Tools and methods

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There's been a huge amount of interest on Twitter and in the media about the new Bomb Sight website, developed by the University of Portsmouth with assistance from the National Archives and elsewhere, and deservedly so because it's fairly excellent. In short it's an interactive map of the London Blitz compiled from a number of sources, showing where what kinds of bombs fell when. So you can browse to (or search for, though this has been temporarily disabled due to high traffic) your favourite part of London and see why there's a mid-20th century building interrupting that otherwise Victorian facade. Zooming in you see a marker for each bomb fall, with a link for more information. You can also get a statistical overview for each borough or ward, or for Greater London as a whole. Each location links in with relevant Blitz photographs sourced from the IWM, as well as related stories from the BBC's WW2 People's War site. In the map view, you can flip between the aggregate bomb census over seven months, or a single week's worth of bomb falls, or just the first twenty-four hours. You can also overlay the original Home Security maps from which the census data is derived, which is valuable because, thanks largely to the Blitz itself, some streets which existed in 1940-1 can no longer be found. As a bonus, London's invasion defences can also be displayed, using data taken from the Council for British Archaeology's Defence of Britain Dataset. An AR app is on its way, though sadly only for Android devices, not iOS.

Despite popular impressions, Bomb Sight doesn't show all the bombs recorded falling on London during the Blitz, but only those recorded between 7 October 1940 and 6 June 1941 as well as those recorded on 7 September 1940. That is, nearly the first month of the Blitz is missing. (This is quite clearly stated but it would be easy to overlook.) The reason for this is that the weekly bomb census maps only began to be compiled a month into the Blitz. It might be possible to fill in the gap from other sources; that's what has been done with the first day of the Blitz, which is from London Fire Brigade records via the Guardian. Of course, coming from different sources the data will be disjointed but that is inevitable with this kind of project. I gather that it is also intended that all the weekly censuses between October and June will be added to the site, which would mean you could slide through the weeks to see how the bombardment changed over time; or else further research might pin down the date of each bomb (at the moment when you click on one it only gives the census period, i.e. up to an eight month period). It would also be extremely interesting to compare bomb falls from the First World War, if only to illustrate the differences in the scale of bombing.

Also, Bomb Sight only covers London. Again, this is at least partly due to the nature of the data sources. But again it's something which could be remedied. Other, smaller Blitz maps like this have already been done for Southampton and for the West Riding of Yorkshire (for the night of 14 March 1941; from after the Blitz there is also Londonist's V-2 map. Depending on the permissions and formats, and hand waving wildly, it should be possible to aggregate these maps into Bomb Sight, if desired. Or else somebody else could build a website to do the aggregation. But in the end, somebody would probably have to do the hard work of sifting through local ARP records to generate the data for outside London, assuming those records do exist and are detailed enough.

None of which is intended to cavil at what the Bomb Sight project has achieved, as it's very good stuff indeed.

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[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.]

In the published version of his 2008 Lord Trenchard Memorial Lecture, Richard Overy concluded that now

air power is projected for its potential political or moral impact. In Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan it is the political dividend that has been central to the exercise of air power, just as it was when Trenchard’s Independent Force flew against German cities in 1918 with the hope that a demoralised urban population might pressure the German government to make peace. In this sense it might be possible to argue, without stretching the history too far, that the RAF has begun to forge a new sense of identity in the past two decades more compatible with the traditions of Trenchardism.1

My interest here is in that last word, 'Trenchardism'. Overy nowhere defines it -- in fact, it's the only time it occurs in his article -- but as an airpower historian I have a pretty good idea what he means, despite the fact that it's actually a relatively uncommon term. Marshal of the Royal Air Force (as he ended up) Lord Trenchard is well-known for his belief in strategic bombing as a war-winning weapon, particularly through its effects on morale, and as the RAF's Chief of the Air Staff from 1919 to 1930 he was in a position to promote it. This sense of Trenchardism, something like Douhetism, seems straightforward enough, and it's the sense in which I've encountered it in the secondary literature.2 But here I'm interested in other uses of this word Trenchardism: specifically the way it is used in a a Wikipedia article of that name which was created recently by Jo Pugh of The National Archives, who invites additions and comments (as discussed on Twitter).3 There, Trenchardism is taken beyond simply an enthusiasm for bombing, indeed beyond the military sphere entirely. The dilemma is that in so doing it risks diluting Trenchardism past the point of usefulness. But equally, it highlights a contemporary understanding of Trenchardism which is very different to that we understand now. Are they reconcilable? And if not, which should we prefer?
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  1. Richard Overy, 'Identity, politics and technology in the RAF's history', RUSI Journal 153 (2008), 74-7. Thanks to Ross Mahoney for this reference. [↩]
  2. E.g. Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Strategic Air Warfare: The Evolution and Reality of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 239, 291. [↩]
  3. I won't here discuss the question of whether Wikipedia is an appropriate place for original research. See also Richard Jenson, 'Military history on the electronic frontier: Wikipedia fights the War of 1812', Journal of Military History 76 (2012), 1165-82. [↩]

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Today I attended the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Arts eResearch forum 2012. This was in two parts: firstly, a talk by Tim Sherratt, down from Canberra for the day, entitled 'Digital Disruptions', where he exhorted us to find new ways to break things; followed by short spiels by local academics on some of their digital humanities work. There was a lot of really interesting stuff on display, and whether by chance or design each one was digital in a very different way:

  • Susan Lowish spoke about creating a databases of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara artwork, Ara Irititja, which is deployed in remote Indigenous communities in central Australia to preserve their (and our) cultural heritage and, crucially, make it accessible to them and allow them to add their own knowledge. It's a huge logistical task but judging from the use the databases get, a very worthwhile one.
  • Alison Young works on street art and the people and communities involved in creating it. She described how the Internet has enabled her to observe and intereact with these communities, which could be difficult due to the borderline-illegal nature of street art. For example she can use her blog to establish her academic credentials (and her politics) to artists she wants to interview to prove that she isn't an undercover cop!
  • David McInnis's contribution was to talk about the Lost Plays Database. This had perhaps the most traditional academic orientation of any of the projects on display today, but the way it works is anything but. It's a wiki which collates information about plays which we known were written in the late Tudor/early Stuart periods, but about which we have only fragmentary knowledge.1 This information is out there in the published literature and has been for decades, but has never been collected together, as it is now. And combining the power of crowdsourcing (even with a crowd of only a few dozen enthusiastic scholars) with newly digitised sources means when a question arises it can often be answered very quickly.
  • Cate O'Neill described the usability issues faced by the Find & Connect project she edits. This may sound boring, but in fact it was fascinating, and quite moving. Find & Connect is a government resource which provides information for people who were in state or foster care as children (including child migrants and the Stolen Generation). While the site has been designed according to best practice and with the best intentions, investigation has shown that users actually didn't understand how it works. What's interesting about these usability problems is how these usability issues are bound up with the reason for the site's existence. For example, with low computer literacy and self-confidence, it can't be assumed that users will know what things like "glossary" or even "help" are for. Even something as taken for granted as a "home" button was confusing in this context, as it is naturally enough interpreted as something to do with orphanages or foster homes. Similarly, the commonplace experience of clicking on a dead link and getting a 404 page can be read by some users to mean that the government is trying to hide something from them (i.e. again, as it has been doing for most of their lives). This was a real eye-opener: usability matters.
  • Véronique Duché is working on adapting her teaching methods to best serve the current generation of students, who live in their smartphones and tablets. So she is looking at developing an ebook, with embedded video, audio, slideshows, 3D models... It's easy to see how this would be useful for language teaching (well, except for the 3D part).
  • Finally, Nikki Hemmingham spoke about the Australian Women's Register and (forthcoming) online encyclopedia of Australian women leaders. What was interesting here was the way the project has evolved with experience: the encyclopedia was originally intended to be a comprehensive hyperlinked resource, but the problem is that links die. What was available on the web when it was written cannot be guaranteed to be there in the future. So now the encyclopedia is intended to be a snapshot in time, but it will be complemented by the Register, a Trove-like harvester of various online resources and databases. As such the need to curate links disappears; instead you curate the sources which contain them.

All good stuff, and I know there are many more digital things being done in the Arts Faculty which could have been included.

As for Tim Sherratt, I've mentioned him here before and used his tools as well. He's a one man digital history machine: QueryPic, the front page, Archives viewer, the future of the past, Headline roulette, the real face of White Australia (with Kate Bagnall) and more. The amazing thing is, despite all this work he has done to improve the way Australians (historians and not-historians) access their history, Tim's not employed or supported by any of our great universities or cultural institutions: he's just one person with a laptop and a broadband connection. While it's inspiring for others in that situation (as I am) to see what can be done with so little resources, I'd really rather see him be gainfully employed and fully supported. And while it's fantastic that Australian universities like Melbourne are getting serious about the digital humanities, it's not to their credit that they apparently can't find a place for someone as creative and productive as Tim. Somebody fix this please.

  1. Humble brag: completely coincidentally, in one of my day (technically night) jobs I'm the sysadmin who looks after the server hosting (among other things) LPD. This is humble because I have nothing to do with the content and in fact LPD was set up before I started; but more particularly so because the server was noticeably sluggish during the demonstration! Oops. [↩]

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Another update to my list of early 20th century British newspapers online. There are a number of new titles available:

Dundee Courier
Gloucestershire Echo
Hereford Times
Herts Advertiser
Lincolnshire Echo
Surrey Mirror
Yorkshire Gazette

In addition, the coverage for another dozen titles has been increased, though in some cases only by a year. There's additional coverage of at least some of the First World War period for seven newspapers, and of the Second World War for five.

Because it was getting a big long I've reorganised the list slightly, with separate sections for English, Irish/Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh newspapers. Which highlights the fact that there are no Welsh newspapers in the list at all. (The BNA does have a very few for 1900; hopefully they will be extended in future.)

All of the updates are due to the BNA; none of the other major newspaper sources I'm aware of have added anything for this period in the last three months. If you know of any I've missed, please let me know in the comments. However, I did recently come across UNZ.org, which has a huge amount of early 20th century periodicals (as well as books and other things) scanned and available for free, without even any ads. ('A New, Vast and Slightly Right-Wing Archive of Magazines, Books and TV Shows' is a pretty accurate description.) It's nicely organised too; a search function would be nice but you can use Google for that. Unfortunately for my purposes, all of them are American or monthly or both -- well, okay, these are interesting and useful too, but they don't fit into my list. But UNZ.org does have several British literary journals from the early twentieth century: Cyril Connolly's Horizon, F. R. Leavis's Scrutiny, and The Bookman (though this was a Hodder and Staughton publication, it published general reviews and cultural commentary too). For example, here's George Orwell's 'Wells, Hitler and the World State' from the August 1941 Horizon, which I had to pester some poor interlibrary loan librarian to find for me when I was doing my PhD. So this is a good thing.

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I've updated my list of online sources for early twentieth century British newspapers. There are forty new titles, bringing the total up over one hundred, and more years are available for another couple of dozen newspapers.

Most of the new titles are from the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), which now has a very helpful list of all newspapers they have along with the range of years available. But I've noticed that those ranges are misleading because the years in between the start and end dates have not necessarily all been digitised. So the BNA describes Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser, one of the new titles, as being available for the years 1833 to 1949. But the only years actually available after 1900 are 1947, 1948, and 1949 (the rest will be added in due course). It's probably difficult to display information about gaps in the coverage without cluttering up the page and making it harder to use (and I do exactly the same on my list), but perhaps they could take another leaf out of Trove's book and put a little histogram on every newspaper's page to show what's available.
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View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map

My next step in characterising the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare was to plot all the sightings Google Maps, which you can see above. I've used differently-coloured icons for different time periods to give an idea of the progression over the course of 1918: blue is January and February; red, March; green, April; cyan, May; yellow, June; purple, July; magenta, August through November. There are too many for Google Maps to show at once in an embedded map (without me learning JavaScript) but the rest can be seen here. Each icon is named for the location and has an attached date, but no other information. I dithered over which map mode to use but in the end settled on good old satellite mode, as it gives an idea of the terrain but also has good social data such as roads and towns (even if these are from 2012, not 1918). Of course you can switch between them yourself.
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Looking over the list of Australian mystery aircraft sightings suggests that some generalisations can be made.

Aeroplane vs airship, 1900-1918

In the 1910s, mysterious lights in the sky were usually described as being airship-like; after 1910 they were far more likely to be called aeroplanes. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1910 was when aeroplanes first flew in Australia; certainly a search of Trove Newspapers (using Wraggelabs' QueryPic) shows that 1910 was the first year when the word "aeroplane" appeared markedly more frequently than "airship". So that's easy enough to explain.

The same search shows that 1909 was the year that aviation really broke through into public consciousness. That's also the year of the Australian phantom airship wave.1 As it was the first burst of interest in aircraft, the first time that people started to learn about them, it's perhaps not surprising that people might think they saw them flying around where they weren't. The 1918 mystery aeroplane scare came after several years of increasing press coverage of aviation, obviously due to the war. So again that fits. Aeroplanes were something people were reading (and probably talking) about a lot. But that by itself is evidently not enough to generate a mystery aeroplane scare: there were a few seen in 1914, and a handful in the years after that, but nothing on the scale of 1918. There needs to be a plausible reason for aircraft to be flying about: and the reported visit of the Wolf and its Wölfchen to Australian shores provided that, though the desperate situation of the Allied armies in France was also a factor.
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  1. Of course, part of the 1909 data in the ngram above is from the airship sightings. But not many. [↩]

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I've updated my list of British newspapers online, 1901-1950 to reflect the new titles available in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), a pay-site which was launched with some fanfare about a month ago. Although it has been digitised from (and in partnership with) the British Library's newspapers collections, I must admit to not having paid much attention at the time because it sounded like it only covered 1900 and earlier. While that's mostly true, there's actually enough to interest an early 20th-century historian, especially in terms of regional newspapers, and more titles and pages are promised. Having said that, the price structure isn't very appealing for what's on offer, so I haven't subscribed to BNA and probably won't until I have a specific purpose in mind.

Most of the 20th-century titles are available only up to 1903. But the Western Times (Exeter) is available right up until 1950, and the Tamworth Herald until 1944. Four other newspapers have digitised runs of over a decade: Cheltenham Looker-On (1902 to 1913); North Devon Journal (Barnstaple, to 1923); Nottingham Evening Post (1921 to 1944); Western Daily Press (Bristol, 1915 to 1930). You can download whole pages (though apparently not individual articles), though sadly without a text layer. The free samples are good quality -- of course, they would be, but keyword searches (which you can do for free) suggests that the OCR is generally good. There is also the ability to correct the text where the OCR fails; and you can tag or comment on individual articles. User accounts also come with a 'My Research' section which allows you to bookmark articles as well as view a history of previous searches performed and articles viewed. A potentially handy feature is the ability to perform a keyword search on just the articles you've viewed. Searching in general is fast and powerful; you can quickly narrow a query by period, area, title or section of newspaper. I'm impressed with BNA's user interface overall: it is a lot like (and I'm sure directly inspired by) the National Library of Australia's Trove Digitised Newspapers but with a few more improvements for the dedicated researcher in mind.

Now for the complaints. These all revolve around the non-free nature of BNA. I do have philosophical objections to state institutions handing over their nation's cultural heritage largely preserved at taxpayer expense to free enterprise to make a buck out of, but there are practical problems too.1 The facilities for tagging, commenting and correcting are great, for example, but I question whether these are going to be used much in a non-open environment like this. Especially corrections: Trove has a community of eager text-correctors who make over a hundred thousand corrections a day; but then Trove is free. Expecting people to pay BNA for the privilege of improving their product is a bit much to ask, it seems to me. Apparently the current commercial arrangement will last for ten years, after which it may become open; but by then the technology will no doubt need updating and probably another commercial arrangement to fund it. I realise that digitisation and hosting costs money and it's not the British Library's fault it had to go down this route if it wanted to make its newspaper collection available to all; but I much prefer the Antipodean ethos on this one. Some of the problems resulting from the non-free, non-open nature of BNA could be fixed, though. As I noted above, given the limited number of titles currently available for the 20th century, subscribing for a whole year is not attractive to me. Why not have a cheaper option for just the 20th century?

  1. BNA is free to use from the British Library's reading rooms. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

I have a favour to ask of you. Would you mind please having a look at this and telling me what's wrong with it? Thank you.

To be somewhat less cryptic, it's an article for peer-review which I am having no luck getting accepted anywhere, and I don't really know why. I've had some bad luck. I wrote the first version about a year before I finished my PhD, in the hope that it would be on my CV by the time I entered the job market; in the event the journal I submitted it to took well over a year to reject it. But I've made some bad choices too. In its original form it was too ambitious and far too long; after three rejections I decided to cut it in two and rewrite each piece as a standalone article. As it (or at least the first part) was now shorter and sharper, I was again hopeful that I could find a home for it. But I've now received a second rejection for this version. This last rejection was helpful in that the reviewer provided detailed criticism, but while much of it is well taken, that some of it is not suggests that the point of my article did not get across. That's my fault as a writer; it might also be that I've been sending it to the wrong journals. But as I say, I'm not really sure why it's so difficult to place; it doesn't seem to me to be any worse than my first or even my second peer-reviewed articles.

So I'm taking a leaf out of Katrina Gulliver's book (though not her actual book!) by putting the article up on Google Docs and requesting feedback from anyone who has the patience to wade through it. You can comment on the article itself, either anonymously (if you don't want to be mentioned in the acknowledgements) or using your Google account; or you can send me an email. (No comments here though, please, unless they're about the crowdsourcing itself.) I'll take it down after a week or so.

How can I improve the article? What am I doing wrong? Where should I send it? Or should I just accept that this one is a dud and forget about it? It's up to you! Well, it's still up to me, but I'll be grateful for any and all suggestions.

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

I've been using the Internet for nearly two decades: in 1992 -- after nervously checking with the physics computer lab manager first -- I sent an email to my future Honours supervisor while she was visiting Toronto. I was quickly hooked by the promise of overcoming the tyranny of distance and transparently communicating with people all across the planet. Of course, it never worked quite like that. Of the many of the different forms of communication enabled by the Internet I've tried since then, many have fallen by the wayside (who now uses Unix talk? When was the last WAIS server shut down?), others still limp along (Gopher, IRC, Usenet) while others are in surprisingly rude health (you've probably used FTP at some point, though you may not have known it). Sometimes I was an early adopter: I set up my first webserver early in 1994, at a time when there must have been only a few thousand websites in the world. At other times I was very late to the party. But after much enthusiastic (and occasionally obsessive) participation in these and other protocols, I eventually became jaded and turned to passive consumption of content rather than creation in any form. It was only when I took up blogging at the start of my PhD that I rediscovered that early joy in talking to the world.

But the thing about blogging is that it's pretty much all about me, me, me. While I absolutely value and enjoy interacting with commenters, and hope that those who read without commenting find what I post here interesting or valuable, it's my place and I set the agenda. And I'd probably still blog even if nobody read it. So while Airminded is part of the World Wide Web, spending so much time on it could lead me to think that bombing and phantom airships and the knock-out blow are more important than they really are (which is to say, not very). As well, because my authorial voice dominates here it can lead me to think that my opinion is more important than it really is (which is to say, even less).

Which brings me to Twitter. I've blogged about tweeting a couple of times before, first when I began using Twitter in earnest, then when I reached one thousand tweets. I've now added more than 10,000 to that figure, so it's probably safe to say that I'm a Twitter addict -- er, become accustomed to using it. For link sharing, making contacts, historical musings, friendly banter and just general silliness, for sure; but there's more to it than that.

Tweeting is sometimes called microblogging, but that's a bit of a misnomer. It's true that it's possible to use Twitter just to broadcast your own thoughts or promote your own things, but unless you're already a celebrity nobody is going to listen. The real value comes from listening and (optionally) responding to what others say -- in interacting with others. With other historians, sure, but also with other people who share some interests and with others who don't.

The biggest and best example of this, for me, has been following the Arab Spring, particularly the revolutions in Egypt and Libya. Not just the news (and the rumours), but the commentary coming from those living through them: their experiences, hopes, fears. I confess this was a bit of an eye-opener for me. Intellectually, of course, I knew that people living in autocracies are like people everywhere else, but hearing the diversity of their responses (even within the limitations of 140 characters) I recognised them as individuals at a more basic level. It became impossible for me to discount the revolutions as quarrels in far away countries between people of whom I knew nothing. Twitter help me humanise an important period in contemporary history. That's something that I don't think any of those older protocols, from email on, could have helped me to do, not in practice. It's not transparent at all, of course, and it is as subject to biases and deceptions as any other form of human communication; but using Twitter is really the closest I've come to entering the global village I glimpsed nearly two decades ago.

Because it's #twitterstorians Day, I really should have said something about the specifically historical uses (and limitations) of Twitter. Luckily there are plenty of others who have done that:

@katrinagulliver (who is responsible) · @jliedl · @jondresner · @kathryntomasek · @kellyhignett · @kelly_j_baker · @lottelydia · @markcheathem · @publichistorian · @raherrmann · @sharon_howard (with a special shout-out for The Broadside) · @wilkohardenberg

PS If you don't already follow me on Twitter, I'm @Airminded!