Historiological Notes

Handbag read

As I was leaving the flat the other day, I discovered that the book I was reading was to big for the smallish handbag I had planned to wear. In circumstances like this one have to possibilities; bigger handbag or smaller book. I usually go for the bigger handbag - I always carry big handbags. On this occasion,  however, I decided to spend the last minute before running for the metro, browsing my bookshelves for a suitable book. My eyes fell on a thin, small light blue spine next to my big yellow The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh: another book by A. A. Milne grabbed at a flee market at a time I cannot remember; Not That It Matters.

Not That It Matters is a superb collection of essays first published in 1919 (mine is a fourth edition from 1924). Milne covers a variety of topics - I still have a few to go - but all the essays have a lightness and easiness which make them an enjoyable read. The essays are short and have interesting perspectives on small things in life.

The first essay "The pleasure of writing" is rambling thought on the pleasure of writing with a new nib. But the rambling still has a thread linking it all together. A perfect blog post has the same quality; a new look written down in rambling thoughts, but still with a punch line or a plot.

Alexandre Dumas as a blogger

Jill writes about this project of digitalising Alexandre Dumas' newspaper articles. I am fascinated by the predecessors to blogging. Though, publishing a blog is easy, getting published in the 19th century was harder. Jill refers to Balzac's Lost Illusions as a description of 19th century journalism. I do not know why I did not blog about it, but when I read it early this spring, I also thought about blogging.

Women's gadgets anno 1928

Chip Chick has an interesting post on cameras aimed at women in the early twentieth century. Nice pictures too.

Quo vadis?

Historiological Notes celebrates its two year anniversary today. The first post was on Koselleck and was very representative of the blog in its first blogspot months. (I switched to Typepad in November 2003; all Blogger posts were transferred to this blog.) I started Historiological Notes to help me out writing my thesis. I wanted to discuss what I read, and it has been helpful, though there were not many readers the first year.

As my thesis is now finished I am not quite sure were to go with the blog. I feel a bit silly about keeping a personal blog with the academic - and maybe pretentious - name Historiological Notes. I wanted it to be historiological/historiographical and I still want it to be even though those aspects of my life is not the most prominent at the present. However, I still hope to get back to historiological blogging. More and more good history blogs are appearing and I would like to be amongst them.

I believe this post needs a follow up post when I have decided what my aims for blogging shall be.

Freebie

My iBook's AirPort has just found out that I have access to a no password protected network from my living room. How convenient, though perhaps not completly legal.

Blogging vs. writing

About two years ago, when I had just started reading blogs and contemplating writing my own, I filled in a questionnaire prepared by a student that researched blogging habits. One question was: "If you had a diary before you started blogging, are you still having one? Are your writing as frequent?". As I did not write have a blog this did not relate to me, but I remembered being puzzled by the question as I understood blogging and diary writing to be two different kinds of writing. I even see Diaryland sort of blogs as different from a diary because it is public and you can get a response to what you write.

After having been a regular blogger myself for a while I do no longer find this question puzzling. I am quite sure there are different answers to that question, but at least I do understand why it was asked. Not thinking of a diary, but writing overall, there seem to be a certain amount of writing that I am capable of doing each day. This mean that if I have much other writing to do, I usually do not feel like blogging much. It is not always so, because I can be inspired by some writing to copy it, or summarise it in a post.

The best inspiration for writing a post is reading; books, articles or other blogs. I suppose this is true for many bloggers; especially if you have a subject blog like this one. Recently there has not been much academic reading for me. Things to do with my thesis is revision rather than new reading.

In addition I also find it less inspiring to write a post now when I am not daily in an academic environment. Even though I am frequently at the university library and many of my friends are student or academic, I do not have the same inspirational talks as I had last year with my supervisor and office mates.

I do not want to be to pessimistic on my behalf, but I do understand that people find it difficult to re-enter academia. I suppose I am still a student, and thus have not left academia yet, but I see that if I get a job outside of academia it will get more and more difficult to get the inspiration for a historical post.

Women's history blogging

As I am reading my way through a week of unread blog post I find that Sharon at Early Modern Notes has written two very good post on women's historiograpy:

Women's history and gender history: what and why?

Alice Clark: working women's historian

Design of history web pages

I have recieved this email from Jeremy of ClioWeb. And it might interest some of you to take part in this survey.

Paula Petrik, one of my professors at George Mason, is giving a
presentation at the OAH this year on web design and history. She has a
website where she gives a poll to measure reaction to the design of a
history site. She would like more participation in the polls, so could
you pass this along to anyone you think might be interested in the
presentation and would have time to answer the questions in the poll.

The poll and introduction is here:

http://www.archiva.net/oah/

Paula's weblog on the presentation is here:

http://historytalk.typepad.com/picturethis/

I also posted a notice on my weblog here:

http://www.clioweb.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/28/presentation-on-design-and-history-at-the-oah/

Thanks in advance for your help,
Jeremy

A Move

Kath has moved her photo-blog to www.kfoto.org

'Historiography' search feed

I use Bloglines to subscribe too feeds, mostly from blogs and newspapers. However, I also have a few word searches - I will get a link to a blog post if my word is mentioned. Since I started to subscribe to Bloglines I have had a 'historiography' as a search word. In the first months I would be lucky if I got a hit a week. Then some feeds were coming but they were often library catalogue entries. For many months the only real post I got on historiography were on Christian historiography and I concluded that historiography was not a much used word except in certain American Christian circles.

This year all has changed. I get between three and twenty links each day and most of them are to blogs. Quite often a post is repeated, so it is just the right amount to read. Now I wonder what has happened. Has the search engines at Bloglines become better? Or are more bloggers writing about historiography?

I believe Bloglines have extended the amount of blogs they are searching, so that might account for some of the change. However, I have come across many blog which has become a part of my regular read this way, and many of these blogs were new in 2004. When I read articles on blogs being a phenomenon of 2004 I feel proud that I started blogging in 2003, but I also remember that there were extremely few history blogs back then (as if it was ages ago). It is therefore more natural that some of the new history blogs might use the word 'historiography'.