stuff 'n other stuff

Newspaper brands and logos are much of a muchness, although you can pick out some memes – like the use of an Olde English style font for a bit of gravitas as seen in ‘proper papers’  like the SMH, Canberra Times, London Daily Telegraph, NYT and others too numerous to mention.

Interestingly even newspapers such as the Bangkok Post and the Siberian Times, designed to service a small expatriate community are devotees of the Olde English design  for their logo

But there’s another logo meme out there – the crest and text meme as shown in the London Times and London Observer, not to mention the London Sunday Times.

The same basic design crops up in the Press in Christchurch, The Age in Melbourne and in the Times of India, and The Hindu. From my admittedly very unscientific skimming of US newspaper websites it doesn’t seem to show up on any US newspaper logos.

So, guessing that the basic design was a British Empire thing, with newspapers. most of whom were nineteenth century foundations, consciously modelling their appearance on the London Times to give themselves gravitas with the assumption that a good many of their readers would be familiar with the UK original.

The logo similarity is quite a stunning effect – more than once I’ve had to look twice to convince myself that the Sunday Age is indeed the Sunday Age and not a weekly edition of the Times that somehow found its way into Hughes bakery.

So, like red post boxes, the ghost of the British Empire lives on …

Inspired by my various experiments with Trove and QueryPic and following on from Jim Mussell and Bob Nicholson’s posts about the new Welsh newspapers online site, I thought I’d give it a go with my favourite topics of the moment, the CSS Alabama and the surrender of the CSS Shenandoah.

As you might expect, both topics generated a fair amount of coverage and were obviously topics of interest at the time.

However, I found myself comparing the site in usability and usefulness to Trove. The Welsh site is of course a beta and consequently some features may not be as functional as they might.

Like Trove it displays the scanned article and the OCR’d text in a fairly standard three pane interface.

Missing is the ability to download the article in either a PDF or as a JPEG, something which should be relatively easy to provide given that the images are almost certainly held as TIFFs. This would also be useful should the Welsh National Library ever want to follow the NLA and start a crowdsourced OCR correction project – it’s simply easier to work from a printed page.

PDF download also provides a simple way of getting content into Evernote for later annotation.

The OCR’ing of the articles appears to be an ondemand process and sometimes it took several sets of double clicks to produce the text. In general the OCR’s text seems to be more accurate that that in Trove, but that could just be an artefact of the half dozen articles I chose.

The only practical way I found to get material into Evernote was to laboriously cut and paste the material from the webpage into Libre Office, change the font from very pale grey to something useful, top and tail the document with the source and date, and then email the pdf to Evernote.

Yes, it works, but it’s certainly not fluid.

There are other things as well – the navigation widget does not let you scroll left right making the hunting for and onscreen reading of text at the highest resolution an interesting experience.

That said it’s a beta, and it certainly has a lot of potential.

Given the power of QueryPic to find material, it would be great if they also provided an api to allow third party search tools access their resources.

Happenstance is a wonderful thing.

I was helping J out yesterday by googling for some nineteenth century sources about early steamship travel to Australia when I came across this study (DOI 10.2104.ha070006) which confirms what I had suspected from my earlier posts on the Lincoln Assassination and the first internet about Australia’s connection with the rest of the world.

The author looked at reports of the Franco Prussian war in the Australian press of the time and the effects of ‘bunching’ caused by the overseas news arriving in distinct lumps, and also how Australian east coast newspapers had special correspondents placed at Albany to meet the mail steamers and work through the mail to create summaries to be telegraphed as soon as the connecting South Australian mail boat reached Adelaide.

The other thing that struck me about the study was how simple my lightweight study had been to carry out, compared to pre-digital days (less than a decade ago) when the author must have had to spend a considerable amount of time in newspaper archives rather than a  couple of lunchtimes playing with QueryPic …

The telegraph network was the first internet, enabling a step change in the speed of communication and the spread of news.

The telegraph was seen by the British as something to hold the empire together, especially as after the 1857 conflict in India.

During the conflict the telegraph came into its own relaying military information much as it did during the American civil war, but it’s clear from reading the histories of the conflict that the local British command was very much on their own. No one in Britain really knew what was happening as reports had to travel by ship to the nearest terminus to be telegraphed on, and the nearest terminus was Suez, so even though the telegraph networks built in India were used by the British to their advantage they were still disconnected from the government in London.

Any news was at least two or three weeks old by the time it got to London.

The obvious thing would be to build a link – but interestingly, as this newspaper report from the Hobart Mercury in 1863 shows the building of a link was neither particularly rapid or problem free.

From and Australian point of view the timing is interesting – the route across Australia had been surveyed and already the Netherlands was building a link from Jakarta (then known as Batavia) to Singapore. It’s clear that from the article that the building of the link to India was seen as important to Australia’s integration into the modern world.

Australia was still dependent on surface mail until the early 1870’s and even then everything more than the headlines would still have come via sea. When you look at the newspapers of the time and the information sent by ‘electric telegraph’  a lot of it is commercial information – wheat and wool prices in London and New York for example – information that crucial to trade.

So as well as quickening the spread of news the telegraph had a role in increasing the pace of business and in tying Australia into the global economy …

Playing with querypic can be addictive, as I did when trying to work out how quickly the news of Abraham Lincoln’s assasination spread to Australia, or more accurately the happenstance element of the other things that you find along the way is incredibly addictive, such as this apology for delayed mail at a time when the mail steamers brought the news from overseas:

The detention of the mails this month arose from the incompetency of the Peninsular and Orient steamers to keep to the contract times. The rate of speed from Suez to Galle and King George’s Sound only averaged seven and a half knots per hour. Througout the average speed ofAustralian Steam Navigation Company’s mail steamer was ten and a half knots in unfavourable weather.

Amusement aside, the thing that looking at these old newspapers gives you is the realisation of the extent to which the American civil war was a worldwide sensation with regular reports from the battlefield. This was very much a reported war.

The war is usually represented in history books as an almost exclusively land based war, but reading these reports, it rapidly becomes clear that there was a substantial naval conflict with what the Confederacy styled commerce raiders and other privateers and worse preying on Union shipping. Much in the way that German auxiliary cruisers such as the Kormoran preyed on allied shipping during world war II.

The 1860’s was a time of change in shipping – steamships or sail assisted steamships were becoming the norm. The great shipping lines of the latter half of the nineteenth century were not yet in operation, and a lot of cargo was still carried on sailing ships – after all if the cargo was not time critical sail would do, and on the right route at the right time of year sail could still beat steam.

The other thing to realise is the importance of whaling. Whales provided the oil for oil lamps, making the supply of oil critical in a time when most lighting outside of towns and cities was in from oil lamps. Disrupting whaling would disrupt the supply of lighting oil and hence rural life and industry.

Whaling ships would sail from New England in pursuit of whales – for oil, for baleen. The whalers would sail down to the Southern Ocean or round the Cape of Good Hope up to San Francisco and then up into the sea of Okhotsk.

San Francisco was a small wild whaling port at the time, and because of the lack of an overland route from the east coast almost as isolated as the colonial cities of Australia or New Zealand. Other towns on the west coast of America such as Portland and Seattle were not much more than logging camps and trading posts, meaning much of what went on in the northern Pacific was out of sight from news corrspondents.

And where the whalers went the Confederate privateers pursued them.

The Confederate navy was not based on the American mainland but unofficially and de facto in Liverpool, which was one of the largest ports in England at the time and the main import route for cotton from the southern states to the Lancashire cotton industry. The cotton industry was of critical importance to the south as their main export and earner of foreign currency. The Union however successfully blockaded the Confederate ports, and while some ships did run the blockade the trade was effectively strangled by the blockade.

Unsurprisingly when the southern blockade runners tried to get their cargo out it was to Liverpool, meaning that the Confederate government had a semi official office in the town, and gradually the role of this office changed from organising cotton shipments to acquiring ships, or having ships built and then moved to a friendly port to be commissioned and armed as confederate navy vessels.

Britain, shall we say, while officially neutral had an extremely lax interpretation of neutrality with shipyards in Liverpool and on the Clyde building blockade runners and later commerce raiders for the South.

These commerce raiders were front page news around the world. One of the privateers the Alabama, distinguished herself by sinking a Union vessel in sight of the shore off Cape Town, again something that was front page news at the time. The Alabama then ran for Cherbourg and was sunk nine miles off Cherbourg by a Union vesssel, the Kearsarge.

News of civil war naval engagement in the English Channel was a major sensation in both London and Australia, with graphic accounts of the conflict being published in the press.

Another privateer, the Florida was lying in Brest at the time, and when explosions were heard off of Jersey in fog a few days after the Alabama’s sinking it was assumed wrongly that the Kearsarge had found another victim. In fact neither the Kearsarge or its sister ship found the Florida.

The last of these privateers, the Shenandoah didn’t surrender until November 1865, more than six months after the end of the war, and then it was to a British naval vessel, the captain probably guessing that the British would be more acommodating than the Union navy.

To emphasise the global nature of the conflict, the Shenandoah had previously put in to Melbourne for repairs, something that was a major sensation for the newspapers in Victoria at the time, and consequently her surrender half a world away was most definitely newsworthy.

As well as giving a sense of the history, following the stories through shows how the news was relayed by the first news agencies, picking up and relaying stories from the English press to newspapers in Australia and New Zealand, and shows how the advent of the mail steamer and the telegraph meant that life in Australia ceased to be ‘life on Mars’ but life on somewhere connected to and engaged with the rest of planet Earth.

Inspired by having gone to see Lincoln last weekend I thought I’d do some digging to see how the news of Lincoln’s assasination was reported in Australia – more to see the impact of the telegraph link to the rest of the world on news reporting than anything else.

Until the arrival of the telegraph Australia might as well have been Mars, with most settlement in the south eastern corner of the continent meaning that ships bearing news faced a long voyage of several thousand kilometres from Singapore or Java. Even now when flying to Europe from Sydney the first five hours of the 24h  journey are spent flying over Australia.

I’m not an expert on the American Civil War or even American history – most of what I know comes from watching Ken Burns documentaries – but the civil war was remarkable for being the first ‘modern war’ with mass conscription, blockades, steam powered battleships, not to mention the use of railways and the telegraph.

I’ve written elsewhere that the Russo Japanese war of 1905 was the prequel to World War one. It may have been so historically but the American civil war was dress rehearsal for the western front with two large conscript armies mauling at each other, niether capable of a breakthrough.

It was attrition – the South had less yet did not need to invade or secure territory, the North had more but had to secure and hold the areas of the South it captured as well as deny the South access to trade to resupply its armies.

Australia was not untouched. Even though it was half a world away the war had its effects. (Wikipedia has an article that serves as a good jumping off point if you want to know more).

So, how to gauge the impact of Lincoln’s assasination?

Australia has, through the NLA’s Trove a large online collection of digitised newspapers from the 1800’s to the 1950’s. However, searching Trove directly didn’t really work as simple searches tended to throw up articles that referred to Lincoln’s assassination rather than direct reports.

There’s an advert for a geneology company on tv that has the tagline ‘You don’t need to know what you’re looking for, you just need to start looking’. Not true – when dealing with historical events you need to be able to control your query.

This is where Tim Sherratt’s Querypic comes in – essentially it’s a tool that allows you search for a phrase on a year by year basis and plots the relative occurence of the phrase. Very neat, I wish I’d thought of the idea.

So first step – check that we have content from the correct period referring to Abraham Lincoln:

which we do.

Then we need to find the correct phrase – nineteenth century languages and conventions are different from ours. ‘Abraham Lincoln shot’ and ‘President Lincoln shot’ both give quite broad peaks:

However, ‘President Lincoln Assassination’ gives a very clear tight peak in 1865 – meaning that most news reports used the term assasination in preference to shot:

Querypic has this nice feature that you can click on a year and see details of the articles referenced and then click through to the articles themselves.

And what did I find – most news reports are dated to late June despite Lincoln being assassinated on April 15 – puzzlingly even Reuter’s telegram is dated to June 29.

The reason turns out to be quite simple. While I correctly remembered that M’Douall Stewart surveyed the route of the line in 1862, I failed to remember the line was not in service until 1872, meaning that news of Lincoln’s assasination had to come by sea with the mail from England, and the news did not reach Adelaide until late June 1865 at which point it was telegraphed on to Melbourne and Sydney.

So while the telegraph did help spread the news, it was only after the news got to Australia that it had a role to play. Judging by the number of reprints of the Reuter’s telegram and the longer news report it was seen by the editors of newspapers across the south eastern states as a very significant event, even though it was by then ‘old news’.

The other interesting fact is that despite a significant trans pacific trade the news came via England, not San Francisco, begging the question as to when the news of Lincoln’s assasination reached California …

[update]

Some more lunchtime digging has more or less answered my supplementary question about getting the news to California.

The American transcontinental telegraph line to Sacramento replaced the pony express in 1862 so we can probably assume that news was in Sacramento within a day or so of Lincoln’s assassination.

Unfortunately the Library of Congress’s Digitised Newspaper collection is incomplete and searching for ‘President Lincoln Assassination’ for 1865 doesn’t throw up any leads so I can’t prove it, but it’s probably a pretty safe bet.

Certainly the news wouldn’t have got any further as the first trans Pacific cable didn’t come into service until 1902 and schemes like the Alaska Kamchatka telegraph line were five or six years in the future.

Official mail would probably have gone via England. However there were whalers and other ships that could have carried newspapers – in the nineteenth century it was quite common practice for ships to drop off newspapers at distant ports, but obviously none did in this case meaning the news had to wait until the mail boat from India got to Adelaide …

Yesterday it rained. In fact it rained a lot. It was also a Sunday.

The previous day, we’d gone and bought some additional plants for the front yard to plant round the new car parking spot we’d had put in last November, it not being an act of sanity to plant out the area during summer with its scorching days and bushfire alerts.

Well we got the tools out, the plants sat in a row on the path and we were just doing the ‘is that best here or over there’ bit when the heavens opened.

We retreated to sit on the covered part of the deck and sip mint tea while we waited to see if the rain would clear. It didn’t, but while it slackened for a moment,  I recovered the tools and moved the plants back up behind the house to wait for another day.

So what to do on a wet late summer afternoon? Well we’d been meaning to go and see Lincoln, so that’s exactly what we did.

The movie should have been titled ‘How not quite Honest Abe got the 13th Amendment passed’ – but then that probably wouldn’t have sold.

The movie revolves around the politicking involved in getting the 13th Amendment to the US constitution through Congress. The 13thAmendment is the one that forbids slavery in the United States, and while Lincoln had proclaimed the emanicipation of slaves earlier in the civil war as part of his extraordinary measures in wartime, the long term legal basis of emancipation was distinctly shaky.

The film revolves around the politicking and dealing that took place to get the amendment passed before the South surrendered – if the South surrendered the war would be over, Lincoln’s emergency powers would expire and the legal basis of emancipation would be dubious, with the consequent risk of there being unfinished business left over and eventually provoking a second civil war.

Despite what you might think from the trailers, this is not an action film. It’s about talk and deals, and beautifully if simply photographed. If you like politics you’ll enjoy it. or more accurately you’ll enjoy all but the last thirty minutes.

The film is overlong with a slightly maudlin ending in which Lincoln is reconciled with his wife (one of the subplots is his marital tensions), the South surrenders and Lincoln is shot. The film would be better if it ended on a high note after passage of the amendment – Honest Abe wins the day rather than a drawn out ending that has little dramatic value.

That said, it’s a good film and worth seeing if you have the chance.

I’ll be 57 next month. That’s three years short of the earliest date I can sensibly retire. (Australia’s tax laws are such that while you can retire at 55, you don’t get any tax concessions until you are 60. The Aged Pension (Think State Pension in Europe, Social Security in the US, won’t kick in until I’m 67.)

At the same time we’re starting to think we’re done with Canberra and thinking about going to live in the bush somewhere.

One idea we had was to buy a block of land, put our stuff in store while we built a house. That of course begs the question of where to live in the meantime. One idea was to live in a shipping container, thinking that it could double as a guest cabin/art studio afterwards.

I’ve a little Pinterest board showing examples and they look kind of achievable, but I have  a suspicion that getting local government planning approval would turn out to be a lot more hassle than converting the container.

The way round, of course, is to find a design that’s been preapproved. Unfortunately most of the designs I could find after a web search tend to be for mining camp accommodation and not really what we want at all.

Pity, I kind of liked the idea of living in a bright orange box in the woods …