bookandswordblog @bookandswordblog@scholar.social

I am glad that our library database emits well-formatted bibliographic references! Saves time as I format the bibliography of my dissertation.

Did you know that Leonard Woolley's classic books on excavating Ur are available at ETANNA? These are 'pre-1945' archaeology so meant for a general audience http://etana.org/coretexts/search?keyword=&subject=&title=&creator=Woolley%2C+Leonard&format=All

Reading the news in 2018: a story about how we are headed to positive feedbacks and 6+ degrees of warming in our grandchildren's lifetimes unless we start changing our behaviour, next to a $17 lemonade-stand robbery and how artificial intelligence might treat depression.

Post: Thesis Fuel and a Bit of Fun https://bookandsword.com/2018/08/06/one-last-pile-of-thesis-fuel-and-a-bit-of-fun/

One of the joys of the academic life is being paid in CAD but spending mostly EUR one year, mostly GBP or USD the next. What is some personal finance software for *nix which makes it easy to change your money of account? GnuCash seems to want you to pick one base currency at the start and treat all other transactions as buying the base currency at the day's rate, and that does not fit my life this decade.

Want to get a feel for price structures in ancient and medieval societies (and price structures are like gravity, they shape almost everything we do even if we don't think about it). I just added a new link to my post on historical prices for gamers and writers https://bookandsword.com/2017/05/20/historical-prices-for-gamers-and-writers/

Google cooperating with the Chinese government's censorship and data collection would be a concern, but the last five search fields you used were almost certainly censored too. Search engine design is not just about tech, it is also about ethics and most designers don't think like librarians. https://theintercept.com/2018/08/01/google-china-search-engine-censorship/

From the archives: how historical linguistics works, and "Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics" (2015) https://bookandsword.com/2017/01/28/some-thoughts-on-facts-and-fallacies-in-historical-linguistics/

Just a reminder: in-copyright back issues of many French humanities journals are available to all on Persée https://www.persee.fr/ #openaccess

So, for example, you can look at early medieval legends and ask what history and myths lie behind them ... or you can ask "why was it useful for people to declare that they were descended from the Trojans? why did this people decide that their ancestors had massacred the Romans after learning their language, while that people decided that they were the heirs to the Romans?"

Is there a good name for the practice of reading sources as telling us about the inner world of the writer's mind, not the outer world which they claim to describe? Its not deconstruction, and philosophers don't like calling it postmodernism or poststructuralism. #philosophy #methodology

Aelian and Fire by Countermarch, for the military methods geeks https://bookandsword.com/2018/07/14/5102/

Alice Slotsky gives a bibliography on the cuneiform cookbooks in the Yale Babylonian Collection https://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2018/07/09/cooking-in-cuneiform-a-guest-post-by-alice-slotsky/ If you want to try out the recipes, check out these books!

The German article from 1896 which I needed was on the Internet Archive! https://archive.org/stream/UntersuchungenZurGeschichteVonEranI.21896/Marquart1896UntersuchungenZurGeschichteVonEranI.2#page/n21/mode/2up

Economists versus historians on economic history https://bookandsword.com/2015/09/05/economists-vs-historians-on-economic-history/ (or, bookandsword gets annoyed with Brad DeLong)

The reason most fields don't have an arxiv is not because academics are snooty and evil. The reason is that we have very limited money and brainpower, so we limp along from improvisation to improvisation trying to make the new one work a little bit better than the old one. Its =hard= to get money to make publications free forever.

Michael Erard on the origins of writing in world history https://aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-writing-lie-in-hopes-and-dreams-not-in-accounting

An early picture of Greeks from the Near East ... The Siege on the Amathus Bowl https://bookandsword.com/2015/05/09/the-siege-on-the-amathus-bowl/

How do you folks navigate the 30 or so text files, PDFs etc. you have open when you are writing? They all look the same in the background when you want to switch.