History and Today

I'm going to be doing the big reveal of Political Meetings Mapper at the British Library Labs symposium on Monday 2 November. I'll post the slides and link here after the event, so you'll get to find out how I got from this when I started my postgrad research all those years ago: to this: (the most exciting video on the internet....) And the video of our Chartist tour of London pubs: me doing a 'news reporter in the street in the rain' impression

The 2015 Conference of the University of Hertfordshire's Social Science, Arts and Humanities Research Institute (SSAHRI) Spirella Ballroom Bridge Road, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, SG6 4ET 10.30am-5pm, 12th November 2015 followed by a public lecture and reception This year's SSAHRI conference, organised by colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Lincoln, and very kindly supported by the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation, is on the theme of utopias. It is very appropriate that the conference will be taking place in Letchworth, the world's first Garden City – and one of the first practical experiments in Utopianism. The conference is exploring the concept of Utopia – we will be looking at utopias from all sorts of angles: social, economic, educational, environmental, literary, cultural, aesthetic and philosophical to name a few. The conference Keynote speech will be delivered by distinguished architectural histori...

This question was sparked by a twitter conversation around George Gosling's excellent blog post introducing types of academic writing to undergraduates: https://gcgosling.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/reading1/  George explains that there are four types of academic writing, from textbooks, monographs, journal articles and edited collections of essays. This is true and correct, but his explanation of what a journal article (and indeed a journal) got me thinking and debating with Barry Doyle, Darryl Leeworthy and Mark Freeman about how students view journals in the age of online access. I've found that first year undergraduates get really confused about what a journal is, and what the difference is between a journal and a journal article. This is not surprising, as their first weeks at university are 99% the first time they've ever encountered such a specialist type of writing and publication. In order to explain what a journal is, therefore, I (and it seems the rest of us a...