For a while now, the little poll on the right-hand side of this page has been closed after collecting information about your preferences on footnotes and endnotes.
As I had half-hoped, half-suspected, most of the 50 voters prefer or even strongly prefer footnotes over all the other options. Hooray, I'm not alone!

For clarity and to sum it all up (since I will remove the poll window in the near future), here are the poll results from all 50 voters:

27 persons (54%) strongly prefer footnotes
12 persons (24%) prefer footnotes
0 persons ( 0%) prefer endnotes
2 persons ( 4%) strongly prefer endnotes
9 persons (18%) prefer in-text citations, Harvard style (or similar).

Now 50 people who read this blog are admittedly a very small sample - but on the other hand, those who read me here in the Internet might just be those who go out and buy my book (I sure hope so!). And that, despite the small sample, might give it some little importance.

And the opinion of the "masses" is clear - you want footnotes! 78% are in favour of footnotes, and only 4% would prefer endnotes. I had expected a few folks to prefer Harvard style, and I can see the appeal for readers, but it is even more uncommon in Germany to do it that way than it is in the English-speaking countries, and I can't imagine getting a regular, non-subsidised publishing house to do that without really, really good leverage.

Speaking of publishing houses, they do prefer endnotes for several reasons, as I have learned. One of the very important reasons is that layout appears to be clearer and cleaner if the page bottom is not littered with footnotes - an aesthetic thing. I can sort of understand not wanting footnotes that take up more page real estate than the actual text, and I personally would try not to have so much footnoting - but on the other hand, I own (and use regularly, and very much appreciate) at least one book with such extensive footnoting which works very well, even if it looks weird at the beginning.
Apart from the "uncluttered" look, there is another reason for the houses to fear the footnote and endorse the endnoote. During a discussion with my editor, I learned that the publishing houses fear that the conspicuously academic-looking footnote style will deter people from buying a book, even if it's written for nonacademics as well.

Luckily for me, who hates endnotes, and luckily for you, who prefer footnotes (and my apologies to the suppressed minority of endnote-lovers), my book is subsidised by a grant from VG Wort, who pay most of the actual printing costs. Only because of that, my strong preference for footnotes will be honoured - and the book will have footnotes instead of endnotes.

And then, of course, I hope that my prediction will be right: People will buy the book regardless of its more academic appearance. If not - well, then I will stand a fool (with footnotes)...

Quite a little stack of links to interesting places and things has accumulated in my "slow blogging day" stash, but they are much too good to languish away. So here's a link drop - I hope there's something for you in there, too!

- Two blogs that recently came to my attention: Fait Attention and Publishing Archaeology.

- For those of you working with MS Word, there's a webpage with tons of good advice, instructions, makros and stuff at the Editorium. This site has helped me a lot when finishing off and layouting my thesis. I still wouldn't recommend to use pictures in large Word files, though. (My pics were layouted half-automatically, using the Word-generated picture list, a homemade makro and LaTex. Not the best layout ever, but very little work.)

- A new project is researching medieval soldiers "to challenge assumptions about the emergence of professional soldiery between 1369 and 1453", and they have put a database online where you can search almost 90 000 muster records for soldiers from 1369 to 1453. So don't forget The Soldier in Later Medieval Times when you are looking for muster information!

- I'm very happy that I usually don't have to cope with Latin (and I would look for help if I had to), but for those who are, there's Du Cange's medieval latin glossary available online: beware the rather large .pdf.

- And for those who read French, there's a bimonthly magazine called "Histoire et images Medievales", with some articles available for download. And of course with nice pictures!

A recent discussion (and my recent read of Beaudry's "Findings") makes me wonder about Footnotes vs. Endnotes. Publishing houses nowadays seem to prefer endnotes - because it makes page layout easier and a little nicer for the eye not to have footnotes sparsely dotting the bottom of the page. However, for reading, endnotes are much less practical - because looking up an endnote means to put your thumb into the book at the place you are right now, go to the back of the book, find the endnote, read the endnote, and then go back to the front of the book and try to get back into the flow of the argument. This takes much more brainpower than just shifting the eyes to the bottom of the page - and thus will regularly exceed the capacity of the "Working Memory", breaking the flow of the reader. I have also made the experience that endnotes get read (and thus used) much less frequently than footnotes, because it is more trouble to get to them.

And now I'm wondering: Am I the only one who strongly prefers footnotes? Are the publishers right in placing looks over footnote access, do readers prefer endnotes in general? What do you think? If you look to the right side of this page, you can find a little poll to mark your preference - and of course, comments explaining your vote are highly welcome!

Unfortunately, printing in colour is really, really expensive, so for the thesis publication, my editor and I agreed on a reasonable number of colour plates. Which means that there are quite a few colour illustrations that have to be converted to grayscale, since I just kept all colour pics for the submission copies. So most of yesterday was spent converting colour figures and pictures from my thesis to monochrome pics while making sure that the important details stay discernable.

Picture editing work is half exciting and half mind-numbing. The same processes and checking files for the same things over and over again makes it mind-numbing - but tweaking contrast, brightness and gamma curves for best results has to be done for each pic individually, so it's nothing for a batch job. Sometimes the details come out even better in the monochrome version - that is when it gets really exciting - while sometimes it's a battle you can hardly win. Because I knew that not all would transfer nicely to monochrome, I checked first - there should be enough colour plate for all the really difficult pics in addition to the pictures that I want printed in colour for other reasons (like, usually, exciting colours on real garments).

So... I made good progress with the conversions, though there are still quite a few left to do. Good thing my thesis has only four hundred and eight pics!

The heap of work lying before me (and the list listing even more things to do) has not only stayed the same, but grown yesterday. Actually grown... and since quite a few of these tasks are things that take a bit longer than five to ten minutes... I can't complain of boredom. Add to that the fact that on a first day back at work after vacation I never seem to accomplish much, I'm feeling a bit inundated.

At least I managed to fetch the next test whorls for the spinning experiment, nicely fired, and I already did a short test run. I won't tell how it went in detail, but the reference whorl (about same weight and same moment of inertia as an archaeological object) spun very nicely. I also made some progress on the translation part, did a little bit of proofreading of an article, and wrote the obligatory few e-mails. And now for more of the same agenda.

Today's blog comes a little later than usual - not because I forgot to blog, but because I had to take care of some other things first after the long weekend.

I'm currently working on the translation of my thesis summary, so that the German book has at least an English summary. There's still a bit to go, and after translating, I'll need some proofreading, but it is progressing nicely. Apart from that, there's not much exciting stuff happening at the moment, at least not in the work part of my life - things running more or less smoothly, if a bit slowly sometimes...

It's busy time here in my study: the taxes can finally be finished off (I needed one last receipt for that), there's things to be done for the thesis printing, last-preparations-wise - like the cover - and a gazillion of emails to write. At least my brain has jumped into idea mode for the cover design, so I can try out a few basic concepts and see how they might work.

Which is why I'm off to my graphics programme now.