Blogging, tweeting and podcasting

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

With the inaugural Military History Carnival coming up, it seems like a good time to ask: what does the military historioblogosphere look like? The obvious answer to that is another question: what on Earth is a military historioblogosphere anyway? Well, 'historioblogosphere' is just a silly word I invented to describe the history blogosphere, and so the military historioblogosphere is the part of that to do with wars and suchlike. (And actually, of course, it's the Anglophone military historioblogosphere ...) In practice, I will take the 'Wars and Warriors' section of Cliopatria's History Blogroll as the closest thing we have to a census of the military historioblogosphere. Which is not to say that it is complete, nor that I think everything on that list should be there, but it's a whole lot more comprehensive than any list I'm willing to maintain! It obviously excludes blogs which may discuss military history, but are not primarily focused on it -- but it's a good place to start.

So I've gone through the blogs listed there and compiled some basic statistics with them, and made some basic plots with them. (I used Keynote because it's soooo much easier and prettier than Excel, or Powerpoint for that matter; and because my otherwise go-to app for plotting, Plot, doesn't do pie charts.) I actually intended to do something along these lines ages ago, but never got around to it; fortunately I kept the data on my hard drive; and as it happens it was almost exactly a year ago that I compiled it, so it's perfect for a year-on-year comparison! So let's begin.

Blogs: numbers

The number of blogs in the military historioblogosphere. The red portion represents the increase in the past year. The blue part (blogs active in March 2006) actually decreased. This is because some blogs have moved out of the military historioblogosphere since then, according to Cliopatria -- mainly because they've ceased activity, but not always. The percentage of blogs in the list in March 2006 which did not make the cut the following year -- call it the churn rate -- is 23%.

The total percentage increase is 65%. This sounds impressive, but actually it's well below the growth rate of the blogosphere as a whole (which would predict a 151% increase in a year). Of course, the Cliopatria blogroll is human-generated, not machine-indexed, so it might be expected that it would fall short of the actual increase. And of course there may well be selection biases affecting what is considered blogroll-worthy by Cliopatria.
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Last month, I mentioned Gavin Robinson's proposal for a military history carnival. He's now dropped a note in comments with details of the first Military History Carnival:

Everything is ready to go now. The first Military History Carnival will be held at Investigations of a Dog on Thursday 12th April. It will then take place around the middle of every month - exact date to be decided by the host. Submit posts for the first one by e-mailing the permalink to mhc1@4-lom.com or using the submission form at Blog Carnival. Posts should be more recent than 1st March 2007 to be considered. They can be on any aspect of military history in any part of the world in any period from ancient history up to the end of the 20th century.

Anyone who would like to host a future carnival, please e-mail me to let me know which month you’d prefer to do. I already have a host for May, but anything after that is open.

Cry havoc, etc.

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Now that I've finally undone the damage WordPress 2.1 did to my sidebar (My Link Order was the answer), it's time to add a few blogs to it. Some I've only found recently, others I should have added ages ago.

Like everyone else, I've quickly become enamoured of Paleo-Future, partly because I've long been interested in how the future used to look (one aspect of which I'm exploring in my research), and partly for pure nostalgia. I myself have given up hope of seeing the skies filled with flying cars, but Futurama-style city-wide transportation tubes would save on shoe leather.

My continuing quest for quality modern British history blogs (other than those concerning war) has yielded The Victorian Peeper, the blog of Kristan Tetens, a cultural historian at Michigan State. Another (ok, not so modern) is Antiquarian's Attic. The mysterious Antiquarian researches Anglo-Saxon decorative metalwork, but posts on many subjects and periods.

Now to war (broadly defined). I've previously recommended Christopher Knowles' How it really was, where he is research-blogging his MA on the British occupation of Germany after the Second World War -- so I should have added it then! Victoria's cross? is a very interesting project, examining the proposition that the Victoria Cross is awarded for political reasons as much as for military ones. It's written by Gary Smailes, a freelance historian and researcher. And Thoughts on Military History is the, erm, thoughts on military history of Ross Mahoney, a further education lecturer in Cornwall as well (later this year) an MPhil student researching the role of the RAF during the Dieppe raid -- so as one of the airminded, he's already off to a good start as far as I'm concerned!

Finally, something a bit different: Larvatus Prodeo, an Australian group blog which admittedly is mostly political, but sometimes has posts on history. It also has the occasional post on Australian defence procurement which can be fun to try and derail with the help of fellow devil-may-care flying fools!

Update: oops, I forgot to add the new project of my R&D associate, Alun Salt: Clioaudio, a history podcast. Probably not something I should attempt, as a native Strine speaker. In fact, aorta mica Laura genst it.

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Thinking Blogger Award

It turns out that memes are like buses ... none come along for a year and a half, and then I get tagged three times in about a month! Firstly, William Turkel of Digital History Hacks tagged me with 5 Things. Then Dave Davisson, the Patahistorian,1 independently tagged me with the same meme. Finally, Kevin Levin of Civil War Memory very graciously tagged me with a Thinking Blogger Award. Well, it's sort of a cross between a meme and an award -- the award bit is that I get a little badge thing to display here (above) and the following citation:

Brett Holman's Air Minded focuses on British history between 1908 and 1941 and while that may seem like a fairly narrow focus he somehow manages to comment on much broader issues related to war, society, and technology. The upshot is that I end up learning a great deal about a period in history that I know little about.

The meme bit (which originated at the thinking blog) is that I have to tag five other bloggers who I think fit the description of "thinking bloggers" (which I don't think is meant to imply that everyone else is an unthinking blogger!)
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  1. I think there's still only one. Either that, or We Are All Patahistorians Now. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

At Investigations of a Dog, Gavin Robinson has proposed organising a military history carnival, which I think is a great idea. It would aim to gather together the best posts on the history of war in all its facets -- not just military operations (AKA "fighting"), but also how war intersects with social, cultural, political, gender, economic, diplomatic, local, public ... (you get the idea) ... histories. Representations, memories and forecasts of war are perfectly legitimate subjects too. Similarly, hosts and participants need not be specialists in military history: war affects us all, in one way or another.

Various issues under discussion include how frequently it should be held, whether to exclude recent-ish events, and most importantly, what to call it! So, please head on over and have your say.

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Jack McGowan of Smashing the Window has some very interesting reflections on his experiences in seeing his first paper through to being accepted for publication (congrats!). A timely read for me, as I start to think about doing this myself.

While I'm on the matter of writing advice, here's a chance to use the WordPress Democracy plugin I installed the other day. Near the start of chapter 3, I have a sentence which begins 'In this chapter, I will briefly examine ...' 'I'. 'I'! While I use the personal pronoun all the time on this blog, and have already done so once this sentence, I find that it really cuts against the grain to do so for academic writing. I don't think it is such a sin in writing in the humanities, but I first learned academic writing in the physical sciences, where the personal pronoun, singular or plural, is rare (though not unknown). Instead, one would use phrases like 'the present author' where in less formal writing one would say 'I'. I guess this is to avoid the academic equivalent of breaking the fourth wall. On the other hand, taking ownership of a sentence with a personal pronoun is a good way to avoid the dreaded passive voice.

So, am I worrying too much about this? Does anyone care about this any more? Should I just embrace 'I'? Here's the poll:

Edit: I have removed the poll plugin for security reasons. But here's a screenshot of the poll results as of 22 November 2011:

Person vs person

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The winners of the 2006 Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogs are out. This time, three of the winning blogs are already on my sidebar: Digital History Hacks (Best New Blog), Chris Bray at Cliopatria (Best Series of Posts), and Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well (Best Writer). As I did last year, I've now added the other winners: Axis of Evel Knievel (Best Individual Blog), Civil Warriors (Best Group Blog), and Participant Historian (Best Post).

Congratulations all!

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This is my third post about maps out of the last four, so I've given in and made a Maps category. It's not just me: there are another three posts about maps at Breathing History, and also at Philobiblon and My London Your London about an exhibition at the British Library about maps of London. And then The War Room alerted me to a great blog called strange maps, the subject of which is just what it sounds like -- fascinating and unusual maps of all kinds: historical, fictional, satirical, political. There are three Second World War era maps produced for propaganda purposes: one supposedly showing German war aims, another supposedly showing Allied war aims, and one especially interesting to me, supposedly showing a 1934 German map of a supposed aerial threat from Czechoslovakia:

Czech air menace, 1934

The provenance of the map is not clear -- it's labelled in German 'A small state threatens Germany', but under that is another label in English explaining that it was 'published in Germany in 1934 to create fear of Czech bombing', so who knows when or where it was published in English, or even if it was ever actually published in German. My guesses would be 1938-40, a British newspaper, and yes, but the online source doesn't say. Anyway, plotting the range of aircraft in order to demonstrate the threat of bombing was common enough by this time, as I've previously discussed.

There's no doubt that Germans in the 1930s lived under the shadow of the bomber: by 1934, the Nazi-founded Reich Civil Defence League already had 2.5 million members, and the prospect of morale bombing would have been especially disturbing to believers in the Dolchstoss legend, that Germany had not been defeated in the field in 1918 but "stabbed in the back" by weak-willed civilians. Hitler described Czechoslovakia as a dagger aimed at the heart of Germany. But Czechoslovakia never came close to bombing Germany; instead it was Goering who threatened the aerial destruction of Prague, to make sure that Czechoslovakian forces didn't resist the illegal German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 (sorry, I mean the liberation of Slovakia). Assuming it is actually genuine, this map would have been one small justification for the progressive German campaign against the Czechs.