Gaudy Night

trowelblazers: Jane Dieulafoy: Cross-Dressing War Hero and Persian Pioneer

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:19:58 +0100

trowelblazers: Jane Dieulafoy: Cross-Dressing War Hero and Persian Pioneer:

Jane Dieulafoy (date unknown). This image may only be re-used for non-commercial purposes.

Jane (Jeanne) Dieulafoy (1851-1916) could be one of the reasons you get to wear trousers in the field. The French government of her day granted her the special privilege of wearing men’s…

"I think there’s a lesson to be learned from Palmer, and it’s not the falling-into-the-crowd lesson..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:11:46 +0100

“I think there’s a lesson to be learned from Palmer, and it’s not the falling-into-the-crowd lesson she offers. Yes, she’s correct: The web offers an opportunity to fall into the open arms of fans, in ways that weren’t available before. Here’s the catch: The web also makes it near-impossible to fall into the arms of just one’s fans. Each time you dive into the crowd, some portion of the audience before you consists of observers with no interest in catching you. And you are still asking them to, because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties. Its content isn’t like a newsletter mailed discreetly to private homes; it’s like a magazine on a newsstand, asking to be purchased. Telling the world all about your life can look generous to fans and like a barrage of narcissism to everyone else… This is a way of using technology to reach out to and engage interested fans, yes, but it’s also indistinguishable from the intrusive begging of any corporation…”

- The Amanda Palmer Problem — Vulture

"It is unlikely, for example, that she would have set about the welfare state in the way Cameron and..."

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:32:11 +0100

“It is unlikely, for example, that she would have set about the welfare state in the way Cameron and Osborne have done. What she had in common with them was an overriding desire to manipulate the electorate for the benefit of the Tory Party. While she might have hoped that popular capitalism would turn us all into entrepreneurs she chiefly hoped it would turn us all into Tory voters.”

- Ross McKibbin · Anything but Benevolent: Who benefits? · LRB 25 April 2013

"I don’t find my appreciation of David Bowie, for instance, even slightly compromised when I..."

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:13:57 +0100

“I don’t find my appreciation of David Bowie, for instance, even slightly compromised when I acknowledge that the glamour of his work is deeply shaped by his status as a signifier of particular generational, racial, national, gender, and class identities. A historically specific fabulousness is no less fabulous. The social specificity of Bowie’s glam does, on the other hand, complicate the kind of rationale I could provide for requiring students to study his music. It makes it harder to invoke him as a vehicle for a general cultivation that transcends mere specialized learning. And that’s why the sociology of culture has posed a problem for the humanities: not that it undermines aesthetic discourse as such, but that it complicates claims about the social necessity of aesthetic cultivation.”

- The long history of humanistic reaction to sociology. | The Stone and the Shell

del-fi: Lessons from Mendeley: Where's The Open In The Model?

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 19:51:37 +0100

del-fi: Lessons from Mendeley: Where's The Open In The Model?:

del-fi:

I’m not mad. I either avoid, from a professional basis, companies built on closure, or I mitigate my expectations of them and do a lot of backing up. Because at some point unless the revenues come from open, the customer acquisition strategy of openness will be deprecated.

Elvis Costello - Tramp The Dirt Down (by alexredcloud)

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:59:25 +0100

Elvis Costello - Tramp The Dirt Down (by alexredcloud)

Scholarship: Beyond the paper : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 07:56:05 +0000

Scholarship: Beyond the paper : Nature : Nature Publishing Group:

Now we are witnessing the transition to yet another scholarly communication system — one that will harness the technology of the Web to vastly improve dissemination. What the journal did for a single, formal product (the article), the Web is doing for the entire breadth of scholarly output. The article was an attempt to freeze and mount some part of the scholarly process for display. The Web opens the workshop windows to disseminate scholarship as it happens, erasing the artificial distinction between process and product.

"RSS is really, really great. There’s a good chance if you’re reading this, I don’t have to tell you..."

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 08:18:13 +0000

“RSS is really, really great. There’s a good chance if you’re reading this, I don’t have to tell you that because you already subscribe to my blog. And it’s a big part of why the open web beats social media. RSS is open; you publish to your feed, and subscribers of that feed get the updates. Why would you not rely exclusively on Twitter or Facebook to do the same thing via their platforms? More people use those, right? Because Facebook and Twitter are companies that ultimately control what you publish and what others see. Your website is an extension of the open web. Open beats closed when it comes to disseminating information.”

- Why a Website (and RSS) Is Still Your Best Bet | JeremiahTolbert.com

mini. Quiet Babylon: The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 08:22:59 +0000

mini. Quiet Babylon: The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations:

quietbabylon:

The scenario imagined is one where there is a button that humans push if the AI gets an answer right and the AI wants to get a lot of button presses, and eventually it realizes that the best way to get button presses is to kill all the humans and institute a rapid fire button-pressing regime. …

And all I can think is: we already have one of those. It is pretty clear to anyone who’s paying attention that 1. a marketplace regime of firms dedicated to maximizing profit has—broadly speaking—added a lot of value to the world 2. there are a lot of important cases where corporate profit maximization causes harm to humans 3. corporations are—broadly speaking—really good at ensuring that their needs are met.

News from the Old Bailey Online: An Old Bailey Online 10th Anniversary Blog Event

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:21:39 +0000

News from the Old Bailey Online: An Old Bailey Online 10th Anniversary Blog Event:

oldbaileyonline:

The Old Bailey Online launched on 15 April 2003. We want to hold a birthday party!

Several years ago, there was an Old Bailey Online Blog Symposium: a number of bloggers got together to blog about their research or teaching work using the website, and co-ordinated their posts over one weekend….

And Richard it was « Mike Pitts – Digging Deeper

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 11:48:05 +0000

And Richard it was « Mike Pitts – Digging Deeper:

… we were being shown a substantial research project that was a case study in how archaeology works at its best, from questioning and planning, to fieldwork, analyses and conclusion. The distinct but linked strands of research were given to us in one go, so their joint impact on the questions could be evaluated. Peer-reviewed publication will take longer, and will see those strands unravelled, as different journals and different research lines complete at different speeds. Armed only with those, the media would make it look more confusing, reporting some of the studies and not others, with differing emphases, and – a key point – the public would be less well served.

And, this is the rub, so would academia. Asking specialists to address a wider audience, during their research, forces them to think beyond the narrow confines of their immediate tasks, to see the bigger picture. It demands that they communicate in clear language, which means they have to think clearly. It encourages them (though in this case I doubt such incentive was needed) to work together, not competitively. And it asks them to think very hard about what they are going to say. For if they get it wrong, they surely will be fried.

Sometimes the peers in the street are the ones that matter most.

On the Learning High Street « LRB blog

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 14:00:00 +0000

On the Learning High Street « LRB blog:

At the moment, academics’ offices take up 21 per cent of total space; this is set to be reduced to around 10 per cent. Office space for UCL Estates, the Registry, finance and human resources, meanwhile, will expand from 5 per cent to 25 per cent.

As academics and students are crammed ever closer together, commercial projects will fill the spaces they vacate.

Welcome to the 21st-century university, where commerce and administration (quite literally) crowd out teachers and students.

OK, so let’s grant for a moment the premise that the withdrawal of funding forces the university to diversify and maximise income; and that modern universities are massively complex organisations whose administrative needs, simply in order to function effectively, are far larger than even a generation ago.

But where does it end?

"Gove’s planning to teach history through great men. It’s like promising to put ether and..."

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 09:00:31 +0000

“Gove’s planning to teach history through great men. It’s like promising to put ether and miasma back at the heart of the science curriculum.”

- Twitter / earlymodernjohn: Gove’s planning to teach history …

LGBT History and Old Bailey Online

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 07:55:09 +0000

oldbaileyonline:

February is LGBT History Month. The Old Bailey Proceedings is a rich resource for gay history and our background page has a detailed discussion and advice on using the website as a source.

"It did dampen my spirits to see so many prominent historians attempt to pour cold water on the whole..."

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 07:54:22 +0000

“It did dampen my spirits to see so many prominent historians attempt to pour cold water on the whole discovery. On a day where archaeology and British history made headlines across the world it seemed petty and bitter to send out snarky remarks that the discovery wouldn’t really ‘change’ anything. I don’t think it is necessary for the discovery to change anything to be noteworthy. Your colleagues have had significant success in finding a frickin’ monarch and the whole world is talking about it. Say congratulations and then shut up.”

- Finding a Lost King in the Reality TV and Social Media Age | Tales From A Tour Guide

Richard III and public history

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:38:00 +0000

I was interested today in the reactions among some academics and commentators to the University of Leicester’s Richard III-in-a-car-park press conference. Personally, I think it’s fucking wonderful that some 500 year old bones under a car park and a load of nerdy stuff about DNA can capture the public’s attention, and I was very impressed at the way the Leicester researchers handled the story.

But apparently I should actually be worrying about whether the story is really historically important enough to get all this attention. And I should be shocked that the archaeologists held a press conference before they’d got their research all properly peer-reviewed and published in the right places. How very dare they tell the plebs about it before getting full academic approval!

(Perhaps we should feel sorry for Charlotte Higgins at the Graun. It seems the press conference gave her “chills”. Can they not afford heating at the Graun offices any more?)

A nuanced response from Cath Fletcher still contains this odd argument:

Amid the excitement over Richard III we should be conscious of how news values shape the history we see on TV and in the press. Imagine that the Leicester archaeologists had uncovered not a royal grave, but a grave of some peasant farmers, results from which completely changed the picture of what we know about human nutrition in the fifteenth century. Not so glamorous, but just as important in understanding the past – perhaps more so. They wouldn’t have the media pull of ‘England’s lost king’. Traditional ‘kings and queens’ history, so criticised over the decades by historians, still plays very well on TV.

But wait: the British public have spent almost 20 years glued to Time Team and other TV archaeology which is almost never about kings and queens. Yes, they still like a royal story, but that doesn’t exclude interest in peasant farmers too. This is not any old royal story. It isn’t making a big splash just because it’s a king. It’s because it’s also about romance and tragedy, mystery and controversy. (Not to mention violence.) It’s also about the incongruity (cue many, many jokes on Twitter) of finding a king buried under a car park. But most of all, it’s about public interest in history and archaeology and forensic science. Without that, hardly anyone but the most ardent royalists and the members of the Richard Was Slandered Society would care.

You know what, academics? History doesn’t have to be important to academic history to matter. It’s not all about you.

The only reasonable way forward is for researchers to take the...

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 20:11:00 +0000

The only reasonable way forward is for researchers to take the initiative, and to show the kind of academic leadership that Professors Hey and Harnad demonstrated a decade ago - to start being proactive in their own scholarly communications. (via RepositoryMan: The Basics of Scholarly Communications in the UK)

Carnivalesque: Transitions and Meetings « Early Modern Notes

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 16:43:42 +0000

Carnivalesque: Transitions and Meetings « Early Modern Notes:

A New Year brings a new look to Carnivalesque: from now on carnival editions will cover everything from ancient history to early modernity.

"we heard a great deal about data, to the point where data seemed to assume a life of its own, an..."

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:38:07 +0000

“we heard a great deal about data, to the point where data seemed to assume a life of its own, an energetic effervescent life force that needed to be freed so that medieval and other forms of scholarship could be transformed into new ‘cool’ forms by its remarkable qualities. It seemed that, for the participants in the conference, we are no longer curators or scholars but makers and consumers of data. In this perspective, data is presented as in some way offering a more objective, less problematic view of historic cultures and societies than the archives or manuscripts from which it is drawn.”

- Digital Riffs: The Deceptions of Data

On /That/ Statement by History Journal Editors

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:25:48 +0000

On /That/ Statement by History Journal Editors:

Secondly, do these editors have any idea of the reach of a niche journal article in the humanities? It’s tiny! Far from banging on about how terrible it is that people can use this material they should instead be more worried about the fact that hardly anybody reads this stuff. Quite frankly, they should be more concerned about being ignored. If somebody commercially uses work, done by an academic, for which the publisher paid them nothing, the academics themselves have lost nothing. Instead, society has gained by the use of RCUK-funded (or institutionally supported) material. …

Thirdly, the idea that (especially in the humanities) academics’ work will be exploited, except by the publisher, is ridiculous. They cry: “we do not want our authors to have to sign away their rights in order to publish with us”. So, I assume, none of these journals requires a copyright transfer? You offer totally permissive licensing? If not, then I call hypocrisy… All publishers want authors to sign over their copyright, nominally to protect the interests of their authors. The actual effect is always, though, that authors’ rights are eroded so that publishers can continue their commercial exploitation, the only form of exploitation that they fail to mention. …

Gaudy Night

trowelblazers: Jane Dieulafoy: Cross-Dressing War Hero and Persian Pioneer

"I think there’s a lesson to be learned from Palmer, and it’s not the falling-into-the-crowd lesson..."

"It is unlikely, for example, that she would have set about the welfare state in the way Cameron and..."

"I don’t find my appreciation of David Bowie, for instance, even slightly compromised when I..."

del-fi: Lessons from Mendeley: Where's The Open In The Model?

Elvis Costello - Tramp The Dirt Down (by alexredcloud)

Scholarship: Beyond the paper : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

"RSS is really, really great. There’s a good chance if you’re read­ing this, I don’t have to tell you..."

mini. Quiet Babylon: The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations

News from the Old Bailey Online: An Old Bailey Online 10th Anniversary Blog Event

And Richard it was « Mike Pitts – Digging Deeper

On the Learning High Street « LRB blog

"Gove’s planning to teach history through great men. It’s like promising to put ether and..."

LGBT History and Old Bailey Online

"It did dampen my spirits to see so many prominent historians attempt to pour cold water on the whole..."

Richard III and public history

The only reasonable way forward is for researchers to take the...

Carnivalesque: Transitions and Meetings « Early Modern Notes

"we heard a great deal about data, to the point where data seemed to assume a life of its own, an..."

On /That/ Statement by History Journal Editors

"RSS is really, really great. There’s a good chance if you’re reading this, I don’t have to tell you..."