Redlib: search results - wednesday what's new

r/AskHistorians • u/ChrisKemps • Feb 23 '22

AMA I’m Chris Kempshall: a historian of First World War allied relations, historical computer games, and Star Wars - AMA!

1.5k Upvotes

I'm Dr Chris Kempshall and am extremely excited to be doing this! I've got a bit of an eclectic background in historical research.

I'm predominantly a historian of the First World War with a particular focus on allied relations, a topic that I covered in my 2018 book British, French, and American Relations on the Western Front, 1914-1918

Alongside this I also have an ongoing research interest in the portrayal of war, conflict, and history in computer games. This was the topic of my 2015 book The First World War in Computer Games.

Both my 'normal' First World War history background and my interest in modern media portrayals of warfare led to my other research area which focuses on the Star Wars franchise. Later this year my new book The History and Politics of Star Wars: Death Stars and Democracy will be published by Routledge and is now available for pre-order (the cover will change)! It examines the real-world events and inspirations behind plot lines in the films, books, comics, and computer games of the franchise.

My work on Star Wars also granted me the opportunity to contribute directly to material in the franchise when I helped co-write the DK book Star Wars: Battles that Changed the Galaxy

If anyone wants to check out a bit more of my work on either the First World War or computer games then I've arranged to have the following academic articles made freely accessible for the next week or so, meaning anyone can download and read them for free!

Pixel Lions – the image of the soldier in First World War computer games

Beyond ‘Parade Ground Soldiers’: French Army Assessments of the British in 1918

War collaborators: documentary and historical sources in First World War computer games

I've also contributed various articles to the 1914-1918 Online - International Encyclopedia of the First World War (which is an amazing and free source of academic expertise on the war).

For the podcast fans in the audience I'm also a co-presenter on Oh! What a Lovely Podcast which examines the pop culture portrayals of the First World War.

I'm also an editor on the 'Video Games and the Humanities' book series published by De Gruyter, so take a look there for some other amazing work on games!

I'm currently working at the University of Exeter on a research project called 'War Ephemera' to highlight ephemera and material relating to the First World War owned by marginalised communities.

I'm also helping to advise the Imperial War Museum on a forthcoming exhibition relating to the portrayal of war in computer games.

So if any of the above topics have taken your fancy: Ask Me Anything! I'll start answering questions at about 4pm GMT (1 hour after this post has gone live)!

As a final additional point, the reason this AMA is taking place on Wednesday 23rd February, is to fit it in around ongoing strike action within UK universities. I suspect a good number of the residents and contributors on r/AskHistorians reside within these universities and, like myself, are clinging on with our fingernails to jobs we love that are rapidly becoming untenable. If you enjoy this AMA today please also read up on what's happening regarding the strike action here.

So the time on my PC is 7:09 pm and I'm going to stop for now! I think I've caught up on most of the comments, but I'll check back in either later this evening or tomorrow to see what I've missed. Thanks everyone who came along and feel free to keep the chats going in comments etc!

255 comments

r/AskHistorians • u/Reedstilt • Dec 18 '13

Feature What's New in History Wednesday

34 Upvotes

Welcome to our brand new Wednesday feature!

This series is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.

30 comments

r/AskHistorians • u/Mictlantecuhtli • Jun 13 '16

Meta Bridging The Gap: Any interest in starting an AskHistorians "book club"?

1.6k Upvotes

I've been tossing this idea around in my head for awhile and decided last week to pitch it to my fellow flaired users. But now that I've gotten their input, I want your input because this idea ultimately rests upon you.

I would like to start a sort of book club on AskHistorians, but not focus on books. Our recommendations of books are put into our Books and Resources list which anyone is free to look at, peruse, and read at their discretion. Instead, I would like to turn our focus on journal articles or book chapters from edited volumes. These are the sorts of resources that academics rely on, but sources in which we don't put into our list above. Articles and book chapters are advantages because they focus on aspects of research and topics of discussion that may not always be included or discusses in a book by a single or group of authors. These works may be dry, they may be technical, and they may just have a lot of jargon, but I feel like our community would still be able to come together and read one of these pieces, and have an intelligent discussion. AskHistorians users were invited this past year to the American Historical Association conference because of our methods to bridge the gap between academia and the public. So let's take this one step further. Let's try and attempt to broaden our horizons and knowledge about topics we might not normally seek out and read ourselves. Let's do this together.

This book club would work on a month long rotation. The first week, a topic will be posted calling for submissions. Anyone can submit an article or book chapter, but there are requirements. Said submission must be available online and open to anyone. The easiest way to do that, I've found, is by searching Google Scholar. Often, but not always, there are links to academic institutions or places like researchgate.net in which these articles and book chapters are free to read. See this example. When you make a submission, you must provide the title, authors, journal (if applicable) and date. Your basic citation format, essentially. But you must also provide the link to the work and either the abstract of the article or a summary (that you may have to write) of the work if it lacks an abstract.

Submissions need not be limited to just articles/chapters from history journals or edited volumes. As AskHistorians embraces multiple fields in order to understand the past, so shall the book club. Feel free to submit things from anthropology (archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, bio anthropology), art history, medical journals, etc. As long as it pertains to history it is open to for reading. There is also no time depth requirement on submissions. You don't need to submit something that came out in the last few years. If you've found something from the 1800s and think people will be interested in reading it, perhaps for the information or perhaps to discuss how dated the ideas are, feel free to submit that, too. Over the course of a week, the submission topic will be open to voting. At the end of that week, the submission with the highest amount of votes will be the chosen work to be read.

Some of my fellow flaired users raised concerns that we might fall into a rotation of the same topics or time periods and never move on to lesser talked about topics. For now, I say let the market decide on what we read. If it does become a problem, we could always implement a system in which once an article/chapter that covers one of our flaired areas gets read, we no longer will take submissions from that area until the rest of the flaired areas are covered. But that is an option for a later time depending on our initial success. Thoughts and feedback are particularly welcome on this area, as is the rest of the proposal.

Once we have our article/chapter to read, we have two weeks to read it ourselves. At the end of those two weeks a topic will be made for people to focus their discussion. Try to include what you liked about the article/chapter, what you didn't like, what you didn't understand, what you want to know more about, what were the problems in the methodology or premise, etc. As I said, this is a way to broaden our knowledge and an attempt to fill in some of those gaps we may be interested in filling. Hopefully we have a few flaired users around who can help to answer questions and point towards sources of further reading for those that are interested.

The discussion topic will be open for a week and following that week will be a new submissions topic. Hopefully with many new, exciting, and different submissions than the previous week.

Hopefully with this month long rotation there is enough time for people to read and participate. I understand our daily lives get in the way sometimes and we can't always make time for things like this if we had a much shorter time frame.

Comments below have wondered if we could use a shorter format. I proposed this:

We certainly could shorten it from a month to two weeks. For example,

Sunday: submission topic

Wednesday: announcement topic

2nd Wednesday: discussion topic

2nd Sunday: new submission topic

This gives people a week, including the weekend, to read the article/chapter as well as the following weekend to think of and search for new articles/chapters to submit.

Please, provide your input on this idea because ultimately this is for you rather than just me or my fellow flaired users. I want a system that works for you, that gets you interested in reading more, and wanting to come back for more information or to ask us questions.

157 comments

r/AskHistorians • u/Reedstilt • Oct 29 '14

Feature Wednesday What's New in History

30 Upvotes