Early Modern Notes

Carnivalesque is looking for someone to help with running ancient/medieval editions every other month. This would mainly involve finding hosts and assisting with publicity. Could you help?

The Carnival’s resident medievalist has been unable to participate much lately because of work pressures, and my own expertise is largely early modern (I’m particularly ignorant when it comes to the pre-medieval blogosphere), so I think that side of the Carnival has been a bit neglected.

The role won’t take up much time, but the main commitments will be:
1. publicity for upcoming editions. They are usually scheduled for weekends in the second half of the month, and the main publicity work starts up to a couple of weeks beforehand, in addition to promoting the edition after it’s posted. You may also need to help with finding material for editions from time to time, if there’s a shortage of nominations.
2. recruiting hosts for future editions. We usually try to keep at least a couple of editions ahead by placing regular calls for hosts, but sometimes you may need to actively recruit/cajole/armtwist if there aren’t any volunteers.

Novice hosts in particular are likely to look to you for support and guidance.

Therefore, you need to have good knowledge of quality blogging about the ancient and medieval world and plenty contacts with bloggers. You don’t necessarily have to be an academic or student but you probably will be, or have been, a blogger yourself. You should be familiar with blog carnivals, and ideally you’ll have experience of hosting.

If interested, please get in touch – leave a comment below, tweet me @sharon_howard or use the contact form.

I set up some Twitter archives for the American Historical Association 2012 meeting. Now the meeting is finished and the Twitter streams are dying down, I thought I’d shove the data into a spreadsheet and get a snapshot for some stats (all counts at time of snapshot, 12 January).

#AHA2012 or #AHA12
Number of tweets: 4590
Number of tweeters: 679 (6.8 tweets per tweeter)
382 (56.3%) posted 1 tweet only
86 (12.7%) posted 10 tweets or more
8 (1.2%) posted 100 or more
Most prolific individual: 306 tweets

#THATcamp
Number of tweets: 581
Number of tweeters: 151
78 (51.7%) posted 1 tweet
15 (9.9%) posted 10 tweets or more
Most prolific individual: 34 tweets

I can make the data available for analysis if anyone wants it! (In fact, will probably put a version up on Google Docs in the next day or so.)

PS: Some similar stats from the MLA conference held at the same time, as of 10 January:

12K tweets, 1341 twitterers. 80% of tweets came from 30% of twitterers. 53% of twitterers tweeted only once.

It’s striking how similar the one-time only stats are, though the number of tweets per tweeter is higher (about 9). The numbers are larger overall because the MLA meeting is larger and Twitter is more established there (and they had free wifi in every room, I think, unlike the AHA). (Public Google Doc of all #MLA12 tweets here)

Yes – I’m taking a break (mostly) from 18th-century London, and for the next few months I’ll be working on Manuscripts Online: Written Culture from 1000 to 1500, a kind of sequel to Connected Histories for medievalists.

Manuscripts Online will enable users to search an enormous body of online primary resources relating to written and early printed culture in Britain during the period 1000 to 1500.

A single search engine will enable users to undertake sophisticated full-text searching of literary manuscripts, historical documents and early printed books which are located on websites owned by libraries, archives, universities and publishers. Users will be able to search the resources by keyword, but also by specific keyword types, such as person and place name, date and language (eg. Middle English, Latin and Anglo-Norman), thanks to techniques which we are using called automated entity recognition. Additionally, users will be able to visualise search results using maps of medieval Britain and create their own annotations to the data for public consumption, thereby building a knowledge base around this critical mass of primary source data.

Please spread the word to anyone who you think might be interested! Right now, we’re looking for willing volunteers to help with user testing – if you’d like to be involved in developing the site right from the beginning or know anyone who might (students, academics and non-academics are all welcome), there is more info here.

Early Modern Resources has been around quite a while now, and it showed. The site design went back to a more innocent time (c.2001…) when an “olde-worlde” palette wasn’t quite as yawny for a historical site as it is now. And so I’ve given it a complete overhaul; please do feel free to report any problems you encounter. [If it looks strange, try first doing a 'hard' refresh, Ctrl+F5, to clear your browser cache.] Also, I’m very grateful to friends on Twitter who gave me rapid feedback on the new design!

The problem with doing an update of the look of a site is that you start noticing outdated content too. Aargh. I’ll be spending some time going through the site over the next month or two and giving it all a bit of a cleanup. I’ll probably be removing a few old low-quality resources, especially if they haven’t been updated in a long time. Back in the early 2000s there was so little quality early modern material online that I’d often include sites just for the sake of having something on a significant topic. I think it’s time to raise standards a little from those days.

I’ve also noticed some material that used to be freely accessible on university websites but has now become restricted to their own students. A very regrettable development, I think. I’ll be removing anything like this as well.

And I’ll also be doing something about the rather shameful fact that there are at least 80 resources under the label ‘Americas’ which I’ve never got around to subdividing more helpfully!

Finally, I’ve added an important new Primary Sources category, ‘Editions‘. This is specifically for (textual) primary sources that are suitable for scholarly historical research: at a minimum this means full transcriptions and/or scanned images, rather than extracts or selections from original sources, and ideally fully searchable and accompanied by contextual background material and information about project methodology. Compared to those early days a decade ago, it’s amazing just how many of them there are now, and not all are as well known as they ought to be.

Yesterday was Ada Lovelace Day 2011. The brief:

This Ada Lovelace Day on October 7, share your story about a woman — whether an engineer, a scientist, a technologist or mathematician — who has inspired you to become who you are today. Write a blog post, record a podcast, film a video, draw a comic, or pick any other way to talk about the women who have been guiding lights in your life. Give your heroine the credit she deserves!

I randomly collected links that I liked during the day on my Tumblr blog, but there were so many good historically-minded ones I thought I’d round them up here.

Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy

Five Historic Female Mathematicians You Should Know | Surprising Science

the ongoing saga of minouette: Madame Wu and the Violation of Parity
Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997), Chinese-born American physicist

Ada Lovelace Day: Emmy Noether and Symmetry, Revisited « Galileo’s Pendulum
mathematician Emmy Noether (1882-1935)

Daughters of Urania | The Renaissance Mathematicus
17th-century female astronomers.

Medicine

For Ada Lovelace Day: Lucy Wills « Stuff And Nonsense
haematologist who discovered folate (folic acid)

Florence Seibert, PhD, receiving National Achievement Award from Mrs. Eleanor D. Roosevelt for her work on tuberculosis, 1944.

Technology

For Ada Lovelace Day: Jane Coe | Mercurius Politicus
Jane Coe, 17th century printer.

early modern women printers: an Ada Lovelace post » Wynken de Worde

Beulah Henry: “I invent because I cannot help it” « Public Historian
Prolific inventor Beulah Louise Henry (1887-1973).

For Ada Lovelace Day: Eleanor Coade – Georgian London
renowned artificial stone manufacturer and ceramic artist

Computing

Ada Lovelace and the Luddites. | Doing Good Science, Scientific American Blog Network

Longitude, ladies and computers – Board of Longitude blog
Mary Edwards, a ‘human’ computer

It’s Ada Lovelace Day! | AXON
Daphne Oram, electronic music pioneer

Don’t look for meanings, count mentions – PHP/ir
Karen Spärck Jones – natural language processing, machine translation, and search

Ada Lovelace Day: Sandra K. Johnson « Valerie Aurora
Parallel processing expert and first African-American woman electrical engineering PhD in the U.S.

Ada Lovelace Day: Susan Hockey « Bethany Nowviskie
a digital humanities pioneer and mentor

Sources and stories

Captivated by Science, Mathematics, and Imagination: An 18th Century Lady’s Commonplace Book

Early Modern Thought Online: The Blog: Learned Women in Early Modernity: Forgotten Sources

Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment by Patricia Fara « The Sleepless Reader
Book review.

Ada Lovelace Day
historical and personal perspectives from Ian Hopkinson

Ada Lovelace Day 2011: Telling Stories « Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth
including the WRENs who worked at Bletchley Park

It’s two years since Katrina Gulliver posted the first #twitterstorians list. Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

That also means it’s about 1 year since I really started using Twitter seriously for the History Carnival and Carnivalesque. The experiment has done wonders for the Carnivals. Twitter is perfect for communicating with existing readers and reaching new ones, for begging for help, calls for posts for upcoming editions and announcements when editions are posted. (Both carnivals have hosts lined up several months ahead – something that’s never happened before.) It’s spread the word more widely and effectively than anything I ever tried before, and I’m eternally grateful to all the followers and retweeters who’ve made it work.

At the same time last year, I launched The Broadside to collect history blogging (and similar material) that was being linked by the people the History Carnival account follows. That used Tweeted Times, an online service that aggregates and ranks links on Twitter and creates an online ‘newspaper’ of the most popular (and, importantly, publishes RSS feeds of the newspapers). Since then, Tweeted Times has extended its service to newspapers based on search queries, and I’ve learned a bit about how to use the Twitter API.

So I’ve been thinking about ways to do more with The Broadside and here’s the result:

thebroadside.org

The site is intended to do two main things, both of which will gradually be expanded:

Firstly, to aggregate the most popularly linked history blogging and news on Twitter and help with the perennial problems of how to keep up and find the good stuff amidst all the chatter;

Secondly, as a resource to highlight what historians are already doing on Twitter and help us make more effective use of the service in research and teaching.

So, happy 2nd birthday Twitterstorians!

I mean, blimey.

I didn’t make a huge deal out of reaching the 100th edition of the History Carnival because in a way the number doesn’t feel all that meaningful. As the host notes, the shifts in the Carnival’s schedule between the first edition in January 2005 and finally settling down to monthly intervals in 2007 complicate things somewhat. Carnivalesque, after all, is older (September 2004) but it’s not even reached its 80s.

Nonetheless, there’s something seductive about a nice big round number that provides an excuse to reflect – not to mention do some basic housekeeping that I ought to have done ages ago. I’ve checked and cleaned up the links to all the past carnival editions; as you might expect when going back several years on the Web, a fair few links weren’t working. Some blogs had simply moved and it was merely a case of updating addresses. However, a few are no longer in existence or are inaccessible.

Between the Wayback Machine and my own sporadic efforts at archiving, most of these have been retrieved in some form: at present 89 of the editions are accessible at their original blog, and a further 8 in an archived format. One of the remaining three may still exist in an offline database and I’m hopeful the host can retrieve it at some point; the other two are on blogs that are now restricted to invited members and I’ll try to contact the hosts to see whether I can get archive versions to post on the HC site. I’ve taken Zotero snapshots of all 97 available editions and will try to remember to do that as standard for future editions so there will always be a record saved for posterity.

So that’s the housekeeping; what about the reflecting? Last time I did that, nearly two years ago, I was in a notably pessimistic mood. I wouldn’t have been at all sure that we’d get to 100. And yet, here we still are, and the Carnival seems in pretty good shape. I should do some research on visitor traffic to the editions and links on the Web, but I do know that my worries about finding hosts and getting nominations have pretty much disappeared.

Twitter has made all the difference. The Carnival has been on Twitter since last September; @historycarnival at the moment of writing has 930 followers (and nearly all of them aren’t spambots). That’s 930 people reading announcements about HC and Carnivalesque, and other relevant carnivals I happen to learn about, calls for nominations, begging tweets for hosts – and retweeting them to their own followers who might not yet be following @historycarnival themselves – in return for a relatively minimal investment of time and effort.

Back in September ’09, I and others wondered if the speed and immediacy of Twitter were making blog carnivals redundant. Fortunately, it seems there’s still a place for the more leisurely round-up – and after all it shouldn’t be forgotten that there are still many people online who detest Twitter. I think I still need to work on new non-Twitter-based communication strategies, but it feels a lot more like hard work than the few seconds it takes to send tweets that will reach several hundred people. Suggestions welcome!

Part of the answer might be tools I’ve been playing around with, which can be used to automatically send Twitter communications to other destinations. I suspect I could do more with the Broadside in that respect. I’ve recently started using ifttt, a very quick and nifty way to convert tweets into various other forms: emails, Delicious bookmarks, blog posts, etc. We’ll have to see.

Here’s to the next 100 editions!

For several years I’ve had some kind of ‘early modern news’ page on this site (recently moved to EMR), grabbing RSS feeds from relevant blogs/resources by using a built-in WordPress function or a plugin. Meanwhile, I have a long list of early modern-related blogs in my feed reader on my computer. Recently I started wondering about the possibility of doing something a bit more interesting with all those feeds.

And then I got slightly carried away. Early Modern Commons is the result. I can’t help feeling ‘aggregator’ is a slightly grand term for it, but what the hell, I’m gonna use it anyway. It is much more than just a blogroll: it enables you to see at a glance the latest activity on blogs that may interest you, which are tagged by topic areas. It currently contains around 80 blogs, and I’ll be adding more. (And hopefully readers will help by submitting blogs I’ve missed and don’t know about.)

This may well be a slightly insane and doomed endeavour. As we all know, blogs appear all the time, shift in focus, move around, go dormant and sometimes die. I may find that it’s impossible to keep up so that the site is full of useless, out-dated information. But I want to give it a try. The early modern blogosphere is much bigger and more disparate than it used to be, and it seems to me that this can provide a useful hub for early modernists from different fields, both within and beyond academia.

I should note that, although some very basic quality control will be applied (for relevance and factualness), it’s not a “showcase”. Readers will have to evaluate the quality of blogs for themselves. Also, I haven’t included much of the content of the blogs themselves – it’s confined to the titles of recent posts. I want to send readers to blogs, not pinch their material to boost my own site traffic!

I’ve included links to all the blogs’ feeds as well as to the blogs themselves, so that readers can easily add them to their own feed readers. (At some point I’d like to include links to related Twitter feeds, but that’s a manual job that will need a bit of spare time.)

There are various tools that can be used for this kind of aggregator, such as Planet, and I was tempted to try them out (new toys!) but decided to stick with WordPress, at least for now, as it’s what I know well and it’s more convenient for backend administration (as I’m running WP Multi-site anyway). I’m using a slightly customised version of the WordPress RSS in Page plugin to grab updates from feeds, which itself depends on the SimplePie Core plugin. I’ve also made extensive use of WordPress’s built-in custom fields to retain the feeds’ data structure for possible export and re-use in the future.

Perhaps I should have subtitled this post “I ♥ RSS”.

I posted a few months ago about the Crime in the Community project for Old Bailey Online, and we brought the work to completion last week. This has been a relatively small but really satisfying project (I would have written about it earlier, but was kept busy by the Connected Histories launch on Thursday).

The project started last October with funding from the JISC Impact and Embedding of Digitised Resources Programme. We carried out a rapid(ish) user impact analysis, which was an entirely new but rewarding experience (our report can be downloaded from here). With the aid of the rather awesome Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources, this included analysis of site traffic and incoming links, bibliometrics, an online questionnaire, interviews and focus groups.

Previously we had only a rough sense of the ways the site was being used, even in terms of visitor traffic. We learned a lot in the process and it helped us to decide on the new features and functionality to add to the site. So, here are the important bits:

User registration/workspace

• User workspaces: bookmark trials etc, save search queries, organise them in folders
• Facility to export the information saved in the workspace
• User registration for London Lives and Old Bailey Online is integrated so that only one account is needed for both sites
• Registered users will also be able to report errors through a corrections facility integrated into the site

Extracting information from the site into other formats

• Citation generator for trials etc and background pages
• ‘Print page’ function (with citation) for trials etc to enable you to print a page or simply to copy and paste the text without the usual formatting and images
• Facility to export raw data from statistics search results

Search improvements

• Facility to refine searches
• Keyword searches have a new set of options (and / or / phrase / ‘advanced’) to facilitate sophisticated searches while (hopefully) keeping it simple for most basic needs

Tutorials and Guides

• Short, basic tutorials aimed primarily at novice/infrequent site users: Getting Started and Search Help (video walkthroughs)
• More in-depth tutorials for research users: Using the Workspace, Doing Statistics, Organising Research With Reference Management Tools (focusing on Zotero)
• For teaching and studying: Using the Proceedings in University Teaching, How to Read an Eighteenth-Century Trial, and How are the Proceedings Different when read Online?

Bibliographies

There has been one significant casualty of the project: after reviewing the user stats and responses in the survey and interviews, we decided to pull the Old Bailey Wiki. This meant that we would need to find another way to maintain the site bibliography. I used Zotero intensively while I was compiling a list of publications citing Old Bailey Online (mostly from Google Scholar and Google Books) for the impact analysis, and Zotero’s export facilities and collaborative tools seemed an almost obvious solution to the problem.

So, the ‘official’ Bibliography is now maintained in Zotero and you can view it here at the site. And, if you have a Zotero account, you can contribute items for updates to the Public Group Library. We would welcome your help to keep it updated!

And: good things still to come…

There were some popular requests among surveyed users for a number of features that weren’t feasible within the constraints of a short project. But quite a few of these should be satisfied by separate projects within the next few months:

First, an Old Bailey API is in development (as part of the Data Mining with Criminal Intent project) and will be launched in the next few months. This will facilitate more sophisticated searching options and facilites for extracting and downloading data for external analysis.

Second, we’ve started work on a new project, Locating London’s Past, which will improve the mapping features of the site (among quite a few other things!).

Apologies: this was supposed to go up on 9 March, just after IWD, but work and life got in the way. Hope you enjoy it anyway!

Sources and Discussions

Women don’t always change channel when the bombs begin to fall | BBC History Magazine
Amanda Vickery looks at whether there really is a gender gap in historical programming: “bonnets for the women and battles for the blokes?”

Alchemy, Women and Data Visualisation
Sienna Latham writes on the role of data visualisation in her historical research on English women’s chymical activities during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Women’s history & Wikipedia’s gender gap
Shane Landrum commented on Wikipedia’s history coverage biases and did something about it: improving a women’s history article. He followed this up by setting up a WikiProject for Women’s History. Why not contribute something for Women’s History Month?

Exploring the History of Women – More on Documenting the Underdocumented
Melissa Mannon at ArchivesInfo lists some excellent online women’s history resources.

Women in the Arts and Professions

Fascinating Women: Nell Brinkley
From Edwardian Promenade, a post about the illustrator, Nell Brinkley, “one of the most popular and prolific of American illustrators” in the early 20th century’s “golden age of illustration”.

Madame de Sévigné
Mme Guillotine has a post about one of her literary heroines and personal influences.

Adventures in Feministory: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
LIndsay Baltus looks at Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s life and work (it’s not just the Yellow Wallpaper…).

Women First
The sex disqualification (removal) act of 1919 enabled women to enter the legal profession and the civil service and to become jurors: Philip Carter looks at six trailblazers.

An Uppity Dutch Master (part 1)
Judith Weingarten’s brilliant series of posts on Judith Leyster from last year (Part II; Part III).

Women and Science

Dangerous Curves: Maria Gaetana Agnesi
A wonderful post by Jennifer Ouellette, at Wonders and Marvels last year, about “the Walking Polyglot” who could speak French, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German and Latin by the time she was 13, wrote a seminal mathematics textbook, and became a nun.

Lise Meitner
Milena Popova wrote about Lise Meitner, a pioneering female physicist who worked on the early development of nuclear fission, and highlighted the discrimination faced by women scientists.

Women and Science, Past and Present
Philippa Hardman explores a similar theme of women’s historical struggles to participate in science equally with men, focusing on Darwin’s female correspondents.

Queens and Heroines

The Many Guises of Marie Antoinette
Emily Brand at The Artist’s Progress explored how Marie Antoinette was represented in French caricature “from the first rustlings of revolution to her execution in 1793″.

A Woman Will Be King
Judith Weingarten explained how Queen Bōrān became the King of Kings, the first female sole ruler of Persia. She also has a post on The Uppity Queen Arsinoë II, “one of the feistiest Hellenistic queens ever”.

History Heroine: Susan Travers
Katrina Gulliver writes at Notes from the Field on a heroine of World War II.

Rebels and Troublemakers

On March 4, Remember the Grand Picket for Voting Rights
Ann Bausum posts on the protests for female suffrage by the National Woman’s Party. This post is just one from a month-long blogging project, Kidlit Celebrates Women’s History Month, with a series of posts from children’s authors and bloggers about famous women and events related to women’s history.

10 Things You Should Know About Clara Lemlich
Jewesses With Attitude posts on the life of Clara, a leader of the mass strike of shirtwaist workers in New York’s garment industry in 1909.

Live-Blogging Women’s History: March 3, 1913
Ms Magazine Blog is “live blogging” a series “this day in feminist history” posts throughout March: this chronicles a massive suffrage parade and pageant in Washington DC.

Tragedy

‘The Somersetshire Lady’ a 17thc Ballad
From Women in Medieval and Early Modern History, a sad story; it may be fiction but reflects the reality of the lack of control married women had over their finances and lives.

I Am a young Wife that has cause to complain,
Yet I fear all my sorrowful Sighs are in vain;
For my Husband he is an invincible Sot,
There is nothing he minds but the Pipe, and the Pot:
When a Husband he is a sad Spendthrift, you know
Then a Wife must sad Sorrow and Grief undergoe…

‘I Shall Have to Answer Before my Maker…’ Or: Amelia Dyer and the Baby Farming Trade:
The Victorianist writes on the life and death of Amelia Dyer, whose case “brought to light the abuses in baby-farming” and caused a Victorian scandal.

The South Cerney Tragedy
From Cotswold History Blog, this is the harrowing story of Mary Hannah and her children.

Material Lives

Celebrate Women’s History Month by Picking Up a Needle and Thread
Craftzine.com blog surveys two centuries of women’s sewing.

Women in the Business of Food
Australian Women’s History forum is focusing for WHM 2011 on women who made significant contributions to the history of food, in cooking or in education, science, or technology and challenged “perceptions about women’s unpaid domestic skills”.

Frederick Douglass’s Women: In Progress: Anna Douglass’s Bandanna
Leigh Fought is intrigued by an item of Anna Douglass’s wardrobe: “The red bandanna caught my attention. White women did not tend to dress like that. They wore caps and bonnets and hats. Go south, however, to Savannah, to Charleston, to plantations, and black women wore scarves around their heads”.

Fabric Samples from an Early New York Businesswoman
The New-York Historical Society Library Collections Blog highlights the records of the business of Mary Alexander, which “provide a glimpse into the life of a colonial NYC businesswoman”.

Farthingales & Vizards – Elizabethan Women & their Dress
Dainty Ballerina has a lavishly illustrated and detailed look at what Elizabethan women wore.

Mother’s Friend
The Quack Doctor brings us “a liniment that claimed to make labour a doddle”.

In Brief

• Happy 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day
• A Glimpse into Black Women’s History, 1970’s and A Glimpse into Black Women’s History, 1960’s (Morgane Richardson)
• Kate Kelly: Women’s History Month: Female Firsts
• The women of early medieval Europe – not such ‘dark ages’ (Philobiblon)
• Badass Women « AAUW Dialog
• An A-Z of Australian women (Sharyn Lilley)
• Carnival of Genealogy, 103rd Edition (special for Women’s History Month)

And lastly…

For a little fun: Good Queen Bess from Hark, a Vagrant.

***

Thanks for nominations: Katrina Gulliver, Judith Weingarten, Margo Tanenbaum, Chris McDowall, and all the people who posted interesting links on Twitter!

There will hopefully be another Carnival later in the month to round up activity after IWD: I’m looking for a volunteer host (more info here)!