Academic goals for 2018

Looking ahead to the New Year I thought I’d jot down things that I’d like to tackle in this area in the next 12 months.

I’ve already blogged about my writing goals for 2018, which are very much still applicable, and I hope to blog more about progress as it is made in these areas.

I also have a number of academic research projects on the go, especially concerning book history and urban history, sometimes both together. I will work away at these quietly in the background, but again they would be a good source for blogs, reporting on progress.

I have quite a large number of peer-reviewed history publications now, and it might be nice to blog more looking back at some of these in particular. Some of the papers are open access and can be read fully and freely online. But even for those published in a more restricted way I could usefully blog reflections about them here, sharing the information more widely.

My piles of academic books to read are terrifying in their scale! But maybe I could set myself the goal of reading some of the books, and blogging brief reviews here after. It would encourage me to read them, and might also help other scholars.

Likewise it would be nice to do more methodological blog posts re working with specific sources, applying techniques such as digital humanities etc. Definitely food for thought.

Many ideas anyway. Looking forward to it!

Read Full Post »

Looking back on a year of recreational reading

As we near the end of 2017 I thought I’d reflect on the books I’ve been reading over the last year. Note this is the books I’ve been reading for fun, usually on my Kindle. I have a to-read pile for academic books of quite scary proportions – well several piles! Academic books are trickier for me to read, due to my brain damage, because I usually can’t adjust the font etc. I also tend not to get on well with PDF-based ebooks. But I read ebooks avidly for fun, and got through a fair number this year. 89 finished so far, and there may be more yet.

My list of books completed in 2017 is online at Goodreads. I set myself, just for fun, the goal of completing 50 books this year, and have surpassed it. Particularly good again given my MS-like illness, which wipes me out for much of the time, and makes reading extremely difficult.

Looking through the list of books completed in 2017 a number of trends jump out. For example I really like fantasy and horror books. I’m not a big scifi fan, preferring fantasy, sword and sorcery, magic etc. So, for example, I’ve been continuing my read through (and reread in many cases) of all the 41 Terry Pratchett Discworld novels. I completed six more Discworld books this year, numbers 32-37 in the sequence, interspersing them with other reading material. I started reading book #38 last night.

Another series that I’ve been reading throughout the year, and will carry on doing so into 2018, is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series of comics / graphic novels. I’ve read these before, and love them, and am rereading them on my iPad in Comixology’s guided panel view. There are 10 collected graphic novel volumes in the main Sandman series, and I read numbers 1-6 this year, and am part way through number 7. Again enjoying immensely.

Other comics that I read this year included those shortlisted for the Hugo scifi awards. As a member of the 2017 Worldcon (actually attending it, in Helsinki) I got a voter’s packet of many of the Hugo shortlisted works. And that included the comics up for the award. So I read loads of these. Many of the works, such as Saga, were parts of ongoing series, but I enjoyed them nevertheless, and have thus found more comics that I want to read in future. I also read most of the Hugo-shortlisted novelettes and novellas.

The Worldcon in Helsinki was held in August 2017, and not long after that I read several horror books in the run-up to Halloween. The first was Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Booker-shortlisted His Bloody Project, more crime than horror, but could easily fit into the latter genre too. I followed this with an annual favourite reread: Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October. I recommend this book to any fans of horror, weird fiction etc. Especially in the days before Halloween. It is rather designed to be read daily throughout October, though I always gobble it up more quickly. Other horror works read in October include Robin Jarvis’s The Whitby Witches, and Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree. October was definitely a good month of reading for me.

Although as noted above I’m not a big fan of scifi I did read several Doctor Who books throughout the year. For me Doctor Who is less a scifi series than a storytelling engine with time travelling aspects. I also read famed scifi writer Michael Moorcock’s The Jewel in the Skull, though this is very much a fantasy novel of his, rather than the scifi that some may associate him more with.

Something new for me this year was reading a number of play scripts. I haven’t done this since I was at school, wading through Shakespeare etc. Thanks to attending a nationwide cinema screening of a live performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead I read the script of this play afterwards. To my surprise, finding play scripts vastly easier to read than most print books – lots of space on the page, not too much crammed text to wade through – this was followed by Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots got her head chopped off, which I saw on stage in St Andrews in the 1990s, and Rona Munro’s trilogy The James Plays about Scottish Stewart kings James I, II and III. I have my eye on David Greig’s Dunsinane play next – definitely getting a theme here for historical Scottish ones!

Quite a few of the books I read this year were bought for me as birthday or Christmas presents, usually in ebook form for my Kindle, where I read with a gigantic font and huge line spacing – more in appearance like a Ladybird book for a 5 year old child. Such present titles read included The Moon Stallion, which I saw on the television long, long ago, and Frost Hollow Hall, another Young Adult book with a historical bent and several supernatural elements to it.

I’d like to mention the books that were my favourites this year, all of which I rated as 5-star in Goodreads. In reading order they are as follows:

• A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
• The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, the first in her Merlin trilogy
• The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner
• The Swish of the Curtain by Pamela Brown
• Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, a love-letter to small town America and childhood in the 1920s
• Mary Queen of Scots got her head chopped off by Liz Lochhead
• Ms Marvel vol 5 “Super Famous” graphic novel
• Saga vol 6 graphic novel
• Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson – read in the run-up to our trip to Finland
• Peril at End House by Agatha Christie – one of my favourite Hercule Poirot stories
• Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott
• Tommy v Cancer: One man’s battle against the Big C by Tommy Donbavand
• The Moon Stallion by Brian Hayles
• The James Plays by Rona Munro
• The Fellowship of the Ring (Lord of the Rings part 1) by JRR Tolkien
• A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
• The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge
• Doctor Who Yearbook 1993
• The Express Diaries by Nick Marsh
• Frost Hollow Hall by Emma Carroll

To be fair many of these top-rated titles were rereads for me, including my absolute favourite Lord of the Rings. But I also found some new favourites to reread in the future, including the already-mentioned The Moon Stallion and Frost Hollow Hall, and Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.

So that’s my look back at a year of reading. It’s been fun! I look forward to reading more in 2018.

Read Full Post »

Autosomal DNA tests verifying conventional paper-based genealogical research

Just blogged some thoughts about autosomal (all branches) DNA testing, and how those results have compared with my conventional paper-based research. Very much genealogical focused, but interesting from a wider perspective, viewed through the lens of general historical research, which frequently has to piece together stories from incomplete paper records, but can’t usually fall back on science to confirm things 100%.

Viv's Ancestry Blog

Some months ago I blogged about a major DNA breakthrough, confirming that I’d traced my Irish great granny properly. DNA testing was needed to be sure of the line, because we lack certain conventional key paperwork, and so it was enormously difficult to trace back.

That testing was with FamilyTreeDNA, using their FamilyFinder test, which finds chunks of DNA from all branches of the ancestral tree. This is called autosomal DNA testing.

I’ve since tested with AncestryDNA as well, which is a purely autosomal test, and have found that very useful too. It’s confirmed numerous ancestral lines, that I traced the conventional way through paperwork. So I thought it might be worth reflecting on that.

My ancestry is 1/2 Scottish (mainly Scottish Borders), 3/8 English (West Yorkshire and West Midlands) and 1/8 Irish (Dublin and County Cork). And I trace every single line, and have been doing so for 35…

View original post 677 more words

Read Full Post »

Academic writing goals for 2018

Mainly as a prompt for myself, to encourage me to get it all done, I thought I’d blog about some writing projects I want to finish off in the next year.

First up is a rewrite of a conference talk, which I want to submit in print to a new academic journal. It’s almost finished. I just need to tidy up the last few bits. And some sections are time, or more pertinently date, critical. So I need to get on with it. That should be done soon.

Secondly I have a brand new journal paper combining urban history and book history, the topics of my PG Masters and PhD. It needs more work, but I’m really pleased with it as it stands. I think it’s one of the strongest pieces I’ve written, and it’s a topic that probably only I could do, given my combined background. The trickiest bits are sorting out illustrations for two case studies. For the first, a town, I can probably work from a published town plan, if I can pick a suitable one, and get permission to use it. The other case study, a regional case study, is possibly going to need a new map. I’m not good at drawing maps! So I’m still pondering what to do re that. It definitely needs some kind of cartographic illustration, to explain unfamiliar geography to the reader. But if I can crack the mapping issues I ought to be able to submit this journal paper in the first quarter of 2018.

Slightly more straightforward is developing an already accepted manuscript publishing proposal for the Scottish History Society. This concerns a poem from the 17th century, which I have transcribed, and will be published in annotated form. The key work to do is to add numerous annotations and expand the introductory essay. Annotations will be added for people’s names, places, events, anything else needing explaining. This should be largely straightforward, but will be somewhat time consuming, and may hit tricky patches. The introductory essay needs more on the possible provenance of the poem and its mystery writer. I may need to consult an academic specialist on poetry of this period for that. I expect that I can finish this by summer 2018, but have a much longer deadline option available if need be.

I also have a short journal paper in progress, concerning a 16th century poet ancestor of mine, a royal courtier, whose family history as published eg in DNB is very wrong. I thought I might write a note putting on record a corrected version, based on my research. This is in progress, in Scrivener on my iPad, but isn’t urgent to finish. It can wait until all the more important and heftier items are out of the way. So while it might be nice to submit it in 2018, in practice it may be done later. Not least because of how ill I am, with a severely disabling MS-like illness.

I have other academic writing projects in the air, but for most I need to do more research in primary source materials, i.e. documents, first.

As well as the academic writing projects I have two fun recreational things that I hope to submit in 2018. I am writing a number of interactive fiction (IF) or text adventure games in Inform 7. And I may be ready to submit two of them to IF competitions in 2018. One of my games, a 15th century set game about the Border Reivers, is about 80% finished at the moment. I need to add further refinements, and improve interactivity, and it still needs thoroughly playtesting. But that could easily be completed well in advance of the 2018 IFComp, the main annual competition for interactive fiction games that takes place each autumn. The other historical game I’m writing, about mathematician John Napier and a treasure hunt he was employed on for my ancestor Sir Robert Logan of Restalrig, around 1590 or so, is much earlier in development. But I expect I should be able to get an opening portion ready to submit for IntroComp, for the opening sections of games, if that competition runs again in 2018, most likely in the summer.

So those are my writing goals. Submit two journal papers, complete another already accepted publishing piece, and submit two interactive fiction games to competitions in 2018, all going well. Let’s see what happens!

Read Full Post »