Break of Day in the Trenches

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Annie Mole

I had a quiet bet that I would be able to find the DS Tube adverts on Annie Mole's site

War Games, more War Games.

Fantastic complimentary post to my earlier one about 'no ww1 games' (which is on the other site.. .really should cross post these more..)

Greater than mine

So, a friend I knew at university dies, and I get aggressive flame comments demanding I put something up about it.

How offensive is that.

Instead, here is a link to where she worked, the Mass Observation archive at Sussex University.

Don't get  wrong, I am very sad this happened, and I'll miss my friend, who was ill for some time. I just don't think it's anyone's right to tell me, in a bizzarre twist on the usual, how I should express my rememberance of someone. Especially in a public place like this.

Wired

Naill Fergusson on counterfactual gaming.

I regard this rather cynically. After all, it was Fergusson who slated Medal of Honor recently as 'Beach Invaders—with fancy graphics'. Granted, his first article does extol the merits of learning strategy from these games, but balks at the idea that these games might be providing history might be a valid element as well. Yes, Medal of honor does have a certain amount of cod history, but so does all that literary slop i've been reading recently, or the episode of Sharpe I saw last night. It's just the same pop culture argument applied to games; 'they aren't good enough unless they are the 'right' type of game, they made me think a bit but in the 'wrong' ways'.

sigh. I'm going to come back to this article, but at the moment I'm halfway through writing something about protest in SL and my mind is horribly awash...

More hypocryphal(?) stories

I learned with glee today after listening to a programme about cricket on Radio 4 that ultimate beardy W.G.Grace allegedly died from a stroke caused by berating the appearance of a zeppelin over his garden in 1915. There is no mention of this in his obituary (!), however wikipedia rather supports the shouting at zeppelins claim in its article about cricket and WW1.

Whether or not this is true, I think it's a wonderful story. How British - berating the zep as it flies over
and then keeling over in the middle of one such patriotic rant. A very fitting end for a man considered one of Britain's finest sportsmen (play up and play the game, and all that!).

Considering the amount of hokum flying about regarding the war anyway, I think I'm going to start a collection of these rumours. They are certainly accroding me a great deal of amusement.

An Infamous Army

So I read some Georgette Heyer recently, mainly because in any other historical era I am lazy first (ie. I read the dross before the serious stuff), trying to gauge a general idea on a topic before going hardcore on it (see repeatedly  cramming 3 different Elizabeth books into my head via audio recording before the last event). It's also because I rather like the dangers of historical fiction; probably most of what you are reading is hokum, it's likely to have a healthy dose of partiality and bias, and it will epxress morals and values of the time rather than what is actually being written about.

So, An Infamous Army is really, not so much about the battle of Waterloo seen from the point of view of several absolutely ghastly one dimensional upper class people, but more a post war novel about how war should be represented to the nation.

Let me first say that Heyer's writing of battles is dire. She spends three chapters at the close of the book bombarding us with every detail she understod from the military history books she read as preparation in close succession. The result is a flat but seemingly endless recounting of troop movement, interspersed with some generalisations and not very clear documentation of maneovers.

The whole book is intensely vainglorious, almost desperately so. At the same time it has that awareness of combat that comes from post WW1 'revelations' (ie, the fact that everyone suddenly had to acclimatise to the prescence of the war past). This is a book obsessed with shellfire, mud, and clogged up supply lines. At one point, several shells fall into the wet mud and refuse to explode, whilst the brave officers shut their eyes to the horrors around them and soldier on.

I think what grips me the most about this book is how it so urgently needs the British to ignore the horrors around them. There is some good wounding (the hero loses an arm), and a clean death from a brother. The common soldier is stalwart and never breaks down. There is a rather disturbing obsession with kilts being attractive, and some dire 'Scotglish'. The women do that 'thing' which I outlined recently in the Lion and Unicorn paper, in that the heorines immediately adopt the role of nurses, even though its something they've never done before but of course turn out to be brilliant at (blue blood vs red).

Overall however, the book displays a real tension. Heyer wants the war to be awful; this somehow seems 'right', but her heroes must somehow gallop through it, uncaring and chivalrous to the end. The book is agressively nationalistic; not a single Englishman lets the side down, and every other race is seen as morally lacking (especially the Belgians, who spent a great deal of time breaking the lines or disturbing Brussels by galloping through it and causing even more damage). Heyer tries to put this dreadful business vs British courage, together and it just doesn't work.

Possibly this is because her writing is so bad, but I think this is partly through an anxiety about war writing. Heyer thinks she should write a war novel, but lacks the experience of the First World War as a dominant participant. She also seems keenly aware of hte way that war writing is starting to change (the book was written in 1937), but follows the pattern of popular writing that tries to maintain the glory of Empire and the grit of the British as a nation. The result is overblown and unreal - none of the characters have gravitas, and the whole thing falls flat. The veneer of Waterloo makes the novel seem even more false; a patched up version of recent wars to make it more palatable.

However, what I'm really interested in is the comparison with the next book I'm about to read - equally dreadful looking but modern. This is Steven Scarrow's Young Bloods, the first in a series of Napoleon vs Wellington novels. Will war be the same only written on modern terms, or is there going to be an attempt to move away from the mythological model... we shall see...

Siegfried Sassoon's Mythologists are Big Fat Liars

George reposts to my posting below.

Of course, this is a perfect example of myth in action, encouraging the idea along. It's an incredibly glamourous thing to have thrown your medal into the river in disgust and despair - the medal arching over the river, a bridge in the background, a soft, all-consuming plop and ripple as it sinks beneath the still waters. And of course, it then lies in the mud for perpetuity and no one will ever be the wiser. I'm intrigued by the fact that the medal (sans ribbon - a lot harder to throw into a river and therefore far less visually potent) was found in a treasure box however. Did Sassoon want it to be rediscovered somehow, and hid it in an 'obvious' looking container? WAs he self-aware of the fact that he hadn't really done what he claimed, but wanted the finding to be as much of a statement as the losing? Or perhaps it was the only thing he could find to hand (having a surfeit of Christmas presents all composed of 'useful' boxes). Then of course there is our own sense of distortion and imagination. To most people, it's the lump of metal that counts, not the bit of ribbon attached to it, so it's far easier for us to assume / misread what actually happened. George reports that Sassoon says it's the ribbon at some point, but I must go back and check what Sherston/Journey/Diaries say. And thus, we go on making myths, creating the visually stunning (the metal, not the ribbon, in the water) and so on. And with Sassoon's reputation, of course it must have been easier to not point out the techincal detail (after all, it is a detail)...and so on.

Edit: Sherston 518: ribbon.

Siegfried Sassoon is a big fat liar

Edit (see article below 'Siegfried Sassoon's mythologists are big fat liars')

George (celebrating a year of his blog), points to an article about the upcoming auction of Siegfried Sassoon's MC, which was cunningly hidden in an attic, and not, as he claimed, thrown in the Mersey.

Elsewhere, everyone is telling me to watch various parts of The Edwardians, however unfortunately my television cable doesn't actually stretch to my television, and I don't have digital. As Alice pointed out at the Women in Games conference recently, I'm one of a growing demographic that doesn't use the television wing of the BBC in any form (although I do rent BBC dvds, listen to the radio, and use the website for everything from checking the weather to reading news). I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say I haven't watched television at my house for about 2 years - the last thing I saw was episode five of series two of Lost (and the reception was borked anyway); although I do regularly watch films or series dvds (which I consume a great deal of)

History blog love-along...

Airminded has some useful statistics about the proliferation of military history blogs (although like Investigations of a Dog, I'm also suspcious about the 'most popular' category). I do wonder how great a percentage of the 6% female category I am, since I think I know of two other female military historian bloggers, and like me their subject tends to diversify. This research couldn't have come at a more useful time however...Meanwhile, apparently history blogging is all new and shiny again (it is -really?) at Victoria's Cross.

I hate to be cynical, but introspection into the nature of our beast goes around and comes around. Perhaps because, as an old timer, I saw this first with research blogs in general (when research blogs could be, almost, lumped into one sidebar). We think therefore we are, therefore we blog, therefore we all start to worry how and why we blog, and so on. But, I'm as guilty as everyone else, plugging on with some excitment at my blogging article, trying to cut out the polemic (well, some of it), and still sourging the blogosphere for other people.

Victoria's Cross thinks we don't cross link enough. To me, as a historical  blogger concerned with the cultural impact of war, linking externally is as important as linking to each other. This post is typical - all sorts of similar versions and ideas will pop up all over our network, but won't spread any further. A similar example is the way that the map I linked to yesterday just came up on a newsgroup I belong to, independent of my own linking.

We're too insular. We blog too insularly. The network then reads and comments in what is essentially an agreement with ourselves. So is this discovery of the nature of ourselves, or simply self affirming action, or both...? I don't really think there is an answer because there isn't designed to be one; a lack of answers is intrinsic to the nature of blogging itself. That, then, is what has to be recognised both by the reader and the blogger. Blogging is not intended to give solutions, although it can provide suggestions. This uncertainty causes trouble - people want answers. And thus, back to the top of these paragraphs again...

Comments and Pings

Many apologies to the lack of response to any comments posted recently. Usually, my site informs me of new comments via e-mail, but somehow I'd turned this off.

Julian, I'd be delighted if you could forward the link for the review! Laura; thanks for the link to Bergonzi - I must dig my copy out again and check the reference you make. Ryan - the thought of a forum makes me go pale at the knees, but thanks for the suggestion (and actually, I rather like the split as it makes me think more about my studies in terms of two similar, but very different things - especially in terms of audience) And apologies to anyone else who commented and didn't get a reply...

The Personal II: Mud Doesn't Stick

More from my blogging article: still formulating ideas but there seems to have been a lot of debate flying about recently, especially about the nature of reposnsibility...

It is perhaps melodramatic to contextualise Break of Day in the Trenches in terms of the censure it receives. However I believe that the extreme reactions to the site provide a key insight into the responsibilities that a research weblogger needs to consider. Does politicised historical debate, or research debate of any kind, have a place in weblogging? Should the audience take preference over the writer, and what sort of obligations does an author have? Or should these intrusions simply be taken as rather violent brickbats, ignored or accommodated? At what point does the researcher have to step back? Where should her theorem be explained (repeatedly, once, never?). In short, how much attention should be paid by the research blogger to exterior pressures?

 

This is certainly something that the more vociferous of commenter believe should be maximised at all opportunities, from their lack of understanding of a subject, to their comments that, for example, the photograph of the author was too attractive to be a ‘real’ academic. This personalised tone of largely anonymous comments is however symptomatic of poor netiquette, coming in an arena where it is easy to be ‘invisibly’ offensive. Thus perhaps it is easy to dismiss what is no more than a casual comment from a poster not destined to return.

 

What is perhaps more important is the level of censorship imposed on a micro level, from friends wrongly construing comments, to workplaces with specific views about the level of research that should be disclosed or the type of work that can be expressed within a weblog. These, I maintain, are far more damaging to an author’s integrity than individual comments damning the site for failing to provide answers to homework or expressing an aberrant view. Whilst webloggers like Rebecca Blood believe strongly that content should never be edited once, this cannot be the case in research weblogging. Opinions change, related lists of links added too, additional comments made or revised, and as mentioned above, academics need to be molified, especially when it turns out they were right.

 

At the same time, exterior micro pressure has immense influence. This perhaps finds full expression in a reader (or not!), who once told me ‘There’s a reason I don’t read your blog, because you don’t talk about me’. The inference that a research site should include personal comment is negated by the fact that such opinion is almost always greeted with a negative response. Similarly making connections with a workplace (even in a positive manner) is often regarded as revealing company secrets; a seemingly bixarre contradiction to the process of research which takes place independently to the academic body as a whole.

 

This influence includes requests to alter ‘offensive’ content and the assumption that doing so is acceptable (see Blood, above). There also appears to be a type of vicarious audience who expect, and then discover, moments which they can then reconstruct and circulate in a negative context, usually at a point of crisis in the ‘real’ life of the author (which the vicarious audience will of course be aware of, but is totally invisible to a casual – and therefore majority - reader). Since the audience in this case is both visible and has social influence, it can be far more destructive to the integrity of the site as a whole, even to the extent of not posting any entries on a certain subject, or avoiding using certain words. An extreme example of this might be the total removal of my personal site from the blogosphere, since I considered this to be detrimental to my web presence as a researcher and academic, but equally odd in this respect is the totally unintentional offence caused by the use of the word ‘Orphanage’ in 2005. This is something I have also seen happen to people on other sites in similar situations - comments about health are construed as moaning about poor working conditions, content has to be edited in the most innocuous of circumstances to an external reader. As Torill says in a recent post:

No, I haven't gone crazy and changed the content here to overdone melodramatic fantasy writing. No worries. I just don't want to think or write or blog about what's up in my reality right now - too many potential traps there for lurking readers of evil (or just petty) intent.

Unlike the ‘real world’, the depiction of the researcher as academic author and personal author does not have separation. Thus, it follows, the integrities of ‘accountability’ and ‘minimising harm’, as Koh et al. determine it, are always in conflict with each other.

Personal and Non-Personal Weblogs

an interesting ethical dissection of 'types' of weblogging, splitting them into personal and non-personal. I like this, but it still doesn't answer the questions/quandries/feelings I have about research blogging:

From the literature on blogging, we identified two distinct groups of bloggers: personal and non-personal. Personal weblogs are those that resemble an online diary or personal journal. Non-personal weblogs are those that focus on specific topics and content, usually intended for larger audiences. In addition to different types of content and intended audiences, these two types of bloggers are likely to have different perspectives on the functions and impact their blogs have which may in turn influence their ethics in blogging.

They then identify four traits in weblogging:

Truth telling includes underlying concepts such as honesty, fairness, equality and completeness in reporting.

Accountability involves being answerable to the public, honesty in one’s work, revealing conflicts of interest, and bearing consequences of one’s actions.

The third principle is minimizing harm (done to others) by blogging. It includes issues of privacy, confidentiality, flaming, consideration of other people’s feelings, and respecting diverse cultures and underprivileged groups.

Attribution involves issues such as plagiarism, honouring intellectual property rights, and giving proper credit to sources.

results and differentiation:

Unlike personal bloggers who write mainly about events in their lives, non-personal bloggers write a variety of content that is useful and appealing to a larger audience. Non-personal bloggers more frequently check how many readers access their weblogs than personal bloggers. A likely reason for this is that a primary purpose of non-personal weblogs is to provide commentaries or viewpoints for others to read and appreciate, and a large audience is one indication that a non-personal weblog is successful.

Useful, interesting, thought provoking.

The Lion and the Unicorn

The issue of The Lion and The Unicorn that I wrote an article for and co-edited with Stacy Gillis has been published (needs Project Muse access - but most university libraries supply this electronically)

Oh So...

It is indeed oh so quiet here at the moment. This is largely because most of my work (and my job) are concerned with the popular culture/games aspects of my research. Posting is therefore mainly on the GlodnEpix site, although as usual I'm considering ways to keep the two together. Attempts to use tabs have failed (because I'm too lazy to apply them), but I'm still wondering whterh to just have one large blog which somehow splits the two subjects...

Make the Pain Stop!

I'm writing up a paper and it's like pulling teeth! After several months of non-stop writing things in what seems like every spare moment, this paper is just the pits to put together. I have tried every kind of displacement activity I can think of, including the ultimate tedious task of levelling my druid outside of instances, a great deal of cookery, sorting the recycling bin... , and I've tried rewards - some of the aforementioned cookery, reading, a level of Age of Empires III, and yet the paper refuses to write. For the last three days I've woken up with the bright resolution of hoovering the floor and finishing this damn paper. And every day, I sit in front of the damn thing, and we glare at each other like some sort of Mexican standoff. The electrician even oblidgingly turned up to make tedious chiselling noises outside my room in order to make it harder to work (insert long rant about how the house is on a building cycle - by the time it's all done, it's time to start again... apparently). So tonight it's no West wing until I can see the end.

Write, damn you!

British Obsessions

I'm looking for an article; any article really (media, press, journal, book, even speech), that vocalises the fact that people from outside the UK see the British obsession with World War One as a bit odd. I've heard this numerous times at conferences, often as a friendly jibe at ourselves ('why are you banging on about that old thing' *laughs*), but need the usual 'justification through print' so that I can counterpoise it with Ted Hughes' description of the war as a 'number one national ghost - it's still everywhere, molesting everybody'.

Suggestions very welcome, as always.

There is Nothing Like a Dame

Lovely post by Ralph E. Luker about the anniversary of the site.

The blogger, the historian, and the reader

Anniversary Post - Five Years of BODITT!

Many thanks to all the responses about the previous post about responsibility. I was quite shocked to find that this subject hasn't been discussed nearly as often as I had imagined it would. So of course, this is good news as I can work it into my own article. Today was meant to be a 'spare' day - spare in that way that next week I have a three day paper to write which is going to need a lot of focus, and that I'm busy over the weekend, and that there is a games day at the London Knowledge Lab tomorrow, and I'm supposed to be spending today getting to grips with Age of Empires III for various sections of history papers. So today is a day to conquer a world, write up these notes, read the beginnings of background research and do a lot of surfing trying to find articles, and so on.

Here are my notes so far:

- using this weblog as a case study, over the years it has been regularly misunderstood, flamed, was used to help get someone sacked (because there was swearing in the soldier's songs and she linked to my site - hence 'unsavoury content'!!!), misquoted elsewhere, plagiarised elsewhere ('neighbours, you are tedious'), the cause for an ex to claim that he only knew he'd been dumped by reading it (totally untrue - I'd done it the week before!), and sometimes, heavily edited against my better judgement, this latter so much so that my old site had a system of 'hidden' entries on it. Which seems totally bizarre, given that a weblog is meant to be an expression of voice.

- is this largely because of being a historian?

- 1. No - researchers in general seem to have this problem. if you are dealing with something specific, then rhetoric about that subject is regularly misinterpreted as 'the truth' rather than 'debate'.

- 2. Sort of. All researchers are supposed to be (through a sort of generic reader consent), subject neutral about their topics and entries. There seems to be an assumption that they are there to provide facts (rather than, like this site, ongoing discussions about research ideas). In this case, the development or discussion of ideas is not perceived as the place for an academic researcher to position on their blog.

This latter seems odd, as the development of sustained ideas is often the objective of a blog (see for example, students developing their learning through the creation of blogs).

- 3. Yes - Historians are dealing with past events, which are often mythologically or social encoded as 'right' or 'wrong'. In some ways, disputing history is akin to disputing religious ideas - and the feeling seems to be that this is fair game for anyone who enters the site. This also puts historians more in the spotlight.

- 4. Yes - in a Broader Context. Declaring yourself as an academic (although many have tried to claim that not getting a job / not really being the person in the photo / not being unbiased relieves me of this moniker), also means declaring a certain amount of authority. This holds responsibilities such as 'you must strive to be accurate', 'you must talk about your subject fully', and above all 'you must be professional'. Arguably this latter is the most problematic - flippancy in any posts, for example, is a killer. I lose count of how many times that one has caught me out. Personal feelings, which include responses to an academic subject, are also disallowed. This is the reason '10s 2 00.00' died a death - in some respects it had to for 'professional' reasons (and there are numerous blogs posts elsewhere about this recording how personal blogs sway job interviews, plus I have personal experience of this on the colleague being sacked front).Personally I feel this is a real shame, since it was THE reason that I started blogging in the first place (after a course encouraging daily writing, even if it wasn't really 'about' anything). I've said before that blogging taught me to write in more ways than one, and it certainly encouraged the system of work that I have held onto since I started using the blog as a research tool. Specifically, I have forgotten to ask, and then kicked myself, in recent job interviews 'Do you have an contractual demands about blogging?', since this is becoming much more of an issue. Again, how much overflow is the 'right' type of overflow in an academic blog...? So this moral responsibility is a Sword of Damocles, and it's a two sided sword - get your facts right for the reader, watch your back at all times, because you WILL get caught by the reader.

- 4a and Below. Nettiquette, in whatever form, still leaves people to express themselves, through comments, in broader (or larger) terms than they usually do in 'normal' discussion. Blogs, especially research blogs, are often embroiled in head on debate. To a blog reader, this is often very clear. To a casual reader, this is not.

 

However...

Many people entering the site do so on a random search basis. Much more so than many other sites - John Battelle estimates that 40% of readers come into a blog on a random search string. This is much higher in the case of my blog - upwards of 90% of hits are from random searches, mostly, it has to be said for the question 'what was life like in the trenches'. The lack of formation in this search shows clearly that readers are not particulary web savvy (lots of words that don't need to be in a search string), and that they are not targetting the website directly (because my site doesn't actually answer the question in a single entry, although if you took the whole five years of the site  (happy  birthday to me...) then it probably would.

This leads to misinterpretation. This isn't a homework site, despite my position as an educator. It is not  particularly useful as an information site - unless you are prepared to really search through it. Instead it is a site of my ongoing research  - often incomplete, often outspoken, frequently poorly phrased and  sometimes just totally  random. But it might be easy to think that it is...

Netiquette. It is generally agreed that netiquette standards are low under certain conditions (rather than in decline).  Anonymity means that leaving flame posts is easy (which is why many of my flamers get personal e-mails discussing the issues they have raised in some detail). It also means that posts  that are perceived to be offensive , or 'wrong' are often the subject of heavy flaming. In my  case this tends to be either students who want their homework done for them and can't  find fast answers (Your site is crap, you suc), or those who read  deliberately contentious posts out of context and  thus get the wrong idea (see for example, the endless Wilfred Owen / Jessie Pope posts).

 

Subtext and Twisting the Question. Never underestimate the ability of your reader to assume that there is a huge subtext to virtually everything you write. *winks to make the reader paranoid at this point*, and that you do want to bring the system down from the inside, or that you are writing exlusively to them, or that ... oh a million other daft things. And like all good conferences, never underestimate the way in which people actually want to talk about their own pet subject whilst lambasting yours, even when the two are not related in the slightest.

What is the solution / should there be a solution / Who is reponsible?

Organic posting (posts that lead to other, relevant entries), is one suggestion (and the reason I should use subjects for my posts more). But does it work?  Do people really follow links, or do they stick with the first one they reach. Whose responsibility is this? The reader, to understand how a blog works, or an author, to studiously link more / justify themselves at every turn. From an author perspective, reiterating my ideas on every post would not only be tedious, but would totally turn  off the regular readers I do have (which long posts invariably do anyway - blogs just aren't really designed for them). This is as far as I have got here - there doesn't seem to be a solution that I can determine, merely this is a state. I can also argue misinterpretation here - the amount of times people have misread intent on this page is legion. The amount of times that other people appear to assume autonomy over the role of the author is also just as great. But here, the answer 'it's my blog, I can write what I want' just doesn't cut it because of the public domain in which it is presented. This is the kicker for academic debate - a surfer is coming in halfway through - should they be coddled or ignored...

so... erm... Age of Empires III and issues of colonisation...

Thousands out There

I'm looking for a fairly cohesive article about readers and blog writers, and how readers who don't understand the ways blogging works often take it out of context - surfing into one page and then leaving flame posts without reading the whole, for an article I'm putting together about historians who blog. A friend of mine told me they'd read something on this recently - Any suggestions?

Sidebar

Updated the sidebar. Updated CV. *bump* *bump*

Tracking Backing

*bump google, checks pings*

rats in ww1 (to break up the monotony of the million queries about trenches)

civilian journals of WW1 - some useful reference material here

A research session using my blog as a research tool

A superb quote

My research page at the University of Sussex

Side-Effects: an unrelated but interesting research blog

A conversation about whether or not I'm gay or not - sheesh!

Torill' comments - also leads to another post, about spam and trackbacking

Father Christmas wigs are 'out' this year it seems (and thus bumps the Father Christmas wigs)

YAAOTYA!

This rather drab page announces the fact that Dan won the Young Academic Author of the Year Award Grats Dan! (although I still say he pinched my joke about the pierrots and the pier through a moment of weird serendipitous telepathy)!

There will be posts - well, maybe there will be posts... At present I'm putting together a load of papers for next month which are all due in over the same weekend. They are sort of connected, in that way that they all link into each other but need totally different approaches to the writing style. Very frustrating.

...

The year, not really, in review

First post of the year to score a ...

I'm terrible at writing end of year posts, which is probably why it's taken so long...

The years started well - Woman's Hour on Science Fiction, War and Women. It epitomised the diversity of work that characterised last year.

Febuary. I sold my soul to Blizzard and bought World of Warcraft, which rekindled my enthusiasm in the representation of warfare in digital narratives. This was to become a major preoccupation of the year, socially, educationally and academically.

March. Justin Parsler and I decided to stop arguing exhaustively in the van on the way to events and to start instead arguing exhaustively and writing it down afterwards. This lead to an application to the Bergen workshop on WoW and roleplaying. We are now writing five papers together and seriously considering a book.

(Dates I can't remember) My paper in Women - a Cultural Review on women's writing and war fiction was published. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die was published. Somewhere in there are my entries... I think at least one has someone else's name underneath it, and one wasn't listed... I was on Woman's Hour again, talking about Gay Women in Comics.

May - The big WW1 conference where I gave my (personal) favourite paper of the year, defining my ideas about the war parable and how it works in modern culture. Vanda Wilcox confidently told me to apply for the Washington conference about the First World War in 2007 as I was 'bound to have a job by then'. Her optimism was both gratefully recieved and acted upon. Disaster -  two of the Sussex programmes I taught had to be reorganised into different departments. In one hour this meant that over 2/3 of my teaching dissappeared in the reshuffle. The summer was spent in a considerable state of unease.

June - September. Endless writing, research, and worrying about both my career and failing funds.  I was asked to co-edit a special edition of the Lion and The Unicorn, in partnership with Stacy Gillis at the University of Newcastle (another person who admirably prooves that computers, science fiction and the First World WAr go together), due out in March 2007. I also contributed a paper to this. I wrote several very enjoyable entries for an Encylopaedia of Science fiction, and began to research my ideas about the historical representation of war in computer games. At some point, I realised that I had already written and had accepted for publication more words than my thesis combined. The first draft of my thesis to book form was rejected. I decided to leave this for a period whilst getting papers out.

October. Term at Sussex began with a reduced load of teaching, only doing the First World War course. My job application list exceeded 120 failed applications in 2 years. My talk about Second Life in London attracted considerable attention, including my comment that Second Life was MSN with legs. On 14th October I was on the World Service talking about Second Life... no, Re-enactment events (I was interviewed for both and they chose the second).

November. Justin and I travelled to Bergen in Norway and spent two wonderful days at the WoW workshop. I met several people who I had 'known' online for years. The experience consolidated my belief in my work and was an antidote to the struggle of the year careerwise.

December. Left the Serens, joined a new guild of mature players and began raiding.  Teaching at Sussex ended (until this time next year?) on an up note with an excellent and innovative class of undergraduates in my First World War class.

January. In the face of increasing panic (no work at Sussex available) I had an eleventh hour reprieve, and a pretty amazing one at that. Interviewing for one job, I was turned down but instead offered a slightly different post, and I start the year in a new job as a part time Postdoctoral Research Fellow at SMARTlab, The University of East London. At present I'm waiting for some 'i's and 't's to be dotted, then will be working there one day a week for the foreseeable future. It looks amazing...

History in Games

I'm giving a paper on the ways in which games represent history tomorrow at the London South Bank University (3.30 start in the Keyworth Centre), and hotfoot ahead of me comes Investigations of a Dog, with many a useful comment and a link to Niall Fergusson's recent paper about history  (or the lack of it) in wargaming.

Jessie Pope Redux

Trolls. Other than the blue braided kind that shout 'Taz dingo!', trolls are pretty dull. Jessie Pope trolls are a particularly common breed, sadly.

"...it is important to remember that Pope's poetry is as reliable as that of Owen and Sassoon. In this way it is important to remember that Pope's poetry is as reliable as that of Owen and Sassoon."

My eyes bulged when I read this. I had to re-read it a few times just in case I was imagining things.

How can a jingoistic and ignorant civilian possibly be more reliable than words coming from an eye witness? And if the poetry isn't a form of 'first hand account' what is it?

I am teaching D et D E to my S3 class. They all understand and approve of the sentiments expressed by Owen.

So yet again I have been brought to task by someone proudly telling me that their S3 students all agree with Owen's depiction of the war, through his poetry, and that Jessie Pope can't write a 'reliable' version of the war.

1. Poetry. That's POETRY. Not a first person account therefore, but a poem written at a later stage, in retrospect.
2. Different oppinions of an event do not make their recountings wrong. See...err... two sides in any war.
3. In many ways we can think of the Home Front vs The War in this respect (as being two sides), but actually it's a very one-dimensional way to do so. It disenfranchises both the people who fought (and believed in war), and the multitude of differing opinnions at home. Of which this is one.
4. Jessie Pope wrote for the Daily Mail. It is pretty much fair to say that the Daily Mail then echoed the Daily Mail now in both presentation and sentiment.
5. Pope's poetry becomes increasingly more satirical as the war goes on. However it is taught homogenously, as if her ideas never changed. 'The Beau Ideal', in context, is clearly satirical. Therefore, it's not intended to be 'reliable'. Poetry is often concerned with making a point, therefore as a medium, reliable is not its intent.
6. For many people, the poems that they read at home were as 'real' as those published (in, it has to be said, a very exclusive  manner), by the traditional war poets, because that was what they were consuming and wanted to have faith in.
7. Once again. POETRY. A FICTITIOUS RECOUNTING THAT MAY OR MAY NOT RELATE TO EXPERIENCE. NOT PRIMARY EVIDENCE.
8. Wilfred Owen: first person witness to the war on the Western Front. Tried to convey the subjective nature of this experience to readers.
9. Jessie Pope: first person witness to the war at home. Tried to convey the subjective nature of this to support readers.
10. It troubles me how many times I have to have this argument.

Frankly, I find it depressing that this tutor finds pleasure in telling me that all his students agree with Owen now. Doesn't that surely smack of the same level of indoctrination as Pope is accused of, totally blocking the myriad possible interpretations of the war that exist. And 'understand'? Isn't one of the war poets' central cries that being able to recount the war experience is totally impossible ot comprehend?

Here is an example I give to my students. You drive home and get stuck in traffic. The traffic has been caused by a horrendous pile up on the other side of the road. When you get home you say 'We saw a terrible accident'. You do not say 'I saw someone's leg in the road'. Why? Well, firstly, it's bad taste. Secondly, you want to protect whoever you are talking to. Thirdly, saying 'I saw someone's leg in the road doesn't really convey the true unplesantness of what you, personally, saw.

Recounting does not a first person account make.

...So much fun...

I've been searching for this for absolutely ages: the video for Sensible's Cannon Fodder (1993) on the CD32, which was also posted inside the Amiga version of the game as an Easter Egg as a series of photos. The video replays the theme tune of the game and shows the programmers messing about, and the odd bit of the game itself.

What strikes me about this is that Cannon Fodder attracted so much censure for being a violent video game at the time (see the internal clips for this), as well as it's use of the poppy. I've written about this aspect before, but basiclly it was used as the game's front page (until removed - several shops refused to sell it with the poppy on the cover), as well as your unfortunate dead  being depicted as a series of crosses, poppies and war graves on a hillock at 'game over' (these graves became cumulative the more you played the game). The game itself was criticised for glorifying war (as the video probably conveys, this veers rather on the wrong side of tongue in cheek but is nevertheless, hardly serious!), and within it, injured soliders would 'scream' until killed if seriously wounded.

Compared to modern war games, many of which represent the re-fighting of real battles, the contents of Cannon Fodder seem very tame indeed. What interests me here is not a comparison between early and late war games, but the idea that a video like this could ever make the transition. Many war games now reward players with historical information when they complete levels or gain Easter Eggs, so the idea of them accessing a video like this alongside this type of reward is just totally non bon. War games need to justify themselves with historical validation rather than irony, it seems...

Set Texts

Via Tink, an article on set texts on the English Literature sylabbus, talking about the involvement of publishers in this process:

War - or rather, anti-war - has also become popular, leading to the choice of Louis de Bernières' Captain Corelli's Mandolin (which has had its swansong for AQA, but is still in the reckoning for OCR) and Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong (in the A-level canon despite failing to win over the critics). The first world war has long been big at A-level and is a mandatory topic for AQA candidates. Faulks is safe territory where more literary work can be dangerous. Salman Rushdie was once edging into the classroom, and Midnight's Children was famously voted the Booker of Bookers, but his fiction now seems far too incendiary a prospect.

What interests me is the responses I've had from students this and last year about the poetry and novels they've had to study at A level. There is a general feeling that some of the poets were simply there because they were contemporary (and in fact, weren't very good), and several comments to the effect that texts have been too mature. This latter surprises me, both because it takes a mature approach to spot that a reader isn't 'ready' for a text, but also the feeling of regret that some students have expressed about reading these books, often articulating a sadness that these books, which they would have liked to read at an older age, have been spoiled by being pushed on them.  It's interesting also because although they don't want books for 'children' or 'young adults' certainly, there is a recognition that not all books are suitable either for a sylabbus or people at their stage of life. This is something I also feel about my own reading - oddly coming back to a rather trite example, I have much more enjoyed the 'Mars' series by Kim Stanley Robinson the second time round (although it still has real flaws and it might be fair to say that what I have enjoyed most, even more that the re-reading, was the long car journey to an event with JP discussing this in real depth). I've also stopped reading books that I feel are too 'old', which doesn't nessecarily mean their content feels older, but that their theme, character or tone strikes me as something I will understand better at a later stage. It's a great shame, I feel (and so do the students, it seems), that books like this are being foisted on readers.

History Carnival XL

This month's History Carnival has a section on patahistory, proof that the blog should never have split (chiz chiz).

History is a perpetual beta, in need of perpetual patches and downloads.and then of course there are the plethora of students studying digital history, and using blogging to record it.

In other news, Indiana Jones' tenure has been denied

The committee concurred that Dr. Jones does seem to possess a nearly superhuman breadth of linguistic knowledge and an uncanny familiarity with the history and material culture of the occult. However, his understanding and practice of archaeology gave the committee the greatest cause for alarm. Criticisms of Dr. Jones ranged from "possessing a perceptible methodological deficiency" to "practicing archaeology with a complete lack of, disregard for, and colossal ignorance of current methodology, theory, and ethics" to "unabashed grave-robbing."

Thanks to Rob Macdougall at Old is the New New for the links...

Illuminated Manuscripts

Part of a history ref I need - not as irrelevant as it seems, as it turns out:

The British Library collection

The Dutch Royal Collection

Image results from google

Big calligraphy links page

Glod and Epix

GlodnEpix, where I will be posting my games stuff from now on...

            

Truant TV

The Truants on Television. (not in English however!)

My So Called Second Life: 'Second Life is MSN with Legs'

Below are my notes for the paper I gave yesterday about MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds, using WoW and Second Life as case studies and arguing/test driving some of the ideas JP and I have had about player agency within these games. The paper was meant as an overview of the ways in which players want to and can respond to these environments, and the restrictions of both.

Tom has blogged his own notes to mine, and I'm pleased because it seems from his writing that my points were clear as what he has written is a clear summation at speed of my own arguments. We got a lot of very postive response from the paper,  and had some extremely interesting discussion about potentials in games given our arguments, so I'm very pleased with the results.

'Not everybody wants to be a troll'

Poems: Reading List

A link back to the poems we are looking at each week in the Great War classes, since hte link has fallen off the page.

Virtual World Economies

Real World Virtual World economies are to be investigated by the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress, with a view to taxing monies in virtual worlds.

/cynic

Apologies that this site is just turning into a mass of links without much comment at the moment. The main reason is that most of the day I'm either writing or working on researching the same writing, with four deadlines all colliding in the space of a month, so the blog has become a quick online dump for links but also most of my commentry is going into the work I'm doing at the moment. However, as promised I will put stuff up afterthe papers are presented.

Giants of the Air

Giants of the Air: a Zeppelin management game.

One final word of advice, if you've been weaned on easy going sims like Theme Park or the like, you are in for a rude awakening. Zeppelin is difficult, it doesn't discourage you from spending unwisely nor does it tell you that the freight deals you've pulled off don't stand a chance of being completed in your less than impressive floating gasbag.

Intersections: Coding Dojo

The Coding Dojo is a series of active workshops being held by my host, Future Platforms. It's a good example of how theory and practise have moved from academic discourse to theoretical application in the industry and back again, something we keep coming up against in our various attendences at digital media events recently. At the moment, these don't go together well (unless they are formed, as this one is, of quite strict guidelines and themes). Theory is only of passing interest to people in the inducstry; although it's useful, and vice versa for academics trying to theorise how games work. I'll be interested to see the responses at My So Called Second Life later next week because there seems to be a strong attempt to break these limits at the moment. Interesting, and heartening that focus can be given to this often vague transitional area.

Blurring Boundaries

Video presentation of The Blurring Boundaries of Play: Labor, Genocide, and Addiction

Every day, millions of people around the world interact and collaborate via avatars in online games such as World of Warcraft. The marketing and media rhetoric make it easy to think of these online games as fantasy worlds that are somehow cut off from “reality”, but the boundaries of these virtual worlds have always been porous. After a brief overview of what these games are, who plays them and why they play, this talk traces out several case studies in the blurring boundaries of play and challenges some assumptions of what play means in these virtual worlds. Are some players’ virtual jobs more challenging and stressful than their day-time jobs? Can you really be addicted to online games? And in a fantasy world of ogres and elves, why is it that being Chinese can get you killed?

In Generals

A list of all of the Generals in the British Army during WW1.

Oh it's a Lovely War!

The amazon link for the new release of Oh What a Lovely War!on DvD, plus the paramount preview page.

Thanks to Brian Bosak for this information!

50 Books

The list of 50 books you must read if you are in the digital games industry. Yeah yeah... I've actually done pretty well on all the ones I ought to have, except Bogost's book, which JP is reading first and is apparently very 'fungible'.

Second Life News in the News

More on Second Life and the advertisers/news companies leaping pell mell into the bandwagon. I am giving a paper on this next week at My So Called Second Life, where I will be talking about the potential to create entertainment, artistic endeavours within virtual worlds, and how to do this successfully (cue a lot of discussion about play vs game, I think) and will publish the notes then.

This is the News

I was on the World Service talking about re-enactments over the weekend in a whistle stop visit to the recording studio in Brighton on Saturday. Ironic, since I was going to be on the same programme talking about Second Life, but sadly this was not to be. At the moment I can't find links to either programme (both articles were on Newshour)

Second Life

A series of basic links about Second Life

http://secondlife.com/

http://secondlife.com/education

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1889678,00.html

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7963538

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/10/second_life.html Huge Terra Nova post with links to elsewhere.

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/10/bragg_v_linden_.html (lawsuit and asssociated links)

More on South Park

WoW fans not amused by inconsistencies in South Park episode

FFS the plot revolves around killing enough low level boars to eventually get to Level 60. WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Project Azeroth

A wiki for a series of possible translations for words in different WoW languages. difficult to tell how accurate these are because a. trying to actually 'break' the code is against WoW's policy agreement b. it is run through a hash programme and randomised

'kek'

/Dance

Two uncannily appropriate tunes for the dance emote.

Too Sexy

WowMCA

REF: Resources for journal's on children's literature

says nice things about the journal I'm guest editing atm :)

Gamespot

Review of WoW which explains why the game is so popular and picks up no some of the game's innovations

DiGRA

I've been voted onto the board of DiGRA, which is good news all round. I have several thousand ideas about what to present at Tokyo next year - things seem to be moving so amazingly fast that anything I come up with seems to be outdated by my own next thought at the moment. Probably a joint paper and a single paper again, I think.

Taz Dingo!