This is a new blog for a new project. Some people might remember my old blog, which ran from 2006 to 2013. That’s not currently online (but I do have a backup) because I want a fresh start. This new blog will be far less eclectic than the old one, because it’s mostly focused on one project, (although I might publish updated versions of some old posts).

The aim of this new project is to create an online finding aid and reference work about the British Civil Wars (c. 1637-60). There will be a web page for each source and each named entity (person, place or organization, especially military units). Most users should be able to find most of what they need through search suggestions and clicking links. This will make it accessible to historians trained in traditional research methods who don’t have advanced digital skills. It’s based on the idea of Linked Open Data but most people won’t need to know much about that. You certainly won’t need to learn about scary things like RDF and SPARQL to be able to use it, but if you do know about these things you will be able to export machine-readable data to do whatever you want with.

The problem that I’m trying to solve is how to make it easier to find and organize historical source material. Lots of useful sources about the civil wars are already freely available online, but they can be hard to find. The Internet Archive has many of the standard printed sources that are now out of copyright but poor metadata and search facilities, and multiple copies of the same thing, make it especially challenging to find the right volume of a multi-volume series such as Calendar of State Papers Domestic. I would be lost without this list of links that Nick Poyntz made a few years ago. But finding and linking to Internet Archive material is only the start. Because this stuff is out of copyright, it can be freely copied, adapted and republished. That means that I could integrate the full text of these sources into my website and fill them with inline links to named entities that are mentioned in them. Hyperlinks can also take users from my site to online sources that can’t legally be reused, such as material at British History Online or Civil War Petitions. Sources like this can be indexed and linked to other material without needing to actually copy them.

Another part of the problem is that there are lots of important manuscript sources that have not been published online or in print. Sometimes these at least have detailed descriptions in archives’ online catalogues. Some archive catalogue data is freely reusable (for example, TNA’s Discovery catalogue is licensed under the Open Government Licence); some is not legally reusable but can at least be linked to as above. But some of the most important sources for the military history of the British Civil Wars are not well catalogued. TNA SP 28 (sometimes known as the Commonwealth Exchequer Papers), which contains financial records of parliamentarian forces, is the most notorious example: big, complicated, and many boxes are barely catalogued at all. Hannah Worthen has improved the situation by cataloguing some of the sequestration records in SP 28, but the series still has several boxes described only as ‘fragments and miscellanea not otherwise sorted’. My own research notes are currently one of the best guides to SP 28, and I want to share them to help other people. This project will also help me. It’s now 22 years since I started my PhD (and 18 years since I finished: I’m not still doing it!) and I can barely manage the material that I’ve collected so far. I feel like I can’t do much more research until I’ve built this thing to help me organize my material.

My own research will benefit from building up service records for military units and soldiers, and mapping their locations. In the longer term this could feed into bigger questions about recruitment, training, and the social backgrounds of soldiers.

The site will run on Semantic MediaWiki, which is the same software that Marine Lives uses. This makes it easy to create, edit and share data which is both human-readable and machine-readable. The semantic features mostly work behind the scenes so you can benefit from them without knowing many technical details. For example, clicking on a ready-made hyperlink in a person’s page can show you a list of all the sources that have been linked to that person, and the list will automatically update when more sources are linked. I won’t have to create all the data manually, because there are some existing datasets that are licensed for reuse, such as TNA’s Discovery catalogue, the Ordnance Survey, and Wikidata.

To start with, this will be a solo project and the scope will be limited to Great Britain 1642-46 to keep it manageable. I won’t duplicate things that other projects are already doing well. In the longer term I hope to expand it to cover the whole of the British Civil Wars and to include crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and collaboration with other projects and organizations. But that can all wait as I don’t want to get too ambitious too soon. Also, it will be easier for other people to understand what I’m trying to do if I can show them a demo instead of trying to tell them. I already have enough experience to do the things that need doing for now, but I will still be asking for feedback along the way. The public demo should be online within a few weeks. Before then, there will be more blog posts to explain in more detail how the project will work and where it came from.