Edward Thompson: Wartime C.M.E. Discussion

The issue with referencing online sources in any kind of scholarly work is that they tend to be ephemeral: you have precisely zero control over the fact that what is there one day may disappear the next at the whim of the owner of a site, who may choose to rearrange, rename, close the site down etc. At least with a book, if formally published, whatever else happens, copies will be archived in perpetuity in the three national reference libraries. (The British Livrary, the Bodleian in Oxford, and whatever Fenland Poly call their library).

Tom

 

Whilst not disagreeing with you, in a way, it's precisely the same issue as 'hard copy'. Reference the number of lost works from antiquity. The reason we've become accustomed to a book always being there is down to sheer numbers, pretty much ensuring a copy somewhere. Ultimately, the resilience of digital storage is no different, the case merely being that the interweb wasn't set up with that as any priority. Developing secure function, as already required by - say - the financial sector isn't likely to prove beyond the wit of the tech-savvy.

I suspect, in this case, that the requisite redundancy to ensure an acceptable guarantee of finding any given work isn't as much of an issue as folk of our generation might fear. Malicious online attack is no different to the book burning so beloved of numpties down the centuries. Don't overlook known examples of literary loss e.g. the library of Alexandria. Perhaps we've grown complacent since Mr Caxton did his thing, but hard copy is, in reality, no more or less vulnerable than '0s and 1s'.

 

I disagree. The issue isn't that a particular electronic file may be lost entirely; it is that the reference to it may change - the address system (URLs) isn't stable over time. That cuts two ways: either the same file may change URL; or else the resource at the end of a given URL may change over time. If you say "there is a picture included in ISBN 1234 on page 94", if you can track down that book you are pretty much guaranteed to be seeing the picture as referenced. If you say "there is a picture included at https://example.com/URL" that picture may have disappeared over time; and even if it hasn't, it may have been altered.

Edit to add: If you got to view this post in the first couple of minutes of its existence, you may have seen a nice locomotive picture, which was available at this URL: https://www.national-preservation.com/attachments/032db1e3-0fb7-4a37-a7ed-6ffa2b16d5ad-jpeg.58004/ And now it isn't ...

Tom

 

Just a minor clarification. The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 requires a copy of each book published to be delivered (at the publisher's expense) to the British Library and, but only if so requested, to the five deposit libraries (NLS. NLW, the Bodleian, "the University Library, Cambridge" to give its its title in the Act , and Trinity College Dublin). An agent acts on behalf of the five to request copies. In practical terms, I think these bodies would only be aware of a book if it had an ISBN. Neilsen administers the ISBNs in this country. You can buy them in advance and they go live only when you report the publication to Neilsen. The ISBN can then be seen by sites such as Waterstones, Amazon, ebay etc. My experience is that the British Library is on the scent very quickly, presumably triggered by the appearance of the live ISBN. I had a request from the Agent for the Legal Deposit Libraries for my first three books but not for the latest one, at least not yet. I also give copies to the NRM.

 

Fenland Poly? Just you wait til I show that to some of my academic customers/friends! They’ll be another mob coming from the East to check the spire on 34002’s Cathedral for you to deal with!

 

I did have an issue of losing my Great Grandfathers Obituary which other more tech savvy members of Nat Pres were able to locate as it had been saved on the Wayback site. But a lot of websites die with their owners.

There is a rather nice website devoted to Newbury Diesel - http://rowifi.com/ndc/ absolutely fascinating but what happens when the creator dies/loses interest/whatever? And unlike a book no contact details, and a few links that no longer exist

 

You can call it what you like, but it's a suitable temple for books! I wrote most of my latest article sat just here...

 

Though the issues Tom raises are currently problematic, unless minded to fart against thunder resist a move to online, that needn't, indeed couldn't remain the case, therefore, respectfully, I have to disagree with his disagreement. Faffing around with url addresses aside, even were the basic Berners-Lee 'seven layer model' (which copes with hardwire, optical and wireless transmission) to be superceded, file conversion, once a programmable m.o. is established, would mean even that wouldn't be insurmountable.

Library filing has been pretty consistent (Dewey Decimal Classification) during our lifetimes and more recently, we've had ISBN. If anything, changes to an evolving internet are more easily handled than for physical systems. The point being that, with the proviso that linked sources can be properly managed (which use in a major commercial application would, rest assured, readily and rapidly render do-able), then the 'broken link' bane ceases to be an issue.

Whilst transmissible packets will continue to be steamed via Bob only knows where, the sum total file is still 'the file', from wherever each portion, or linked part is downloaded, with secure redundancy rather more manageable than multiple copies of physical books. Systemically, it's really no different to what's pretty much already happened with video and music.

 

That's why references to online sources in Wikipedia, and elsewhere in academic writings generally, are supposed to give the date on which a source was examined - much as references in such places to books are supposed to list the edition to which a reference refers (since books too, more often than one would think, change their content significantly between editions). That isn't by any means a general solution to the problem, of course, but it helps. I'm not sure there is a general solution; always including a checksum of the target contents would allow detecting when the target contents had changed.

The tendency of people to reorganize sites without apparently thinking that they're possibly breaking inbound links is really annoying. I know I don't rename or delete image files whose URLs I have posted, for precisely that reason. Some sites (e.g. sites that use MediaWiki, like Wikipedia) have a rule that when a page is renamed, a forwarding pointer is left at the old location, to prevent breaking incoming links. It will be a while before everyone on the Internet learns that, though, sigh.

Noel

 

Maybe, but in many ways the internet community has been pretty damn poor at dealing with complicated issues like that, witness that we still have a constant tide of criminal activity that's normally dealt with by complacency, ostriching and victim blaming.

 

True enough, but criminality throughout recorded history (legalised or otherwise) has always kept ahead of whatever contemporary laws, tech and mechanisms have existed. The internet's here and it ain't about to go away.

IIRC, wasn't one of the objections to early railways that they'd facilitate the nefarious activities of newly mobile ne'er do wells?

 

I believe this is one of the reasons why ‘Cambridge Polytechnic’ as Tom put it so well insisted on the railway station being so far away from its colleges.

 

Things need to change though. I've been working with internet technologies since the very early 90s when the net was run on a basis of trust between techies who were basically all on the same side. The base technologies still largely reflect that, for all that there is a certain amount of security bolted onto the top. Think, for example, that the average member of the public might be subject to an attempt to defraud a few times in thir life. Now its a few times per week...

 

No disagreement there. On the plus side, in the five or so years I've been connecting via Android tech, I've had no security issues .... unlike Windows (10 was better in this regard than 7, but grossly intrusive and the user seemed to rank way below advertisers). In the time I've used Linux (having finally given Microsoft the heave-ho), there have been no security probs either.

Perhaps I've just been lucky, but I've noted a friend of mine, who's internet pattern differs from mine only in his use of Amazon, GumTree and Shpock gets very many times the number of nuisance calls as me, presumably a result of data being, sold, shared or hacked. One of the biggies, in my books, is over ownership of one's own data. The notion that some company to whom you've given data in good faith can then treat that as a mineable asset infuriates me. It's not theirs to do with as they wish and it's about bloody time people stood up to this bare faced pillage.

Of course, GUIs are only one route employed by fraudsters. Last week I received several calls purporting to be from National Insurance from numbers now blocked, but these clowns are persistent. Same friend mentioned above gets a regular nuisance call between 17:00 and 18:00 every day. The calls come from the same block of numbers, so bar one and they've many more .... and two years of telling them everything from a polite "no, now please take my number off your database", to "sod off and get a proper job", has produced no cessation. TPS seem useless, ditto network providers. Perhaps a whip round to buy shares in a hit man might get the message across, as nowt else seems to.

Do you think this IT / computer related stuff's important enough get it's own thread (if it hasn't already!) and we give this one back to the Thompson discussion?.

 

I used to say that the great thing about the Internet (oh, BTW, everyone; it is capitalized; 'Internet' and 'internet' are different words, with different meanings - something apparently not realized by the people who started the de-capitalization craze) was that it brought people from around the world to your doorstep; the downside of the Internet is that brought crooks and frauds from around the world to your doorstep. TANSTAAFL. (I agree with your broader point, BTW.)

Noel

 

Amen to that!

 

In a blog, on his publisher’s site, Tim Hillier-Graves outlines how he started with a very negative view of Thompson until his research took him on a rather similar journey to the one many of us in this thread have also travelled; although it seems without the benefit of Simon’s original data and detailed analysis.
https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/blog/author-guest-post-tim-hillier-graves/

 

That could almost have been penned as synopsis of this thread!

"Opinions formed by later authors who weren't party to these events ... slipped far too easily into the Gresley - Good, Thompson - Bad mind set ... often basing opinion on conjecture or dubious truths ... Thompson managed very effectively in the most difficult and trying of circumstances ... rebuilding of [Gresley's] locomotives were not sponsored by envy or maliciousness ... sound practical reasons for doing so."

Simon could practically have dictated that! (And that is meant as a compliment to both authors).

Tom

 

Interesting; I think it contains a typo, though: surely "he undoubtedly followed the advice and guidance of his Chief Draughtsman, Edward Windle and others senior members of his team, so his decisions were taken in isolation" should be 'decisions were not taken in isolation'?

Noel

 

Having read his Gresley book and liked his writing style, I had no hesitation in buying the Thompson volume. I'm about one third of the way through and enjoying it. It's also good to know that any profits from his books go to Cancer research. Tim Hillier-Graves has had an interesting journey through life!

Tim Hillier-Graves was born in North London in 1951. On leaving university he served with the Royal Navy seeing wide service on land and sea. For much of this time he specialised in weapon development projects, specifically missiles and heavyweight torpedoes, and worked alongside BAe, Marconi Space and Defence Systems and McDonnell Douglas in the process. In support of this work he undertook prolonged periods of study and research at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham. Late in his career he changed specialisms and focussed on Human Resource Management and outsourcing, then as an Assistant Director took on responsibility of housing for military personnel. He retired in 2011 to concentrate more fully on writing. He has had a number of books and articles on the Navy, railway engineering, aviation and military history published since the 1970s.