History yays

[dubsartur]

From 2019, a grant-funded project to explore records at the city of Aberdeen as inspiration for computer games Playing in the Archives: Game Development with Aberdeen's Medieval Records.

They are preparing a Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/commonprofytgames/strange-sickness

[Tusky]

Oo interesting. I'll be curious in seeing how that goes!

(That modification was me correcting the kickstarter link by the way, the old one took me to 404 page)

[dubsartur]

Graeme and Felicite Wylie's caravel SV Notorious in Australia of 58 tonnes displacement
Brisbane Times 2015
Wikipedia s.v. Notorious(ship)
Out and About in the Otaway YouTube channel walkthrough

[dubsartur]

The Medieval Views Virtual Arts festival kickstarter looks like it was pitched too high for the author's fundraising capacity https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/drdknight/medieval-views-virtual-arts-festival

[Jubal]

I'm not sure that counts as a yay! But yes, it's a pity, I think Dayanna is great and it's disappointing that we can't get these sorts of community efforts better funded. I'm not sure that seeing things as pitched too high for one's fundraising capacity is the right way to consider it - you have to pitch events at the level needed to actually fund them, and see where you can get your fundraising capacity (which is a function of the project itself, personal linkages, institutional access, and a lot of luck) in light of that. I am one of the backers, anyhow, and I hope it'll inspire future efforts even if failing this time round.

[dubsartur]

I'm not sure that counts as a yay! But yes, it's a pity, I think Dayanna is great and it's disappointing that we can't get these sorts of community efforts better funded. I'm not sure that seeing things as pitched too high for one's fundraising capacity is the right way to consider it - you have to pitch events at the level needed to actually fund them, and see where you can get your fundraising capacity (which is a function of the project itself, personal linkages, institutional access, and a lot of luck) in light of that. I am one of the backers, anyhow, and I hope it'll inspire future efforts even if failing this time round.

The serial crowdfunding people I know describe it as a "fists get you a brick, brick gets you a knife, knife gets you the keys" situation: you create a series of projects, each calibrated so that you are confident your audience will fund it and probably reach the stretch goals, and use each project to build your audience so you can propose more expensive projects.  As always, I describe the best practices of people with demonstrated success in an area as far as I understand them, not the only way of doing things.

[Jubal]

I think that works with some types of project and not others... and where it's larger projects, one has to account for e.g. individuals' ability to input labour for free. One suspects that with the "building it up" approaches there has to be a lot of loss-leader work in there, which requires an input level of financial stability on the part of the person doing it.

[dubsartur]

Some academics in the last century had the barbarous custom of letting people claim 'dibs' on topics for decades without publishing their results (with the results that often they never did publish and their knowledge died with them). 

The death of Alwyn Ruddock in 2006 released a flood of archival research on John Cabot / Giovanni Caboto and his voyages to the New World tracing her unpublished steps and hints she shared with colleagues.

Glaurung edit: link URL fixed.

[Glaurung]

Oh dear. That's a rather depressing story. I can see that there's a sort of professional courtesy involved, given the respect accorded to first publication in the academic world, but I think that courtesy carries with it a duty to actually get on and publish, even if that publication isn't perfect. At least with the hints that Ruddock provided, it's possible for others to follow in her footsteps, and find the original documents again.

UPDATE
Also, I'm reminded somewhat of Tolkien, and his long struggle with the material that eventually became the Silmarillion - worked and reworked during his lifetime, but never quite brought to publication. But at least Tolkien wanted it published, even after his death, and had ensured that someone was in place to make it happen. Similarly in his academic work: the book Finn and Hengest came out of material that Tolkien first presented in lectures in the 1930s, but was happy to hand over to Alan Bliss when he (not aware of Tolkien's lectures) started research along the same lines in the 1960s. Bliss's preface gives a good example of the professional courtesy I was thinking of:

Nearly twenty years ago, I read to the Dublin Mediaeval Society a paper entitled "Hengest and the Jutes". Later, in conversation with colleagues, I discovered that nearly all my conclusions had been anticipated many years previously in lectures by the late Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, which I had not heard; it was therefore impossible for me to publish my paper. On my next visit to Tolkien, in 1966, I explained the situation to him; a few days later, he wrote to me offering, with characteristic generosity, to hand over to me all his material on the story of Finn and Hengest, to make what use of it I wished.

[dubsartur]

Yes, I think its reasonable to give someone a monopoly on a piece of evidence for some years while they put a publication together, but not for decades.  The way it often works in European archaeology today is that to get your next grant to excavate, you have to show that you published your last excavation to a basic standard.  That avoids the problem where someone excavates a site, says they will publish it when they retire, and never get around to that so its as bad as if the site was looted.  And I understand ordering all drafts, unfinished books, and private correspondence destroyed upon one's death, but doing the same for notes, transcribed sources, etc. seems a very strange choice!

IIRC, D. Obbink made use of this kind of professional courtesy to hide his various shenanigans and alleged crimes

[dubsartur]

A key turn in the creation of scientific history was when Leopold von Ranke popularized the idea of searching archives for sources and not just reading what other scholars had written.  Looking at contemporary documents and letters often gave a completely different picture of events than reading stories by literari decades or centuries after the fact.  In the 1990s, that tradition continued by explaining one big reason why the German generals stuck with Hitler: he had been paying them monthly and annual gifts as long as he was satisfied with their political loyalty.  English Wikipedia page and the German book which was the first to lay out the evidence in one place.

[Jubal]

I found this interesting: how the "spiral staircase as defensive feature" myth was created by a late nineteenth/early twentieth century art critic and fencer:

https://triskeleheritage.triskelepublishing.com/mediaeval-mythbusting-blog-2-the-man-who-invented-the-spiral-staircase-myth/

[Pentagathusosaurus rex]

That was a myth? My whole life has been a lie!

[dubsartur]

"Historians: ruining fun since Herodotus let out the truth about Helen and Paris?"

[Jubal]

I only realised it was a myth like two and a half or three years ago and I'm a medieval historian...