Books, Lists and Computers

(new 17 May 2006)

“I reckon that if you can write, save and edit a letter in any Windows-based text software then

you already know enough to be able to at least read numerical files in spreadsheet form…”

It would be a pity if people who don’t “do numbers” see my approaches as irrelevant to them or downright scary. I’m exploiting the technology for all it’s worth to multiply by a factor of tens what I can accomplish but strictly as a means to an end. Most of what I’m doing is not at all technically sophisticated in professional terms. Any originality lies in the application to serve maritime ends and maybe some of the interpretation and explanation.

I’m deliberately following strategies that should enable people with very little knowledge of the numbers side of computing both to make use of the results of my work and to contribute to research resource development if they wish (mine or others). Thanks to the nature of Windows, much of what you know about writing letters and manuscripts in text software is directly transferable to spreadsheet software and will give you everything you need to read spreadsheet files like a book and nearly everything you need to add to them (refer Spreadsheets for people who don’t already know that they already know how to use them)

The original starting point for all of this work is simple lists on paper of the type that many people in maritime history will have compiled and still use and their later electronic counterparts. Many of the tabulations in books (such as all ships built in Bath, Maine in chronological order) or appendices in books like those in Basil Lubbock’s Last of the Windjammers volumes are of this type as is much of the content of the Log Chips magazine. All such records can be processed, kept and used electronically much more efficiently.

The full range of database applications and statistical analysis may be on another planet you will never visit but you can still have the benefit of reading numerical files in spreadsheet format with the aid if need be of my Spreadsheets guide and also easily master spreadsheets for storing your paper lists in multiple copies, to revise them, back them up and share them with colleagues or send them through cyberspace. The type of interest and effort that went into Log Chips would have benefited enormously from the technology that many people today have in their living rooms. I’m sure that with tools at their disposal which we take for granted or don’t even know we have, the Log Chips team would have left us a truly wonderful resource that would have significantly influenced how we do research today. It isn’t too late to pick up where they left off.

I reckon that if you can write, save and edit a letter in any Windows-based text software then you already know enough to be able to at least read numerical files and nearly all you need to know to contribute to adding to them because the file indexes, screen menus and many commands are effectively identical, that being the point of Windows. Spreadsheets are "low-tech" in their universality, accessibility and cheapness, high-tech in what can be done with them (and high-tech in any sense by quite recent standards).

Using computerised records in the ways outlined will require a bit of adjustment in terms of approach but it’s much more akin to how you’ve always been reading books than will be at first apparent. Think about how you have a number of books on your shelf with overlapping content, know where more are at the library, where you can borrow one from a friend and how to get some facts from Lloyd’s Register. From time to time, some question or topic will catch your imagination, you’ll look up a bit here and bit there and it will gel together in your mind. You may never commit a word of these thoughts to paper, but in a real sense you have just “written” a new little book in your head or a least part of a chapter.

Information stored in computerised modules can be read and used in essentially the same way as your traditional books but with major advantages in the amount and efficiency of storage and utilisation and for making the computer do the work but still involving essentially similar ways of combining information for similar as well as new types of result. In principle, it could all be done with systems of cardboard filing index cards but computers can do it much more efficiently and accurately and still produce outputs you can read like a book while enabling you to find and combine information that you may or may not ever print out on paper.

All of the information referred to in my web site came out of books (some handwritten registers) at some stage. It can be printed into new “books” but they’d look like your telephone directory and be even thicker. You can learn to read them from a handful of CD’s or other formats without printing them out on paper. Even if you don’t think you’ll go very far in reading tabulated information in electronic forms and will need to use librarians or others as “electronic intermediaries” for full access I hope you’ll persevere with my writing as relating to tracking down, comparing, combining and using information. The thinking processes are the same. The tools are simply means to ends.

I hope that in this section of my web site you’ll find that you can at least read things that you didn’t think were accessible to you.

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