile of research questions which can only be answered in the archives. Airminded will therefore be in hiatus until July, while I holiday in England, Scotland, and Wales, and (more importantly for the purposes of this blog) research in the following archives:

I'm hoping to have some sort of Airminded meetup or meetups, so if you're in or near any of these places in late June, drop me a line!

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Ferris Bueller in his dressing gown with the meme text "YOU'RE STILL HERE? IT'S OVER. GO TO BLUESKY"

UPDATED 18 NOVEMBER 2024

After 14 years and 7 months, I've deleted all of my Twitter/X accounts.

The best place to find me now (other than here!) is Bluesky:

But you can also find me on Mastodon:

NB: the code for my bots can be found on Github: trovebot-mastodon2 and ttaships.

Twitter has been both fun and useful for me. I don't know if it's going to survive, but it's getting much less fun, it's getting much less useful, and it's definitely getting much too fascist. I'm sorry to lose touch with the people I've made friends with there over the years, but I hope to see them elsewhere. And I'm not at all sorry now to be gone from Twitter.

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a confused man surrounded by social media apps

UPDATED 18 NOVEMBER 2024

With Twitter X circling ever closer to the plughole, it's time to have a microblogging alternative. In fact, I already set one up at Mastodon back in November, and spent a bit of time making it comfortable. But the social media landscape has fragmented since then and everyone is fleeing in all directions. There's no longer any one place to go. And so, being as extremely online and extremely indecisive as I am (and also because my day job is in communications), I've settled on… pretty much all of them! So here's where you can find me, in descending order of likelihood:

I'm also on the following, but really just very barely:

  • Threads: @airminded
  • Post News: @airminded (dead)
  • Spoutible: @Airminded (dead)

Due to Twitter/X's API changes, my Trove bots now only run on Mastodon and Bluesky:

And my AI art accounts are also only on Mastodon and Bluesky now:

For the benefit of wanderers, I'll keep this post pinned updated on Airminded (which is older than Twitter, and now looks likely to outlast it, too).

See you out there... somewhere!

Image source: Midjourney.

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Postcard showing Zeppelin LVI bombing Leige, 6 August 1914

I'm featured in the latest episode of the podcast Tales from Rat City, which is focused on unusual and sometimes bizarre aspects of the history of Ballarat, Victoria's third largest city (if you've heard of the Eureka Stockade, well, that's where that was). It's run by David Waldron (a historian at Federation University who co-authored the excellent Snarls from the Tea-tree, about Australian bigcat folklore), Tom Hodgson and Katrina Hill. As you can probably guess, 'Anzacs and airships: Australian UFO panics in the First World War' is about Australian mystery aircraft sightings in the Great War period. As well as the interview with me, it's based partly on my article 'Dreaming war' as well as the team's own original research. It's a really interesting scamper through early Australian airminded hopes and fears (ranging well beyond Ballarat and 1914-18). I particularly enjoyed the use of actors to read out the primary source quotations, including many mystery aircraft sighting reports. It's a great way to give back to these accounts of strange apparitions something of their original uncanniness.

Bonus: if you happen to be in the Ballarat area on 28 May 2023, why not go along to the Ballarat Observatory and see David's magic lantern show 'Mystery Airships: A Night of Strange Things Seen in the Skies!'? Details and tickets here.

Image source: Tales from Rat City.

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With Twitter's future looking increasingly nasty, brutish and/or short, I've made alternative arrangements for my array of Airminded social media accounts at Mastodon. My main account is:

This instance, hcommons.social, is run by Humanities Commons, an open-access scholarship repository (where I already have a presence).

...continue reading →

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History of the Second World War

It seems like only last week that I was spruiking a podcast appearance -- actually, it was last month, which is also not very long ago! This time it was on the History of the Second World War podcast with Wesley Livesay, chatting about the German air raids on Britain of the First World War (and how that affected British thinking and planning for the air raids of the Second World War).

Wesley is indefatigably thorough, or possibly thoroughly indefatigable: this was his 27th interview for this podcast, on top of 97 regular episodes, and he's still only in the interwar period! (This is after doing 295 podcast episodes on History of the Great War, too: clearly he knew what he was getting into.) So there is plenty more world war content to consume -- including another five episodes on interwar airpower, and an interview with Alan Allport on 1930s Britain -- and when you've finished with all that you can go read Wesley's sources.

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Stories from the Space Between

A little while ago I was privileged to be part of a discussion on the Stories from the Space Between podcast with Rinni Haji Amran and Luke Seaber, and hosted by Michael McCluskey, on the idea of, yes, airmindedness. Michael and Luke edited Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, to which Rinni and I (and, for that matter, Luke and Michael!) contributed chapters. Here's the blurb:

Take off for a discussion of “airmindedness” with contributors to Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain (Palgrave 2020). What did it mean to be “airminded” in interwar Britain? How did airmindedness encapsulate the possibilities and potential dangers of aviation? How was it an expression of military and industrial power as well as aerial theatre? Join Rinni Haji Amran, Brett Holman, and Luke Seaber for a discussion of aviation, Croydon aerodrome, and the work of W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and T. H. White, among others. Rinni Haji Amran is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University Brunei Darussalam. Brett Holman is a Professional Associate of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra in Australia. Luke Seaber is Senior Teaching Fellow in Modern European Culture at University College London and the co-editor with Michael McCluskey of Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain (Palgrave 2020).

Stories from the Space Between is the podcast of the Space Between, a society for the interdisciplinary discussion of studies in the interwar and wartime periods covered by 1914–1945. It's only up to episode 5 but has already covered everything from psychogeography to Poland! You can listen to the airmindedness episode here.

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I have a short, non-peer-reviewed article about Trove bots coming out in History Australia as part of a special issue on Trove; the advanced access version has just been published. Here's the abstract:

Like many other historians I use Trove for both targeted searches and exploratory ones, which in itself has revolutionised my historical research practice. However, I have recently been exploring the potential of Tim Sherratt’s concept of ’Trove bots’ – Twitter bots which tweet links to random Trove Newspaper articles – as, in effect, automated research assistants, as well as public engagement tools. Here, I will discuss how I have been using one such bot, @TroveAirRaidBot, in my current writing project, and its limitations and hopefully its potential.

It was an interesting piece to write: partly trying to make a case for experimenting with Trove bots for their curiosity and engagement value, but more reflecting on how useful their directed serendipity can be for serious research too. Also, it amuses me to have a formal publication with a Twitter handle in the title!

It's currently available for free, but I'm not sure how long that will last. In any case, the green open access version is here.

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Don't listen to podcasts

I'm a bit of a podcast sceptic, meaning not that I don't believe in their existence but rather that I don't really get the appeal (which probably puts me in a similar position to a blog sceptic about 15 years ago). Since they aren't actually going away any time soon, I guess it was bound to happen eventually that I would be asked to speak on one...

The podcast in question is Big If True, which is for kids and is about big things -- in my case, airships. It's hosted by Maggie and her mom, Abby Mullen (a naval historian and one of the people behind Tropy, an excellent tool for organising and annotating archival photos). And, of course, despite my scepticism I had a great time talking about airships with Maggie and Abby, who had some great questions. And yes, we did get to phantom airships! So please have a listen if you have a spare 20 minutes or so, and then maybe check out some of Maggie and Abby's other episodes too (such as aircraft carriers, with Carlton McClain, and World War II, with Kim Guise).