Investigations of a Dog

The December edition of the Military History Carnival will be hosted by Alex Clark at History of Warfare on 14th December. You can e-mail submissions to alexanderclark999 [at] gmail [dot] com or use the submission form.

I’m taking a break from blogging because I probably have RSI.  I’m experimenting with voice recognition software but I need to use the computer as little as possible until I recover.

[@ Tom Crawshaw: if you're reading this, I got your e-mails but suspect you haven't been getting my replies]

As for the Military History Carnival, I probably have a host for December but I’m not sure what will happen after that.  I might want to stop doing it. Maybe someone else will want to take over, but as it’s so difficult to get hosts and submissions this might be the time to let it die.

There’s a new early-modern edition of Carnivalesque up at Mercurius Politcus. Nick has done a fantastic job of pastiching 17th century presbyterian bigot Thomas Edwards.

The next Carnivalesque will be an ancient/medieval edition  at The Cranky Professor in November. You can submit posts using the ancient/medieval nomination form.

The October Military History Carnival is now up at Chronologi Cogitationes.

I still need a host for the November edition, so if you’d like to do it please get in touch.

It’s now 2 years since I started this blog. In that time I’ve started a blog carnival, got an article published, and finally got a job. I can’t really think of much to say about this anniversary, but here’s an arbitrary selection of some of my best/favourite posts. They’re in chronological order as ranking them any other way would be too difficult. It at least gives a rough idea of what I’ve been doing with Investigations of a Dog over the last couple of years. I’m now moving towards shorter posts which get straight to the point as I don’t have time to write 2-3,000 word posts, and I doubt that many people have the time to read them either.

19 October 2006, Grand Narratives of Global War: Postmodernism that you can actually understand, illustrated by the problems of working out when the Second World War started.

5 December 2006, The Bing Bong Boys: The first time I posted about my great-grandfather’s experiences in the First World War. A little bit of family history led to me digitizing the battalion history and learning a lot about XML.

13 December 2006, Cavalry Charges: Shock: Destroying some myths about horses crashing into each other. I’ve changed my mind about some things in the light of new evidence, but this is still a good introduction to why the “equine battering ram” is impossible.

25 May 2007, Everyone knows you can’t make a World War I game: Some lazy journalist wrote some rubbish about computer games and the First World War. Esther found ‘em and fixed ‘em, then I flanked ‘em and finished ‘em. Maybe would have been better without the unsubstantiated “long periods of boredom” bit, but mostly bang on target.

18 October 2007, FPS is good for you: Just reporting what someone else said, but it’s really important. Gender differences in spatial reasoning are not fixed and can be changed easily by playing games.

6 December 2007, Book Review: Malcolm Wanklyn - Decisive Battles of the English Civil War: All about how Malcolm Wanklyn is coming out with some of the most exciting work on the civil war.

13 December 2007, Cows: A still unsolved mystery about Londoners who supposedly hadn’t seen cows before.

4 April 2008, Glenn Burgess On Revisionism: Maybe a bit too dense and esoteric for a blog post, but I think I made some good points about some very big historiographical issues.

10 August 2008, Saddlers Wills: A bit of a lazy post as it was just edited highlights from some documents I’d been transcribing, but I liked it and so did some other people. Shows some of the interesting things you can find in wills, and how digitization and wikis are making it easier to share interesting information.

29 August 2008, Cavalry Generals: Cromwell and Balfour: Comparing Oliver Cromwell’s early military career with the criminally ignored Sir William Balfour to show that they were both good at commanding cavalry.

And an honourable mention for “To the disgrace of all womankind”, which is the most popular post for Google searches…

The UK National Archives (or PRO if you’re old-skool like me) has announced a new project called Digital Microfilm. This involves scanning existing microfilms of original documents and making the whole reel available as a single (very big!) PDF file. These files are free to download. The aim is to eventually digitize all the microfilm records held by TNA/PRO and get rid of the microfilm readers at Kew. I think this a great idea as it’s a quick and easy way of making these records more widely available without the time and cost involved in indexing individual documents. Users can post their own indexes and transcripts on the Your Archives wiki. Although the quality of the scans obviously won’t be any better than the microfilm that they came from (and I know from experience that full colour high-resolution digital photos are much easier to work with) PDFs will still be more convenient than using a microfilm reader - no more holding a camera up to the screen to get a copy of the microfilm! I’m not sure whether this project will include records that have already been (badly) indexed and made available through DocumentsOnline and Ancestry, such as WWI service records and medal cards, but I assume records which aren’t currently available anywhere online will be the highest priority.

The next Military History Carnival will be at Chronologi Cogitationes on Monday 20th October. Please e-mail submissions to blakemore_9 [at] hotmail [dot] com or use the submission form. We welcome posts on any aspects of wars and armed forces in any part of the world in any period up to the end of the 20th century. Ideally submissions should have been posted since the last edition (12th September).

We also need hosts for November onwards. Please get in touch if you’d like to help out. Your blog doesn’t have to be primarily about military history, as long as you’re interested.

I’ve just got an e-mail from SAGE Publications advertising free trial access to their online journals. Thunderbird thought it might be a scam but I’ve checked their website and it seems to be genuine. Just go to this page and register, then you should get free access to all SAGE journals, including War In History, until 31st October. That means that my debut article is available for anyone who wants to read it but couldn’t get at it before.

90 years ago today 46th Division broke through the Hindenburg Line. You can read about 1/5th Lincolnshire Regiment’s part in the battle in the relevant chapter of Sandall’s history (and if you click linked names in the text you can get to medal citations and an interactive map). Although my great-grandfather served with the battalion he missed this action - by this time he’d been a prisoner in Germany for nearly 2 years.

It’s interesting to note that although people who are down with the revisionist work that’s been done in the last 20 years or so know this as one of the greatest achievements in British military history it still doesn’t seem to have broken into popular awareness in the way that the Somme or Third Ypres have. The coverage in Wikipedia is very poor, with 46th Division’s spectacular success on 29th September given only one sentence! The article gives far more attention to the less successful American and Australian attacks. Is this because people still can’t help thinking about the First World War in terms of failure?

Bill Turkel has been testing a really cool piece of equipment. The MDX-20 can turn 3D computer models into physical objects, and can automatically scan physical objects to make 3D computer models of them. And it doesn’t rely on magic, alchemy, or the Dark Side of the Force. There are so many interesting things that could be done with this (not all of them related to SL avs, Weird Science, and “In Every Dream Home A Heartache”…). As Bill says, “the possibilities seem nearly endless”. Strangely, the first thing that came into my mind when I read about it was palaeontology. Maybe if this technology gets good enough it might be possible to digitize collections of fossils, then researchers could easily run off life size replicas instead of flying to China to measure dinosaur bones (but there might be drawbacks that I haven’t thought of because I don’t know enough about dinosaur measuring). As the David Baird quotes in Bill’s post make clear, objects created by the MDX-20 are models, not recreations of the thing itself how it really is. Just like theroetical models and digital resources, what we get is some aspects of the thing (usually the ones we’re most interested in) but not all of them.

Nick at Mercurius Politicus points out that while digital collections like EEBO give us easier access to some aspects of early modern texts, there are other aspects that we don’t get to experience unless we go back to the originals. “Reading them on a screen today is inevitably a different experience to reading actual copies.” Like Nick, I’m not sure what impact this has or is going to have on how we read these texts. Even with the original physical books in our hands we’re still a very long way from being able to reconstruct the meanings that readers found in them in the 17th century. Holding a book, feeling the paper, seeing the colour of the ink, will necessarily suggest more or different meanings to me than when I see a PDF on screen, but those are still my perceived meanings, and not necessarily anyone else’s. On the other hand, being able to see a physical difference between two books which isn’t apparent on EEBO gives a new insight and has to affect the range of possible meanings, even if we’re not sure exactly how.

This isn’t something that only applies to early-modern print culture. Brett at Airminded mentioned in his excellent series of posts on the Sudeten crisis that British newspapers in the 1930s tended to have the most important stories in the middle, not on the front page. I had absolutely no idea that this was the case. It’s not something that’s obvious if you’re just dipping into the Times Digital Archive as you just get one page out of context.

And it doesn’t just apply to print. The same issues come up with old computer games. I can play my old favourite C64 games on my PC using an emulator, but the experience isn’t the same as playing them on a real C64 in the 80s. In many ways it’s better - you don’t have to wait for tapes to load, there aren’t as many crashes - but from a historian’s point of view it’s obviously not a perfect way of reconstructing the past.