Tools and methods

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In a previous post I wondered whether the authors of the 1934 knock-out blow novel Invasion from the Air, Frank McIlraith and Roy Connolly, might have been left-wing, as the artist who (apparently) was supposed to illustrate the book was a communist. I hadn't been able to turn up any biographical information about either of them in the usual places (eg Oxford DNB or Who's Who). But thanks to the magic of the Internet I've tracked down Connolly, in 5 easy steps!

The first breakthrough came when I looked for other books by McIlraith or Connolly in the British Library catalogue, and I found one called Southern Saga (1940), which was published by the same company as Invasion from the Air - which is suggestive but not conclusive. Then Google led me to "New literatures" in The Year's Work in English Studies which in turn led me to "Literary imaginings of the Bunya" from the Queensland Review, then "The Making of a Queensland Politician: Jack Duggan's life before parliament 1910-1935" from the Journal of Australian Studies, and finally I used the very handy AustLit (subscription only, unfortunately) to confirm that it was indeed the same Roy Connolly who wrote both Invasion from the Air and Southern Saga. So it turns out that Connolly was not British at all, but an Australian! He was the political journalist for the Queensland Labor Party's Daily Standard in the 1930s (and so it is probably safe to assume that he was a Labor man himself). What he was doing writing air-scare literature for the British market, I have no idea, but if I can scare up a biography of him it might give me more of a clue. (I tried the Australian Dictionary of Biography today at the library, but naturally the volume I needed was not on the shelf.)

It makes me wonder how I would have found this out 15 or even 10 years ago, before masses of this sort of information became available on the Internet. Even if I'd thought to check non-British biographical dictionaries, there's still no guarantee that I would have found Connolly, and without any clues I wouldn't have known where else to look. In the end I probably would have given up: it's not really all that important and there would be better things to spend my time on. But now, thanks to Google and other resources, this kind of sleuthing is both painless and fast - in fact, I spent more time writing this post than I did on the search itself!

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Patahistory notes this horror story about a student having her USB drive stolen - and with it, her only copy of her nearly complete PhD thesis. Although she did manage to recover the drive, Dave suggests that this is a timely reminder to make backups. Absolutely! I work as an IT manager in an academic environment, and I've seen enough disasters and near-disasters to take backups very seriously. Here's my advice on the subject:

  • Back up often - at least weekly. The longer you leave it, the more work you will have to do over in order to get back to where you were.
  • Get into a routine - even if you haven't written much, back it up anyway, instead of just doing it when you think of it. (This minimises the chances of you forgetting to do it the one time you need it.)
  • Backups should be easy to do - or else they will tend not to get done (unless you are more disciplined than I am!) Automate them, if possible.
  • Check your backups periodically, to make sure that they are actually backing up correctly, and are not corrupting over time. There's no point in having them if you can't read them when you need to!
  • Have a few different backup methods, for redundancy. Keep some away from your computer - emailing copies is a good idea, as Dave suggests. Or make physical copies and leave them with your parents or friends, or archive them online (eg Gmail or a service like Strongspace).
  • Be paranoid! You can never have too many backups. You'll probably never need them, but just think about how devastated you would be if the unthinkable happened, and you didn't have any ...

My personal backup regime is probably unnecessarily sophisticated - use CDs, USB drives, email, whatever works for you. I have a network-attached hard drive at home, and automatically write a backup to it from my Mac every hour (via a cron job - though I just make tar archives instead of the utilities mentioned there. When I'm travelling I will probably modify this to write smaller backups to a USB drive). Then I make a CD backup every week, which I take to work and leave in my desk drawer. When I start writing the thesis itself, which I am actually about to do, I might start uploading it to my web hosting server on a daily basis ... it's on the other side of the world, so if Australia slides beneath the waves, I can still get my PhD!

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From the just-because-I-can department.

RAF growth, 1920-39

As an ex-physicist, I like to see numerical data plotted in a graph, as well as in tabular form - it's much easier to visualise what's going on. I don't have any particular need for this right now, but I've been playing around with a few plotting packages anyway. The figure above was made with pro Fit (OS X only), which has a free trial version, limited in the number of graphs, data points, etc, that can be in use at one time. It's easy to use and the end result is pleasing enough to the eye. The main problem I found is that the legend isn't a separate object to the graph, so I can't shift it to make room for a longer axis label. But I like it otherwise, so I think I will stick with it for the moment.

The data itself is taken from the tables in the back of John James, The Paladins: A Social History of the RAF up to the Outbreak of World War II (London and Sydney: Macdonald, 1990) - tables 5 (for the Air Estimates, ie the Air Ministry's, and effectively the RAF's, budget), 9 (UK squadrons only) and 15 (from which I derived the number of squadrons in 1939). A few remarks: the number of squadrons tracks the budget fairly closely. I would have expected there to be a year or two lag, because as James points out, men have to be trained, aircraft orders placed and land for airfields purchased well in advance of a squadron coming into being. I guess the squadrons may not have been effective initially, though. Secondly, despite the deterrence policy of Trenchard's RAF, and the authorisation of 35 bomber to 17 fighter squadrons for the Home Defence Air Force in 1923, there were actually slightly more fighter squadrons than bombers right up to 1935. Finally, the graph shows how weak the RAF was in fighters at the time of Munich in 1938 (and just plotting raw numbers actually understates this, as Fighter Command mostly had obscolescent types at the time).

Addendum: I forgot to mention that James doesn't say if the Air Estimate figures are in adjusted pounds or not - so I assume they are not.

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Like about half the historioblogosphere,If Google is any guide, that word is original to me. I'm not proud of this. I've been playing with LibraryThing (where I am airminded, naturally enough). Well, more than playing - I've added just about all my books (even the dodgy pseudoscience and pseudohistory ones - I'm a paid-up skeptic, I swear!) and made a first pass at tagging them too - everything from history and science fiction to Mars and Cornwall.

I've also added the blog widget to my sidebar, so that it will display an ever-changing selection of books from my collection. At my request, LibraryThing's creator Tim Spalding added the ability to show random books from a selected tag only (in this case, history). Thanks Tim!

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As befits a self-respecting Unix geek, I've pretty much finally decided that I will write my thesis in LaTeX, and not in Word (which is what I have been using for the last few years). I am a bit nervous about this. Most historians, I'm sure, have never heard of it, and indeed the typical LaTeX user would be working in the sciences (which is where I first learned to use it, many moons ago; among other things, it's great for equations). There's not a lot of support for using LaTeX in the humanities.Though there are in fact some users in the humanities, as the comments to this Crooked Timber post show. The Astrophysical Journal may prefer papers to be submitted in LaTeX format, but the Journal of British Studies probably wouldn't have any idea as to what to do with such a beast.Though actually, it seems that most history journals only accept paper manuscripts. How quaint! Since none of my colleagues will know how to use LaTeX, it's next to useless for any collaborative work. But all that is get-around-able, because I can switch back to Word if need be. The big problem, though, is bibliographical management. EndNote can't work with LaTeX in the same way as it does with Word. That means I either enter and format all citations by hand (urk), or use BibTeX-oriented software. Which is fine ... except if I ever decide I want to go back to Word/EndNote, either temporarily or permanently, then my bibliography will be in BibTeX, which of course Word can't handle. It is possible to convert from EndNote to BibTeX and vice versa, in theory, but in my experience this isn't very unreliable. EndNote can export directly to BibTeX, but the resulting file isn't readable; I had better luck exporting to RefMan (RIS) format instead. Unfortunately, for some reason this abbreviates authors' first names to just their initial, so I will have to key those in by hand.

So much for the pain. What's the pleasure? Well, for one thing, the result looks so much better than Word. It is very easy to produce a beautiful document in LaTeX. It's the kerning ... the justification ... it's just the vibe. More importantly, LaTeX separates form from content. When writing in Word, I find that I get hung up on how the thing looks, and distracted by trying to massage its appearance. In LaTeX, you just write, and worry about that stuff later. And when producing large and complex documents (like a PhD thesis!), LaTeX comes into its own: when you do need it, you have the power to specify exactly where to place that table on the page - whereas Word will put it wherever it thinks best and you have little say in the matter. In fact, LaTeX can be (and is) used to typeset entire books. The other main advantage as I see it is that LaTeX files are just plain text files, where Word uses a binary format. Which is stupidly easy to corrupt.To be fair, this seems to happen much less often than it used to. This is the safest and most portable format around, and it helps that LaTeX is available for Windows, OS X and your various Unices and Unix-work-alikes. (For more comparisons, see here (with pictures!) and here.)

OK, but just what is LaTeX? It's actually not strictly comparable to Word, because it's not a word processor: it's essentially a markup language, like HTML. So for example, in HTML the first sentence in this paragraph would be written like this:

OK, but just what <b>is</b> LaTeX?

In LaTeX, the equivalent is:

OK, but just what \textbf{is} LaTeX?

And so on. Then you run 'latex' on the document in order to produce the output (these days, generally a PDF file) - just as a web brower parses a HTML page. There's a handy cheat sheet here, and a useful collection of installation and usage links here.

Frankly, LaTeX is hard to get the hang of, especially coming from the WYSIWYG world, and typing out the various commands is a bit tedious. But there are tools which make the process a lot easier (and this is the biggest improvement from my days as an astrophysics postgrad, when I used vi exclusively). I'm on OS X, and my favourite LaTeX editor is TeXShop, but there are others. To manage my bibliography, I'm using BibDesk (and for the humanities, the jurabib bibliographic package is a must - specifically the Oxford style, jox.bst, as Chicago support is poor).MAKEBST might be another way to go. I'm currently going through my ex-EndNote bibliography, fixing up the first names and adding keywords (PRImary/SECondary, OWNed/LIBrary/UNSeen) as I go. This will be a good thing to finish, because I had been deferring adding new entries until I made a decision to go to LaTeX/BibTeX or stick with Word/EndNote, and instead writing them down in little text files here and there, and it was all starting to get away from me!

So is this a good idea? Come back in three years and I'll tell you ...

Update: for some reason, I've re-edited this entry about 10 times since posting it. The most important thing I forgot to mention is that all of the LaTeX/BibTeX tools mentioned above are free - an important consideration for postgrads! LaTeX is open source software, and pretty much all the related tools are too, though I think there are some commercial LaTeX editors.