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ting the blog reviews subscribe to rss archive june 2014 june 29 2014 in methodology leave a comment historians and their damned eclecticism after a recent post i received an email from a blog reader pointing me to an online project focused on presenting information on ww2 in a digital environment envisioning history if you re interested in the potential for digital history you should check out some of its youtube videos watching a few of the videos made me appreciate once again how different note taking needs can be from one academic inquiry to another for historians they appear to break down into two categories storing the unstructured data of the original sources themselves whether they be scans of archival documents or photographs of battle paintings or fortifications keeping tabs on the structured data extracted from the unstructured data for a particular analytical purpose usually a summary of the sources content most often in the form of summaries keywords or quantities or maybe a quote or two these two types of information are fundamentally different yet related as many methodological treatises will no doubt explain they also require different types of note taking capabilities historians are generally generalists and a surprising number still rely on 3 x5 notecards and simple word documents but those on the cutting edge like me also want all the cool toys our colleagues in other fields play with back in the day i referred to the options as a quadrangle or rectangle my early attempt to categorize different types of software on the one hand historians want the unstructured original documents in all their messy glory that means ideally transcripts of the full document as well images of the originals but the hard work for historians is to find structure in this chaos we need the originals in case we need to verify a quote or ask a new question but usually we are creating structured data by extracting information from the original sources according to a pre determined method ideally the methodological choices are made clear to the reader structuring the unstructured requires at a minimum keywords and categories with a link back to the original whenever possible there s an immense amount of winnowing in the journey from source to analysis unfortunately few off the shelf software packages handle both unstructured and structured information with equal facility a limitation i am once again confronting in my transition from ms access to devonthink the clio or kleio software by manfred thaller was an early extremely historio centric attempt but most historians fall back on packages with a broader user base in part the specialization of software is probably explained by cultural explanations as much as purely technical ones over the several decades of the personal computing age increasing processor power has expanded our toolkit far beyond the simple business friendly relational databases and punch card legacy systems of the early days but it took time well into the 1990s social scientists still shoehorned their qualitative data into the quantitative model preferred by most early software creating quantitative dummy variables 0 no 1 yes and numeric codes 1 french 2 english 3 dutch that could be handled by the slower processors of the period though the 0 1 yes no dummy variable retains its elegant simplicity today s more powerful relational databases can handle big chunks of rich text but we also have so many other types of analysis to choose from quantitative analysis software like spss and minitab gis software which allows us to analyze geospatial relationships between objects and textual analysis software for those seeking word frequencies kwic co occurrences topic modeling and the like modern programs even allow photographic and increasingly video analysis picasa s facial recognition being one of the simplest examples today big data is as likely to be composed of text or images as it is of numbers this embarrassment of computational and data riches the data mining metaphor isn t accidental comes at the price of having to deal with often incompatible software packages not to mention distinctive methodologies unfortunately i don t have a solution for methodologically eclectic historians but i figured i could at least give those ignorant in relational databases a better sense of what this type of software does well so here i post my powerpoint slides from a presentation i gave 14 years ago describing the basic design of my note taking access database it preserved both the unstructured original sources transcriptions only alas and built a layer of structured data on top of it as it turns out i didn t use it to its full potential but perhaps it might be of use to others if they can suss out what the slides mean without my accompanying explanation that ll cost you extra maybe i ll even return to relational databasing in my next project read more june 26 2014 in bibliography professional 10 comments the times they are a changin interesting piece in inside higher ed today on academic monographs as luxury items expensive items that justify their high cost by appeal to prestige and reputation the takeaway quote for me admittedly because i ve already said the same though from a scholarly as opposed to publishing perspective so here s a thesis if there truly is a crisis in scholarly publishing it has arisen from this fundamental first cause the end of the era in which institutions sponsoring presses saw the publishing of scholarship as something near to the heart of their core mission and deserving to be supported on those terms result what was never intended to be a system left to the vicissitudes of the market has become exactly that scholarly books have become high priced prestige driven luxury goods not by accident but by forgetfulness i m sure there are various complications particularly that some popular subjects are marketable in softcover but the article and the comments are an interesting read the article also cites a report which estimates that the average academic book now carries a price tag of 90 up 50 from a decade ago i e 2002 2012 my vauban under siege monograph costs twice as much so i guess that means it s twice a good as the average monograph ah the life of luxury truth be told though my book probably doesn t cost that much for most readers as it so happens i just received a royalty payment which adds yet another wrinkle to the mix i was curious about the number of copies my book has sold i won t give the number on the statement but it s several times lower than the number i d been told a few years back so i went to check on worldcat to see how many copies were in libraries to my shock the book was reported in 753 libraries now i know i haven t sold anywhere near that many copies so i explored further and quickly realized that most of those copies are purely digital i e a university or group of state university branches pool their pennies together and subscribe to publishers e collections which give them access to all of the monographs within the publisher s catalog or maybe by series who knows something to keep in mind if you re concerned about the circulation of your future book or even thinking about terms in a future book contract june 26 2014 in bibliography leave a comment soldiers and violence who woulda thunk it the latest issue of history 99 no 336 july 2014 has a collection of articles on violence in early modern britain revolving specifically around the intersection between violence and human rights those interested in the topic should consult all the articles but those more narrowly focused on military matters might be particularly interested in 1 malcolm smuts organized violence in the elizabethan monarchical republic pp 414 443 abstract this article argues that the tudor concept of england as a protestant commonwealth normally implied a belief in the legitimacy and necessity of armed violence against enemies of god and the public good in the absence of a standing army the instruments of such violence had to be mobilized partly through the voluntary efforts of subjects who regarded warfare as a form of public service the article goes on to explore how ideas and practices of armed violence shaped government policies in england and ireland in england the privy council constructed a system of county militias under the control of a cohort deemed loyal to the protestant state and toyed with schemes for using martial law against vagrants and other groups who threatened public order but in the absence of a successful invasion or major rebellion this machinery of military control was never fully mobilized and a reaction eventually set in against its potential abuse by contrast in ireland linguistic and cultural divisions weaker institutions of civil government and the preponderance of catholicism created situations in which brutal military coercion sometimes appeared the only effective method of maintaining civil governance and protestant control the weakness of royal supervision over the captains who carried out government policy on the ground also enabled freelance violence elizabethan brutality in ireland was not simply a product of colonial rule it reflected the dark underside of commonwealth ideals of civility political initiative and godly rule 2 vincent carey as lief to the gallows as go to the irish wars human rights and the abuse of the elizabethan soldier in ireland 1600 1603 pp 468 486 abstract this essay explores the treatment of the elizabethan soldier in ireland under lord deputy mountjoy from 1600 to 1603 the years of the most atrocious violence of the conflict coming at the experiences of the ordinary soldier in these years from the perspective of human rights forces the historian to a set of rather uncomfortable conclusions for while many of these soldiers inflicted horrific violence on the native non combatant population their own experiences were determined by a set of forces and practices that left them vulnerable to some of the most extreme abuses of the age while this essay will address the question of human rights and the implications and applications of the terminology for elizabeth england it will do so within the context of a war that abused the ordinary soldier as much as it abused the non combatant irish yet the abuse of these men is worth re examining as it provides us with an insight to the state s attitude to the subordinate classes and their basic rights for in examining the recruitment equipping and treatment of the ordinary soldiers in the field we find a brutalized mass whose only option was to endure or flee a mass whose fundamental rights as subjects of the english crown or indeed as humans were badly abused they were often masterless men unsuitable for combat and ultimately the victims of social cleansing victims of class and coercion the wretchedness of their conditions of service was thus forced inevitably downwards on the helpless non combatant gaelic irish june 22 2014 in methodology 2 comments the deceptive nature of note taking in any note taking system having lots of categories or fields in database parlance in which to record information about sources aka meta data is important really important for historians simple tags aren t enough nor is relying on the full text alone nor is a single hierarchical organizational scheme what on earth do i mean keep reading let s say i m looking at the question of how early moderns perceived military deception trickery subterfuge lying and the like you find a bunch of germane sources and take notes on their discussions of the subject to simplify matters we ll stay theoretical focusing on how contemporaries expressed their preferences for either deception or straightforwardness in war rather than using other measures the frequency of their actual reliance on such sly stratagems etc perhaps you try to get a good balance of sources including theoretical discussion of the use of stratagems as well as reactions to specific examples of deception on campaign deception thy name is megatron so you ve found dozens or hundreds of quotes from contemporaries verily the digital age has given early modern historians military ones at least a bounty of evidence to sift through you have plenty of notes on other topics as well so you need to identify those specific to deception for future reference you could take the shortest route and simply tag them all with a deception tag assuming you want to examine whether contemporaries considered deception laudable or execrable you could make your life easier and further sort your quotes into two bins based on the stance presented in each source those quotes that support the use of deception pro deception and those that are against it anti deception or maybe there are three possible values for this variable pro con and ambivalent neutral heck maybe add in a separate value for those sources that you checked which you d think should discuss the utility of deception but actually don t perhaps that s noteworthy so we have one stance category with four possible values pro con neutral ambivalent or not discussed call the stance variable a group a tag a field a category or what have you note takers don t appear to have a standardized vocabulary for such things thus tagged you can now easily find those hundreds of examples in just about any note taking system worth its salt but historians at least systematic ones want to look for patterns within that data a whole range of questions start to bubble up maybe you want to see if particular types of people shared the same view on the subject or whether geography or chronology or both played a role in shaping opinions on the morality of deception maybe you wonder whether these contemporary prescriptions and proscriptions were universal or did contemporary judgments depend on the situation maybe you speculate that there are finer gradations within the pro deception camp figuring out all of these questions require slicing the data in a number of different ways to do this you need additional categories to differentiate your notes on deception let s say you re looking at the question primarily from the perspective of two groups say the english and the french see how we re staying totally hypothetical here so maybe you want to see if the english were more likely than the french to express their opposition to the use of trickery if you wanted to count up the quotes you could even get all statistical in a cross tab y sort of way nominal variable x nominal variable so we should add another variable call it side to the stance measure that s two variables to keep track of for each quote but side isn t really specific enough what we probably mean by side is actually the side of the author of the quote this assumes of course that the author s point of view is represented by the quote i e the quote isn t part of a dialogue where one or both characters might not even represen...
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