Week 5
Primary sources research. Extracting and finding whether there was suitable information in the Australian War Memorial archives. Chose: RCDIG1014546.pdf;Headquarters, 4th Australian Field Artillery Brigade, Unit diary from the 4th artillery brigade headquarters for October 1917, Item Number: 13/32/19: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1353124?search
Technical Log: File Conventions Overlay Raster Maps https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/QGIS/issues/9.
Develop and document the file naming conventions for future use when preparing raster maps from primary map scans supplied by archives.
Learning GIS and the intricacies of coordinate reference systems, then applying it to a historical problem like the tracing of one serviceman's movements through WWI campaigns has been a welcome and enjoyable challenge.
The opportunity to actually spend time learning new software and literally explore the capabilities, possibilities and potential uses has been refreshing. Unfortunately my professional life has left my professional software tool development in a fixed zone, primarily my professional clients are fixated with products like MS Word, Confluence, and Adobe PDF. Even Adobe PhotoShop is considered now, to be a step too far in complexity. FOAR705 offers students like me to attempt something different with the humanities, and apply technical knowledge and skills from my experience to academic endeavours in ways unexpected. It's a wonderful amalgam of all that I am interested in.
It has been a brilliant opportunity to actually take risk, to afford the time to find opportunities to push my personal and academic limits, and attempt without fear of ramifications, of failure. For example, if the first attempt at overlaying a raster map onto the OSM map in QGIS had failed in a corporate environment, it would have added pressure. The consequence of the first failure, and the subsequent exploration of the GCP table failure, was an interesting diversion, and I learnt far more from the failure than from the success. Learning other software technologies has been a great opportunity, and each other package
From an academic perspective, the follow-up interviews with Dr. Chris Dixon and Dr. Ian Plant and our discussion of the intricacies and possibilities of the use of GIS applied to historiographical problems in war studies showed a range of potential studies like:
Tracing the production of an artillery shell from primary materials through production, transportation, and use in terms of the period workflow and industrial environment.
Movement and modelling possibilities for campaigns and battles.
The mathematical analysis possible used in conjunction with historiography - which opens up the intent of Braudel philosopher historians like Marc Bloch to link history study more stringently with science.
Digital Humanities, and interdisciplinary studies linking science like geographical information systems, now seems a more realistic possibility. Other technologies, like the natural language processing studied by Kathryn, and the interview processing utilised by Erin, both peers in our course, offer real possibilities for history studies. Digitising and translating large amounts of primary source materials currently seemingly locked away forever in archives may now become fully public, in a sense, applying history to the public in a new democratised way. For historians, the capability to study texts in archives in Paris, France, from a small Australian outback town, offers so many new horizons. Technology applied to our craft can only help, as long as Braudel's note in his May 1969 preface is borne in mind:
""I fear that there is an element of illusion or of alibi in asserting, when speaking of "statistical history," that the historian of the future "will be either a computer programmer of nothing at all." What interests me is the programmer's program." (Fernand Braudel, On History, 1980, pg.: ix).
Other points from that discussion were the need for this study to set limits and a scope that makes sense with the Masters level thesis this proof of concept has been for. The capacity and possibility of this type of geospatial dataset development is its trap! Potentially, you could easily spend weeks, months, years, collecting and collating datasets, tracing and plotting, but not really moving forward into historiography. This, of course, as we know, is the real problem with technology tools, which can hide the real reason for their existence and application to problems. This limit setting process must now follow, as will a complete analysis of the primary sources, both the diary of Alfred James Lewington, and the unit diaries and headquarters diaries and materials directly related to his service. Without a complete picture of both the limits of those items and the quality of that entire source of data, we can go no further.
Stay tuned, its going to be quite a journey!
Warren Lewington.
Introductory Proof Of Concept Lewington_PoC_v4.2lowres.pdf
Week 2
eResearch task: Tech Research: Bibliography software Survey: https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/JabRef/issues/3
Technical Log 1: "[Technical Log: JabRef First use]"(https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/JabRef/issues/2), and add a new custom source: "Technical Log: Add a New Custom source."
Week 3 Installing QGIS, JabRef, and ConTeXT.
Technical Log: Installing JabRef, QGIS, ConTeXT. https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/ConTeXT/issues/8
Technical Log Week 2: Installation of QGIS (https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/QGIS/issues/1
Week 4 Technical logs for ConTeXT
Technical Log: Really Learning ConteXt and Terminal: https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/ConTeXT/issues/4
Technical Log: Technical log: Building a Base ConTeXt template.https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/ConTeXT/issues/7
My GIS reference manual, written over multiple weeks, called: "Gis.tex". https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/QGIS/blob/master/gisv1.0.tex
Week 5 Primary sources research. Extracting and finding whether there was suitable information in the Australian War Memorial archives. Chose: RCDIG1014546.pdf; Headquarters, 4th Australian Field Artillery Brigade, Unit diary from the 4th artillery brigade headquarters for October 1917, Item Number: 13/32/19: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1353124?search
Research Task: British WWI Map projection: Research Task: British WWI Map projection
Technical Log: Extract Pdf and rectify for readability: https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/QGIS/issues/7
Week 6
eResearch task: Learn GIS systems. "gis.pdf" chapter 1.
Technical Log: Getting Started with QGIS Exercise. https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/QGIS/issues/4
Technical Log: Adding maps to QGIS: OpenLayers Plug in. https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/QGIS/issues/5
Week 7
Following the unsuccessful attempts last week, this attempt was successful.
Technical Log: Install or add a map to QGIS https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/QGIS/issues/6
Week 8
eResearch task: Learn coordinate reference systems. Chapter 2 of "gis.pdf"
Technical Log: Coordinate Reference Systems beginning. https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/QGIS/issues/8
Week 9
Technical Log: Raster Map Overlay Preparation https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/QGIS/issues/10
Week 10
Technical Log: File Conventions Overlay Raster Maps https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/QGIS/issues/9. Develop and document the file naming conventions for future use when preparing raster maps from primary map scans supplied by archives.
Week 11
Technical Log: Overlay a raster map. https://github.com/Dapscoptyltd/QGIS/issues/11
Week 12 Begin database development (ongoing as work in progress as at 08-Jun-2017).
Reflections
Learning GIS and the intricacies of coordinate reference systems, then applying it to a historical problem like the tracing of one serviceman's movements through WWI campaigns has been a welcome and enjoyable challenge.
The opportunity to actually spend time learning new software and literally explore the capabilities, possibilities and potential uses has been refreshing. Unfortunately my professional life has left my professional software tool development in a fixed zone, primarily my professional clients are fixated with products like MS Word, Confluence, and Adobe PDF. Even Adobe PhotoShop is considered now, to be a step too far in complexity. FOAR705 offers students like me to attempt something different with the humanities, and apply technical knowledge and skills from my experience to academic endeavours in ways unexpected. It's a wonderful amalgam of all that I am interested in.
It has been a brilliant opportunity to actually take risk, to afford the time to find opportunities to push my personal and academic limits, and attempt without fear of ramifications, of failure. For example, if the first attempt at overlaying a raster map onto the OSM map in QGIS had failed in a corporate environment, it would have added pressure. The consequence of the first failure, and the subsequent exploration of the GCP table failure, was an interesting diversion, and I learnt far more from the failure than from the success. Learning other software technologies has been a great opportunity, and each other package
From an academic perspective, the follow-up interviews with Dr. Chris Dixon and Dr. Ian Plant and our discussion of the intricacies and possibilities of the use of GIS applied to historiographical problems in war studies showed a range of potential studies like:
Digital Humanities, and interdisciplinary studies linking science like geographical information systems, now seems a more realistic possibility. Other technologies, like the natural language processing studied by Kathryn, and the interview processing utilised by Erin, both peers in our course, offer real possibilities for history studies. Digitising and translating large amounts of primary source materials currently seemingly locked away forever in archives may now become fully public, in a sense, applying history to the public in a new democratised way. For historians, the capability to study texts in archives in Paris, France, from a small Australian outback town, offers so many new horizons. Technology applied to our craft can only help, as long as Braudel's note in his May 1969 preface is borne in mind: ""I fear that there is an element of illusion or of alibi in asserting, when speaking of "statistical history," that the historian of the future "will be either a computer programmer of nothing at all." What interests me is the programmer's program." (Fernand Braudel, On History, 1980, pg.: ix).
Other points from that discussion were the need for this study to set limits and a scope that makes sense with the Masters level thesis this proof of concept has been for. The capacity and possibility of this type of geospatial dataset development is its trap! Potentially, you could easily spend weeks, months, years, collecting and collating datasets, tracing and plotting, but not really moving forward into historiography. This, of course, as we know, is the real problem with technology tools, which can hide the real reason for their existence and application to problems. This limit setting process must now follow, as will a complete analysis of the primary sources, both the diary of Alfred James Lewington, and the unit diaries and headquarters diaries and materials directly related to his service. Without a complete picture of both the limits of those items and the quality of that entire source of data, we can go no further.
Stay tuned, its going to be quite a journey! Warren Lewington.