A macro view of the past

It’s ironic that after 25 years, I find myself returning to Mac macros. Way back in college I worked in the Carleton bookstore, which bought some new-fangled database software to run its billing/shipping/inventory. Since I was more Mac-savvy than most of the adult full-timers, I was in charge of creating a few macros to speed up some of the data entry. I don’t know how useful my initial experiments were. I hope I wasn’t to blame for all of the inventory miscounts we had – you’ve never seen so many “Quantity: -1” records in your life. It certainly couldn’t have had anything to do with the foolproof system we used: we would ring up the price of each book on the NCR cash register, complete the sale, and then write down the ISBN of each book on a pad of paper by the register. At the end the day, or during a lull, somebody would walk over to the Mac Classic and enter in the day’s ISBN numbers. I still say the best skill I acquired from my early days in retail was to use the numeric keypad.

So now I find myself back with an iMac, and an extended keyboard with a numeric keypad, finally returning to the concept of macros. Sure, macro programs have been around for a while, but I guess I’d become inured to the drudgery of repetitive data entry. No more.

So now I’m using Keyboard Maestro to create macros for repetitive tasks that need doing in DT. They probably are also possible if you know Applescript, but I don’t. I do know, however, how to press keys. As long as food pellets or power-ups are involved.

Most importantly, I realized that even though DT doesn’t provide a way to batch edit documents’ metadata, I could create a simple macro that would carry out the 10+ steps required to add the metadata for a single record: open Document Properties of selected record, wait .25 seconds, tab down 5 times to get to the Keyword metadata field, type in “note” (or a separate macro for “thought”, for “map”…), close the window, and go to the next record.

Now if I can only figure out how to do it for multiple selected records, some kind of macro loop.

We’re getting closer, people.

Devonthink, scripted

Busy with administrative, research and teaching matters, but I managed to carve out small bits of time late at night to tweak Devonthink with some Applescript and Keyboard Maestro. Mostly code monkey stuff, with the assistance of my programming wife, but helpful nonetheless. Don’t continue reading unless Devonthink, Applescript and macros get you excited.

As I was saying…

This time, Pickering and Chatto’s catalog. Warning: if you are interested in all sorts of nooks and crannies (‘holes and corners’, if you will) of early modern Europeana, wear a bib when browsing. And bring your wallet.

Books of direct military note include:

Greenspan, Nicole. Selling Cromwell’s Wars:  Media, Empire and Godly Warfare,  1650–1658. Boydell & Brewer, 2011.

Abstract:

By the mid-seventeenth century, the English public’s thirst for news and a dramatic growth in print culture made the media a powerful tool for shaping public opinion. Greenspan examines a selection of Cromwell’s conflicts, policies and imperial ventures to explore the ways in which the media was instrumental in developing, promoting and legitimizing government actions.

Murdoch, Steve, and Alexia Grosjean. Alexander Leslie and the Scottish Generals of the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648. Boydell & Brewer, 2014.

Abstract:

Field Marshal Alexander Leslie was the highest ranking commander from the British Isles to serve in the Thirty Years’ War. Though Leslie’s life provides the thread that runs through this work, the authors use his story to explore the impacts of the Thirty Years’ War, the British Civil Wars and the age of Military Revolution. Based on research from archival material from across Europe, Murdoch and Grosjean are able to explore how Leslie and his fellow officers brought a unique set of cultural and societal factors to the European theatre of war.

More Scots!

White, Jason. Militant Protestantism and British Identity, 1603–1642. Boydell & Brewer, 2012.

Abstract:

Focusing on the impact of Continental religious warfare on English, Scottish and Irish Protestantism, this study is concerned with the way in which British identity developed in the early Stuart period. British identity and foreign policy are studied as one, allowing a greater understanding of the role of religious fervour on national and international politics of the time.

Presumably an expansion of his 2009 article in History.

Tis the season for publisher catalogs

From Boydell and Brewer’s latest catalog:

Margulies, Martin. The Battle of Prestonpans 1745. Boydell & Brewer, 2013.

Abstract:

Lieutenant-General Sir John Cope, the leader of the British army, has been ridiculed, in song and history books, for losing the Battle of Preston pans – the first major battle of the 1745 Jacobite rising. His defeat led to the invasion of England, in which the Jacobites almost drove King George II from the throne. But was Cope really to blame?
The Jacobite Risings occurred after Parliament ousted King James Stuart in 1688 and installed a new dynasty. Stuart loyalists, many of them based in Scotland, took up arms repeatedly in futile attempts to restore James’s descendants. The 1745 Rising, led by Bonnie Prince Charlie, was the last. Martin Margulies traces Scottish history up to ‘the ’45, describes the sharply contrasting weapons and tactics of the opposing armies, and follows the Prestonpans campaign from the time Charlie landed, almost alone, on the remote Isle of Eriskay through the moment his tiny force destroyed Cope’s regulars in an early morning Highland charge.

We just can’t get enough of those High Flyers I guess.

Jacobites bite back

Recent book out:

Oates, Jonathan. The Jacobite Campaigns: The British State at War. Pickering and Chatto, 2011.

The military aspects of the Jacobite campaigns in eighteenth-century Britain are considered in this study. Taken from the viewpoint of those loyal to the Hanoverian Crown, the three mainland campaigns of 1715–6, 1719 and 1745–6 are examined, using research based on primary sources: memoirs, diaries, letters, newspapers and state papers.

Oates looks at how the eighteenth-century military machine operated in a domestic context, as well as its effectiveness. Such a focus adds a new dimension to the study of this period, and allows for further questions as to the uniqueness of the Jacobite rebellions.

Now 75% off if you subscribe to their email list. Or, I suppose they could buck the trend and only charge $25 for the book in the first place. But that horse has already left the barn, as they saw.

Buddy, can you spare a scribe?

Interesting NY Times story on the increasing use of scribes by physicians – you know, those who claim to be “doctors.”

Three weeks of training gets you a scribe that follows you around with a laptop in hand and takes notes on your interactions with patients, with the scribe company charging $25 per hour ($8-$16 for the scribe). Sounds like something academics could use: there don’t seem to be nearly enough research assistants floating around. Only problem: that going rate is a bit high.

“Tell me where it hurts.”

Apparently all the computerization is one of the biggest complaints among physicians. A money quote from the article: “a recent article in the journal Health Affairs concluded that two-thirds of a primary care physician’s day was spent on clerical work that could be done by someone else; among the recommended solutions was the hiring of scribes.”

From one doctor to another, I hear ya. Though History must be more challenging, because I’ve had limited success getting some of my department’s past office workers to do much more than photocopy.

Computerized medical records were supposed to make everything efficient, but I guess they forgot the lowly data-entry clerk. I didn’t. So now we’re going back to the days when secretaries actually did typing for doctors, at least the medical kind. Funny how technology sometimes takes you in circles.

What to do, what to do

With the new semester approaching (why is the most appropriate metaphor an oncoming locomotive?), I thought I’d get prepared ahead of time. Feel free to follow along.

Last year I got around to reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Over ten years old, it’s a bit of a cult in the private sector and with IT people especially (witness its coverage on Grad/ProfHacker). Reading the book for myself, I was fascinated by the way in which he broke down all the types of tasks and projects into discrete elements, and combined them into a coherent system. And his discussion of the psychological barriers to organization and productivity rang oh-so-true to my ears. If you know much about his system, you’ve probably seen this summary diagram floating around the internet (and you know I give him extra credit for creating a diagram with icons):

Advanced GTD summary

Now you see the problem

Just got my login info for the e-version of the latest Journal of Military History, and skimmed through the early modern section of its Recent Journal Articles. This type of resource used to be critical in the pre-digital age – every journal seemed to have its own listing of recently published works. Before online databases and the Internets, you were pretty much limited to the journals your library subscribed to, the good ol’ Historical Abstracts, a few rare bibliographic journals (remember that War and Society newsletter Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen used to publish?), any citation indexes you could get your hands on, and of course pillaging the citations of the latest articles and books. Maybe you even traded citations within your scholarly network. OK, so maybe it’s not that different today.

But even back then, looking through the Recent Articles section, you’d notice how haphazard the selections were – some journals that you knew of weren’t included, others were included one year and not the next, and undoubtedly they’d list some new article in a journal you’d never think to explore, or even heard of before. All this serves not only to remind us that there are extremely few journals that specialize in EMEMH, that there is no central “go-to” source, but it also serves as a way to introduce an article of interest in a journal that’s really not been on my radar screen:

Buchan, Bruce. “Pandours, Partisans, and Petite Guerre: The Two Dimensions of Enlightenment Discourse on War.” Intellectual History Review 23, no. 3 (September 2013): 329–347.

During the Enlightenment period a certain notion of war came to prominence in European thought. This notion, which I here refer to as ‘civilized war’, centred on the idea that European war-making in the eighteenth century was characterised by humanity and honour. This image of European war-making was sustained by a variety of intellectuals and even some military practitioners who reflected not only on the practice of war in Europe in this period, but on the practice of war among supposedly less ‘civilised’ peoples in other parts of the world and in Europe’s barbaric past. In these other places, among other peoples, and at other times, warfare was characterised as altogether less ‘civilised’, less ordered, less humane and honourable, and was thus considered more ‘savage’. I will argue in this paper, however, that there were at least two dimensions to the Enlightenment discourse on civilised war: the first dimension stressed the moral qualities of civilised war, its honour and humanity above all; the second dimension emphasised its technical or rational qualities that gave European war-makers a decisive military advantage over non-European war-makers. These two dimensions applied to conventional or symmetrical war between sovereign militaries contending by massed fire power on the field of battle. They were less easily applicable to petite guerre, that is, unconventional, asymmetric or partisan war. Here, the two dimensions of the idea of civilised war were shadowed by persistent anxieties about the status of both dimensions of civilised war.

But wait, there’s more: nowadays the web allows us to descend further into the rabbit hole. Googling such articles tends to send you to the author’s homepage, which often mentions other articles of note. To wit:

Buchan, B. “Civilized Fictions: Warfare and Civilization in Enlightenment Thought.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 36, no. 1 (February 1, 2011): 64–71.

In range of recent articles, Barry Hindess has explored the intellectual foundations of European perceptions of other peoples as different from and in need of European models of government and society. In particular, he has focused on the European “conceit” of superior, more rapid, and more sophisticated historical development or civilization. In this article, I will take up Hindess’ view of European civilization as a conceit, and explore its deployment in relation to the influential idea of civilized war in Enlightenment political thought. In particular, I will trace the articulation of this conceit in Voltaire’s account of the battle of Fontenoy on May 11, 1745. I will argue that Voltaire’s account of the battle shows that the European notion of civilized war was not only a conceit but a fiction.

Another article of interest illustrates yet another complication. I’ll let you identify the problem:

Green-Mercado, Marya T. “The Mahdī in Valencia: Messianism, Apocalypticism and Morisco Rebellions in Late Sixteenth-Century Spain.” Medieval Encounters 19, no. 1–2 (January 1, 2013): 193–220. doi:10.1163/15700674-12342129.

Prophecies and apocalyptic prognostications circulated widely among the Moriscos—forcedly baptized Muslims in sixteenth-century Iberia. Messianism, however, is a phenomenon which had hitherto never been attested in traditional sources of Morisco history. This article studies the interrelated phenomena of apocalypticism and messianism among the Moriscos of the Crown of Aragon in the second half of the sixteenth century. Through a case study of a 1575 inquisitorial transcript, it analyzes an obscure messianic figure named Abrahim Fatimí, who was accused of attempting to lead the kingdom to rebellion, casting himself as the expected deliverer of Morisco tradition, el moro Alfatimí. The discovery of this case sheds light on the political and social implications of apocalyptic and messianic ideas among Moriscos in the late sixteenth century.

The problem? Those damn medievalists squatting on early modern land! A journal with a title like Medieval Encounters is pretty far down my list, but this article would fit nicely in my Religion, War and Peace course. Ever vigilant!

Venturing to that journal’s website pulls up other possible articles of note:

Coleman, David. “Of Corsairs, Converts and Renegades: Forms and Functions of Coastal Raiding on Both Sides of the Far Western Mediterranean, 1490-1540.” Medieval Encounters 19, no. 1–2 (January 1, 2013): 167–192.

Historians have long debated whether or not the cultures of the Mediterranean constitute a singular unit of geo-historical analysis. The Alborán Sea—the Mediterranean’s far western corner that narrowly separates the Iberian Peninsula from Africa’s northwestern shore—has long been an important “frontier” zone in which arguments for and against Mediterranean unity are put to the test. This essay contends that endemic practices of corsair activity and coastal raiding played analogous functions on both sides of this “frontier” in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. While the fact of systematized conflict in the form of raids lends some support to the notion of an enduring “clash of civilizations,” the parallel forms and functions of such raiding within the societies from which the corsairs came argue at least as persuasively for a significant degree of fundamental similarity and continuity. The Alborán corsairs along both coasts, for instance, typically received patronage and organizational aid from local and regional elites, and their raiding activities proved central to both economies. On both sides of the frontier, moreover, the world of the corsairs allowed a surprising degree of mobility and participation to converts and renegades of Muslim, Jewish and Christian origin alike.

And for those who need to be reminded that the British Empire existed in the 18C as well as the 19C, we have:

Muller, Hannah Weiss. “The Garrison Revisited: Gibraltar in the Eighteenth Century.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 3 (2013): 353–376.

In the 1940s, scholars across a variety of disciplines started using phrases such as ‘garrison state’ and ‘garrison mentality’ to describe societies where military imperatives predominated. They frequently argued that a perpetual sense of threat and a profound feeling of isolation shaped the outlook of residents in these communities. Such terms continue to surface in contemporary scholarship and popular media, where ‘the garrison’ often remains a stock image. Evidence from eighteenth-century Gibraltar, however, suggests that traditional readings of the garrison as an insulated fortress should be reconsidered. The survival of this strategic outpost actually required that colonial administrators rely on an array of foreigners to keep it supplied during times of both war and peace. At Gibraltar, the garrison was neither isolated from its surrounding environment nor perpetually threatened by its cosmopolitan residents—instead, inescapable dependence on a motley local population often rendered administrators willing to accommodate the alien in their midst and to acknowledge the interconnections between military and civilian.

And finally, for the sake of completeness, I should also give a hat tip to Wayne Lee’s Review Essay in the most recent JMilH on three of Jeremy Black’s recent works: “Military History in a Global Frame.” [Insert your preferred joke about Black’s publishing fecundity here.]

When do we get our EMEMH bibliography aggregator?

Keeping tabs on the discipline

The new issue of the Journal for Military History is out. A year ago, I decided to switch from the print version to the digital online. Unfortunately I didn’t realize that I wouldn’t receive any kind of email reminder to check when the new issue was up, and I’d keep forgetting my password and have to search for it in my email. Yet another reason to use that repeating reminder on your calendar app – or at least look and see if the journal’s publisher has an email alert setup. (Speaking of reminders, sometime I’ll do a post on my Pocket Informant setup – it won’t be useful for those who are quite happy with their calendar/task system, but it might be of interest to others.)

So I searched my way to the SMH webpage, and was pleased to find a webpage for each issue back to 2007. A few disjointed thoughts came to mind, all revolving around the question of how we should be ‘doing’ history in this digital age.

1. These webpages conveniently include the titles and abstracts of all the articles, including the articles on modern military history that I don’t read, as well as a list of the books under review. The abstracts in and of themselves are a significant advance, since the JMilH, and History generally, was surprisingly late to the abstract party. It used to be that most history journals didn’t print the abstracts along with the articles – they were only to be found in abstracting services like Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life (subscription only, of course). The JMilH only started including abstracts within the past several years I think – at least I recall I had to write one for my 2000 article, but it wasn’t published along with the article.

I can’t say why the historical discipline was so late to appreciate abstracts, unless it was seen as smelling too much of the sciences, natural and social. (Published abstracts also raises the question of what the point is in assigning students to abstract journal articles if the author already created one, though that wouldn’t be the only way we should be changing how undergraduate history is taught. But I digress…)

2. Such abstracts have a broader effect beyond simply identifying the argument of each article. I’m far more likely to read a 75-100 word abstract of an article on World War II than read the 25-page article; presumably modern military historians feel the same way about pre-modern topics, Europeanists about Asianists, and so on. I’m that much more likely to read them if all of the abstracts are on a single page, so I don’t have to page through the journal issue to the first page of every article. It’s thus much easier to see connections (or lack thereof) between different periods and places, without having to wait for the occasional historiographical article to be published. Now if only people would start publishing their ideas in argument maps.

3. What the provision of these pages also means, of course, is that you can easily import them into a DTPO database, making their full text available for any searches you might perform. Again, ease of use (ease of reading, ease of copying) makes a huge difference for items that are of marginal importance – probably why Zotero libraries (one-click and it’s downloaded) tend to be much larger than bibliographic databases where you have to enter all the information in manually.

4. You can also get a quick glance at what the (sub)field is interested in with this info – we’re finally starting to get easy access to our disciplinary information, rather than having it locked behind subscription databases like EBSCO, JSTOR, etc. I’ll post the word cloud to the SMHBLOG for those interested.

5. One of the articles in this issue is Jon Sumida, “A Concordance of Selected Subjects in Carl von Clausewitz’s On War,” The Journal of Military History, 78:1 (January 2014): 271-331. Its abstract:

This concordance of the standard English translation of Carl von Clausewitz’s On War by Michael Howard and Peter Paret breaks new ground in two important respects. First, it indexes the text in unprecedented detail by listing references to every significant proposition and distinctive phrase under major subject headings. Second, information about the location of indexed items includes the book and chapter of On War, and page numbers in both current editions of the standard translation.

I don’t have access to the issue yet, but it would be interesting to compare Sumida’s results with the original index in Howard/Paret – is Sumida’s article an indictment of the original? It would also be interesting to compare Sumida’s article with what one could uncover just taking the full text and using various forms of text analysis – how much effort and specialist expertise was required to add that value, vs. what you can get from basic text mining? Perhaps Sumida even addresses this issue. The article also reminds me of a somewhat similar effort several years back, John Lynn’s “The Treatment of Military Subjects in Diderot’s Encyclopédie.” Which in turn prompts me to wonder to what extent such efforts will be needed once we have the full text of the documents directly available to us? Will reference works like concordances soon become irrelevant? Isn’t this yet another reason why we should have these sources in full text, so we can perform the same analysis on any number of sources?

So read up.

Two months without a Devonthink post?!?

My Devonthink posts, marginally related to EMEMH proper I admit, continue to attract readers, and even comments/questions. So an update is in order.

To frame the discussion, here’s a reminder of what any note-taking setup should allow you to do:

1. Collect: Amass all your documents, notes, thoughts, writings and images into a single interface. The wider the variety of files you can view, the better. The wider the variety of documents you can search with the same keywording scheme, the better.
2. Summarize: Distinguish original documents from your notes on those originals. Provide a way to connect summaries to the originals.
3. Sort: Organize your data in sortable lists, usually using metadata fields (date, author, place…) as the sorting variable.
4. Search: Find specific documents quickly via title, author, and other metadata, or by navigating through a folder hierarchy. Find specific text strings within any documents. More powerful software (like DTPO) will allow proximity and fuzzy searching.
5. Cite: Provide a place to store bibliographic information about each source, so that it can be cited when used.

[Reminder: I haven’t fully implemented all of my features, so some of the screenshots may show outdated features. Still a work in progress.]