The History Code

we have issuus…

mamelouk — Mon, 11 May 2009 11:22:36 +0000

Here is quite an amazing online reader, where I found a publication from the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information (you know, the one at the Pompidou!!) on the history of Muslims in France. Who knows what else is on there! Don’t have time to look!

Issuu reader

Hot up your habitus

mamelouk — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:17:45 +0000

Historians don’t just tell stories, they investigate problems too, and that’s when they start to look for ideas from social science. Reading the work of social theorists helps us to question some of the assumptions we make about history.

Les classiques des sciences sociales

This site has essays from Foucault, Bourdieu, Weber, Braudel, Freud, Sartre, de Beauvoir and many others, plus downloadable classics of sociology, and work on contemporary questions like prisons and health. And excellent sections on “Creole societies” and “Sociology of the family”

It’s in French, but there are also some links to English texts.

Find out about Bourdieu’s conception of the habitus!

The US Library of Congress has an amazing digital collection!

Iohn Huighen van Linschoten his Discours of voyages into ye Easte & West Indies : deuided into foure bookes. London [1598]

Clash of the Titans

mamelouk — Sat, 02 May 2009 05:52:29 +0000

Today I discovered something exciting while spending a sunny Saturday afternoon cooped up in the office. No … not that rather dodgy movie from the 1980s. It is a French site offering free and open access to journal articles of all kinds (in French, of course).

To explain, there is no equivalent to JSTOR or such paid subscription access for most French journals, which has always been a bit frustrating.

But the basic principle in French scholarship seems to me (1) it will take a long time (2) when it does come, it is free, impeccably put together and enormously rich in resources. This is certainly true of Gallica, France’s resounding answer to Google Books.

The site Revues.org has always allowed free access to on-line journals, but not on-line access to print journals if you get what I mean. We’ve become greedy these days – we want instant access to back issues with fully downloadable pdf.

Now here comes Persée to slay the gorgon of American hegemony and free the Andromeda of intellect!

Just kidding. All suspicious mythological and gender implications aside, I love it!

To quote…“Persée is a program which was created for the digital publication of scientific journals in the field of the humanities. The entire printed collection of journals is digitized and published online through a portal which offers access to the collections as well as advanced functionalities which facilitate and enhance use of the portal’s resources. The journals are selected by an editorial board, thereby guaranteeing the collection’s scientific coherence.”

And ... “The main goal of the Persée project is to widely disseminate the scientific output of French language specialists in the humanities on the internet. Considered part of France’s heritage, the collections are at the disposal of all, without charge, in an optic of free and non exclusive access and dissemination.”

Ben….Vive la France!

I must confess, most exciting for me is Annales historiques de la Révolution française (87 Issues, 2047 Articles 1966-2005)

Other gems

Annales (334 Issues, 13717 Articles 1929-2002)

L’Homme (164 Issues, 5958 Articles 1961-2008)

Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée (72 Issues, 1633 Articles 1966-1999)

A Vault Ahead in Digital Archives

mamelouk — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:27:18 +0000

I am no American historian, but even I have to be goggling at the chance to inspect Ronald Reagan’s handwritten letter to Gorbachev in 1985 …. The most powerful man in the world writes like a grade 6 kid! Maybe handwriting is the key to character after all. The National Archives in Washington have put together a model website for showing off their treasures. Enjoy!
http://digitalvaults.org/

Handwritten memo from Reagan to Gorbachev 1985

Flipping fantastic

mamelouk — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 06:58:19 +0000

Everyone probably knows Google have a massive online library which can be searched by text, with whole books available as download in pdf form. It is astonishing what is on there. But frankly, I think their reader is horrible. It is clunky and ugly, and a lot of the books have been so poorly digitized they are hardly legible. Enter another library, this time called the Internet Archive. It does not have the same resources as Google, but it offers a raft of different reading modes. The one I think is brilliant is called “Flip Book (beta)”. Here is a screen shot:

The pages flip in a very rapid and funky way, it’s possible to search in the text and you get a bunch of little markers for your pages. It’s got everything except the inky-papery and sometimes a bit mildewy book fragrance (maybe that’s next!). Verner W. Clapp, the author of this book on “Libraries of the Future” would have been gobsmacked.

Best of all, books are scanned in colour, unlike the dour and illegible GoogleBooks (love those latexed fingers that appear on so many pages!). Here’s my personal favourite!

Nice, eh? I think Google would do well to emulate this benchmark.

But still, Internet Archive has its limitations: you can’t search the full text directly from the search page, and it just doesn’t work as well as Google. Instead, try doing a Google advanced search, limited to domain “archive.org” and then you can find whatever you want.

Welcome to the History Code

mamelouk — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:32:41 +0000

Electronic Resources for History Geeks

Hi everyone! The world of history on the net is pretty exciting, and guess what… it’s not just the Da Vinci Code! If karate-chopping monks chasing eachother around the Louvre sparked your interest, you might want to start finding out what else is out there. In fact, historians get a teensy bit upset about books like this, mainly because of their outrageously selective presentation of evidence (and not because Dan Brown could purchase my whole life on eBay and still have change to buy himself a small university). But hey, being a true history geek myself, I’m happy that people should be so interested in the past, so I want to encourage everyone to start researching for themselves. For students, for colleagues and for everyone interested in history, I’ve put together my own cheekily-named “History Code” of tools to use in your own research. I’m going to post them as I find them. My work stretches from the late 17th century to the present, and is focused on Europe (particularly France) and the Muslim world. So it won’t be exhaustive in any way. But I hope the resources will be helpful to everyone, and feel free to put up links to other resources or to your own blog. Happy hunting….