Tools and methods

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Reprisals: all mentions, 1939-1945

The word 'reprisals' popped up during my 1940 post-blogging quite frequently. After one post I had the idea of checking whether it could be used as an index of British attitudes towards the bombing of Germany throughout the rest of the war. The short answer is: not really. But it was still worth trying.

With The Times and the Manchester Guardian/Observer databases I can luckily do this in a semi-automated fashion. Automated because I can do keyword searches on the full text of the newspapers, semi because the interfaces are crude and require manually stepping through the date range to bin the data. For example, searching for the word 'reprisals' in The Times database between 1 and 31 July 1940 gives 16 articles; doing the same between 1 and 31 August 1940 gives 18 articles; and so on. I then put these numbers together and plot the results.
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I've put the series of posts I did a couple of years ago on the Sudeten crisis into one big PDF file called, rather grandiosely, Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis: The British Press, August-October 1938 (147 pages, 5.6 Mb). It's freely available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. It's very bloggy in style, but I've also added a basic index and put in internal links between the chapters (posts). My Sudeten posts are probably the best thing I've done with this blog, and they've been linked to from a few educational sites as well as Wikipedia. So by putting them into this format I hope they'll be made accessible to a wider audience. (I've been inspired in this by the work Evangeline Holland has been doing over at Edwardian Promenade.)

The conversion was done using a nifty tool called WPTEX. This is some PHP which hooks into WordPress's functions and reads out and formats your posts into LaTeX format. It didn't quite do what I wanted but with some PHP and LaTeX hackery I think it turned out pretty nice in the end.

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Since graduating I've become what they call an 'independent scholar', meaning I currently have no academic job but still have the irrational desire to do research. I'd certainly like to be a dependent scholar, but it turns out they don't hand out jobs with your testamur.1 Who knew?

So there are things I need to do. One is to keep an eye out for jobs. In Australia, we don't have anything like the AHA interview-fests, which sounds like a slightly terrifying (if hopefully worthwhile) experience for recent/almost graduates. Nor does Britain, as far as I know. So job-hunting is presumably less seasonal. We do have the usual job search sites, such as UniJobs.com.au and jobs.ac.uk.

Once into the job application and interview process, one useful site to keep an eye on is the Academic Jobs Wiki, especially the history section. There are also places to share good and bad interview experiences, or simply to vent. The entries are mostly about North American universities, but it being a wiki there's no reason why that can't change.

The other thing to keep doing is writing and publishing. Part of that is knowing which journal to submit to, and part of that is knowing how long it takes for them to get your article through the review process. It's not something journals advertise on their websites (and understandably so), so the only data seems to be anecdotal. Which is why I was glad to stumble across the History Journal Response Times wiki. It might have saved me some grief had I known of it earlier!

Finally, an inspiring blog I recently discovered is Nicholas Evan Sarantakes' In the Service of Clio, which is aimed at providing advice to history graduate students on the subject of career management. It's all there, from choosing a university, to conference strategies, to having a life. For me, the best posts are the numerous guest blogs from people who got their PhDs and then got jobs, mostly outside traditional academia. So it can happen.

I'd be glad to know of any similar resources I might have missed.

  1. Australian for 'diploma'. [↩]

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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 ...

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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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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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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