Hullo the onlooker. This is an occasional column, or similar, for whatever may be occupying my mind on matters medieval and so forth. Matters medieval is kind of what I do: although my daytime job as a Research Assistant isn’t particularly medievally-focussed, I still have research in train and work in draft building on the various things I’ve done in the past.
What were those things, you may ask? And if the point of this exercise isn’t self-publicity, what is it eh? Well, I:
- worked on the political relations of the kingdoms of really early medieval Britain at Masters level, which left me with stuff to say about the supposed matriliny of the Picts and the structure of the Pictish kingdom, as well as some ideas about its relationships with other kingdoms;
- moved on to a field with actual evidence for my Ph.D., whose title was (is) “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, and which looked at the way in which you can reconstruct power relations and therefore politics (high- and low-level) through the associations of people in charter material;
- published a paper about a nunnery run by a Count’s daughter;
- gave a few papers at conferences here and there–I’m still doing this, and the sidebar should tell you where next;
- landed a post as Research Assistant in the Department of Coins and Medals at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where I’ve done a few bits and pieces you can see on the web.
And there I currently am, with various papers and book plans in ferment meanwhile. The sidebar should enable you to see what I’m busying myself with in that line. Anyway, this will serve for an introduction. Welcome!
6 September 2007 at 16:55
Hi, I couldn’t find an email address for you, but I’d like to talk to you about doing an article on what you do at the Fitzwilliam for The Heroic Age. Would you drop a note to the above email if you’re interested?
7 September 2007 at 12:57
Larry, I’ll answer this by mail, because comments here come through to my INBOX anyway so you’re already there. But for anyone else who might be trying to contact me through here, an e-mail address that should reach me is on my departmental webpage, and when that stops being true I’ll update or replace this comment.
4 August 2008 at 20:51
Jonathan, I tried to contact you through the “departmental webpage” link above, but it wouldn’t load the page for me. Could be my university has restricted access to certain Web sites, and it’s not allowing me to see it. I’ll try it again when I get home.
Anyway, I have been a subscriber to your blog for quite some time, and I’m just now trying to fill out my blogroll — I’ve been slow to add other resource links to my website — and the category of “medieval resources” definitely needs some links added to it. I notice we share several of the same Web sites on our lists: I’m a regular reader of both Gabriele’s Lost Fort blog and Dr. Richard Nokes’ Unlocked Wordhoard.
Was curious if you would like to trade links? I’ll add your site to my list and vice versa. Just let me know.
Again, sorry for posting here.
Steven
http://steventill.com
4 August 2008 at 21:01
Steven, it won’t load for me either! I suspect our webserver must be down, sorry about that.
I’ve been pointed at your site a few times by Dr Nokes’s Miscellanies, so blogrolling you is something I’ve considered, but I’m afraid I’m no more inclined to do so now than I was before. I wish you all success in your endeavours all the same, however.
5 August 2008 at 13:44
Jonathan, that is quite all right. I understand. Best of luck to you as well. I will continue to follow your blog in the future. Nice photos from today’s post by the way.
28 August 2008 at 22:35
On another note, the second comment I’ve had asking if I would consider setting up an RSS feed for this blog means that I should probably say here: guys! there is one already! It’s automatic in WordPress. If you were using Firefox you’d already have an icon to click on. As it is, try adding the feed (which is here) to your feed-reader, whatever it may be.
16 September 2009 at 11:12
You know, I am very fascinated by early Medieval Scotland… it’s interesting to know that’s what you did for your MA. And it must’ve been a nightmare trying to find any concrete evidence of it…
16 September 2009 at 12:32
Well, that was why I liked it; the freedom to imagine! But yes, I did decide that evidence would help, after a while. Part of growing up I think, or just decreasing confidence in my own ability to construct things, who knows.
29 September 2009 at 16:37
Hi,
I just found your fabulous blog via Ezra Klein.
I just wanted to encourage you to consider joining ResearchBlogging.org, where we collect blog posts about peer-reviewed research. We’re looking for more bloggers in the humanities and social sciences. The “peer-reviewed” requirement can be a problem for humanities/social science types, who often write about books, etc., but when you have a post that meets our guidelines, we’d love to see your work collected there.
Best,
Dave
30 September 2009 at 15:57
Dave, I’m bemused by this. Are you under the impression that books in the humanities are not peer-reviewed? I think that almost any of my posts would qualify as being `about peer-reviewed research’ because I don’t read a lot that isn’t, but if there’s some more silent criterion involved I think I’d have to know what it is before I could sign up to try and meet it!
1 October 2009 at 10:33
Hi Jonathan,
I’m aware that many books are peer-reviewed, but since our site has focused primarily on science, the emphasis has been on journal articles. Sorry if I implied that books in your field are not peer-reviewed.
Unfortunately our system doesn’t have a good way to create citations for books — the way it works is it looks up citations in databases and then gives respondents codes that they can use on their blogs to indicate that they are discussing that work.
The basic premise of our site is that many bloggers will sometimes write serious posts about research, and other times they write posts that are more like rants or personal narratives. We try to collect just those serious posts, and one criterion that works quite well in the sciences is when the post cites a journal article. Most books in the sciences are not peer reviewed, and books are generally not cited in serious blog posts about science.
Many bloggers in the sciences have offered the same complaint as you: “All my posts are serious and thoughtful, and they’re all about peer-reviewed research. Why should I bother to register with you?”
From your perspective, that makes sense, but consider our readers’ perspective: They are looking for a site that collects research-based posts from a number of different blogs. It doesn’t matter to them whether a blog makes one post a month about research or three posts a day. They like the ability to find posts on the topics they are interested in, whatever the source.
If you’re happy with your current readership and don’t want to expand to reach other readers, and if you don’t want your work here to be indexed so people can easily locate it, then, by all means, don’t bother registering. Most of our members say that when they do register, their readership and comment base increases, and that’s important to them.
The larger problem, of course, is that our site doesn’t offer you a way to index your posts about peer-reviewed books. That’s something we’d like to be able to do in the future, but we need to come up with a system that makes it clear that only peer-reviewed books are acceptable. Perhaps we need to limit citing books to certain fields of study (where peer-review is the norm). We’re certainly open to suggestions.
Best,
Dave
1 October 2009 at 21:17
Dave, thanks for feedback but I think I should take this to e-mail. I’m not sure whether or not we’re on the same wavelength here but I don’t think the open internet is a particularly sensible place to have the discussion… Expect to hear from me.
30 September 2009 at 18:22
Peer review for scientists always = blind, preferably double-blind, peer review. It’s easy to apply this to articles, but very difficult to apply it to books, because they are impossible to anonymize. However (this is for scientists), books published by serious presses do get read by other scholars ahead of publication, and the comments made are meant to be acted on, though we can all think of exceptions, e.g. when OUP didn’t bother to get the author of a book on a certain Anglo-Saxon ruler to engage with the comments of a distinguished reader. Sometimes the profit motive takes over.
30 September 2009 at 21:57
It’s often difficult to anonymise articles too, of course, especially if one works on a fringe area or subject. There are not very many people who can review my work and I suspect most of them must know who I am by now when a manuscript of mine arrives for them. I certainly recognise at least one of them by style alone. So I suppose I can see your point, but I don’t think it makes it any more practical for me to contribute much to this gentleman’s site!
7 October 2009 at 22:27
Thank you for your critique today, since you made a point of view which I had not thought about. Sadly, it was in the midst of my excitement and innocence that things were related in a way that might have considered potentially inappropriate. I also come from an industry where excessive sincerity and opinion are highly valued, especially when you express the first thing that comes out of your mind. I do sincerely apologize for my comments to have been expressed that I did express them, as I meant no harm at all.
8 October 2009 at 8:15
Oh no no, I don’t think you’ve done any harm. It was just the possibility that worried me, so I thought it would be best to mention it before rather than after…
8 October 2009 at 8:26
And I do appreciated that you did, because you are right; it could’ve done harm, even if that was not my intention at all. I guess it’s a good lesson learned on the power of words.
8 October 2009 at 14:49
I really enjoyed that article of yours in The Heroic Age. Thank you for the link!
For some reason it hasn’t registered with me before (although I’ve read this ‘about’ page) that you’re connected with the Fitzwilliam Museum. My husband and I will be in Cambridge later this month and were planning on a visit (I was sorely disappointed that both the Classical Archaeology museum and Fitzwilliam’s Roman/Greek gallery will be closed). Any tips?
8 October 2009 at 18:09
You’ll just miss the Darwin exhibition, too, which is a pity. However, the Fitzwilliam’s Egyptian galleries are still very much worth seeing, our Rothschild Gallery of Medieval Art is small but full of beautiful things, and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on Downing Street may fill the gap left by Classical Archaeology. It doesn’t have so much of the beautiful stuff (unless you like Anglian grave goods and, really, who doesn’t?) but there is lots there. And, if you’ve not been to the Fitzwilliam before, the building itself is so ridiculously splendid inside that it’s worth seeing for itself.