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Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!
All Yuletide requests are out!
Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!
-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)
Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!
-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French
-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...
Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links
Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!
-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)
Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!
-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French
-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...
Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links
Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
But before I start rereading comments, I'm going to share a couple things with you that I put together in the last day or two. One I'll do in the Algarotti thread, and the other here.
So remember when
Well, it occurred to me that you could put together a pretty good approximation from his correspondence. It's obviously going to be very light on the early years, especially pre-1730. You'd have to do that manually. But after 1740, we have reams and reams of correspondence for him, and it all comes with locations.
So I, uh, wrote some code. Like I do.
Then it turned out that code is easy, data wrangling is hard. (This is the mantra of data scientists everywhere.) In our case, data wrangling = converting the 18th century German names of cities into 21st century German, Polish, and Czech names with standardized spellings, and getting the latitude and longitude manually for the really small and obscure ones. Ahahahaaaa.
So I went with his personal correspondence for my first stab at this project. It gives you much less granularity than the political correspondence, but a much smaller and therefore more manageable data set, and it also gives you some of the 1730-1740 period.
I ended up manually googling 150 names that I couldn't automatically match to any modern place names. Some of them were pretty damn hard to track down. In a few cases, I had to go read the letter in question to figure out where the fuck he was, or his memoirs. Fortunately, in the one case where I absolutely could not find a modern equivalent even after reading the letter and would have been stumped, he conveniently described his location in the letter as "near this city, on this river, and just on the opposite side of this other river from this other city," which meant I could get fairly precise coordinates even without being able to match up names. Thanks, Fritz! His memoirs were actually pretty useful too in giving geographical descriptions. But you can see why I used the personal correspondence.
That got me a rough map of his travels 1730-1786. Or at least a data set that allows me to generate rough maps. Attempting to generate one single map crashed my laptop.
Then I picked out one small period and went through it by hand and attempted to clean up the data as best I could. (Some guesses have been made, but the final result doesn't have him jumping to the other side of Germany and back overnight, which is how I'm judging "good enough".) Now it looks like an actual map.
But he moved around and backtracked so much, that it would be unreadable as a static map with overlapping names and dates. So I made it into a gif.
And without further ado, behold the First Silesian War! (You'll need to click on the gif and zoom in to make out the text. Depending on your connection, the transitions may be a little jerky if you view it in the cloud, but when I downloaded it to my computer, it was much better quality. It's in the same folder as the screenshots, so you should be able to view it, but let me know if not.)
If we wanted to tackle this project properly, this would be my todo list:
1) Clean up the entire data set, 1730-1786.
2) Make the map all pretty with colors and better titles and stuff.
3) Use the political correspondence, omg.
4) Maybe see if it would be possible to make static maps covering short time frames that aren't unreadably cluttered?
What I should do is the initial number crunching on the political correspondence just to see exactly how much work it would be to make that data set usable. Would it be a couple hundred place names that needed to be manually wrangled (doable), or a couple thousand (lol no)?
Oh, btw, you know the 46 volumes of political correspondence? They stop in March 1782! I don't know what happened to the last 4.5 years. Maybe everyone who was compiling his correspondence died of old age and forgot to name literary executors, haha.
But anyway, enjoy watching Fritz invade Silesia and Bohemia in the meantime! ("Pragmatic Sanction? What Pragmatic Sanction? Anti-Machiavel? What Anti-Machiavel? *shifty eyes* Posterity is going to make MAPS commemorating this!")
Also: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." I certainly learned a lot about Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic from this exercise. To the point where I'm starting to have intuitions about what's been misgeocoded just from proximity to surprisingly obscure villages and rivers. :P
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
- 1740-1745
- 1745-1756
- 1756-1763
- 1763-1786
- And the granddaddy of all gifs: 1740-1786
It was easier than I thought, and apparently researching coordinates for 18th century place names is a suitably mindless and time-consuming pastime on 3 hours of sleep and insomnia.
I got two surprises out of the finished product, one cool and one sad.
Cool: I keep reading about the autumn military maneuvers Fritz held in Silesia, and you can watch them happen on this map! What you can't see on the map is that he kept going every year until his death, because in 1785 he famously insisted on sitting on his horse in the pouring rain for 6 hours reviewing the troops, and then got so sick he couldn't get out of bed the next day. That was the beginning of the one-year decline toward August 17, 1786.
Sad: The 1780s autumn maneuvers, aka Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Map. That's because the map turned out to be an inadvertently very poignant illustration of his emotional isolation. You may notice the itinerary gets less and less granular at the end, as his correspondents die off one by one. There's a sharp drop-off in volume after Voltaire goes in 1778 and Maria Antonia in 1780. :(
Which, of course, makes me even more annoyed that the transcription of his political correspondence cuts off in March 1782. I'm just not going to be able to put together a decent map after that date. Ditto before 1740, the data's just too sparse.
But what I've got so far is still cool! As approximations go, I'm pretty stoked about what I've put together. And proud, I have to admit.
Do you think Old Fritz would be proud?For my next trick, I'm planning to see how much work would be involved in wrangling the more granular data from his political correspondence, and then making a decision whether to proceed. :D
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
I wouldn't have noticed had you not mentioned it, but because you did mention it I could see how much faster the dates advanced as they got later in his life :(
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
Yeah, the later years are :(
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
I feel like you should publish this somewhere :P
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
Me too! But I have no idea where.
Anyway, let's wait and see if I sustain my momentum long enough to get through the political correspondence, and what the resulting product looks like.
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
Anyway, on one occasion, almost the entire first page of hits was works by or about Fritz, and the first was Carlyle. The blurb Google showed me reads: "Friedrich now has nothing for it but to try if he cannot possibly get hold of Kunzendorf (readers may look in their Map)."
Yes, if only it were still named that, Carlyle! I laughed pretty hard. It reminded me of a touristy t-shirt I got in Bratislava that read, "Where the fuck is Bratislava?"
Where the fuck is Kunzendorf?
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
invadedwent.It started when I couldn't find *any* place names when googling "Pischeli Czech Republic". But I remembered that the last time I couldn't find something, it ended up being in Prague. So I tried "Pischeli Prague", and ended up with an 1865 "Memorial of the Projected Railway from Vienna" that listed a bunch of stops on the various projected lines, using the old German names for villages and towns.
On the line that included "Pischeli", I recognized a bunch of names that I had just found the Czech names for (sweeeet). So I plugged in a few into Google maps, and sure enough, they formed a nice projected train line. Then I looked at the stop immediately before and immediately after Pischeli, zoomed in on the map, and knowing that it was somewhere between Benešov and Říčany, spotted "Pyšely" within a few seconds. Victory!
You have to get creative on this scavenger hunt. :D
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
ETA: Also, I'm slain by the fact you managed to come up with all the current Czech and Polish names to all the places.
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
Some of us in this fandom make contributions via knowledge of German and French, some of us manage to make contributions via knowledge of bash and R. ;)
Also, I'm slain by the fact you managed to come up with all the current Czech and Polish names to all the places.
Haha, it was definitely the most time-consuming part, but I had to! It was the only way to get latitudes and longitudes so I could plot the locations on the map. Like I said, a lot of the original place names seem to exist in Frederick the Great-related sources and nothing else, according to Teh Googlez.
Also, just checking (since you replied to the first comment) that you saw the revised version(s), not just the far inferior black-and-white first draft?
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
1740, though--unfortunately--not 1730. I do have the data for 1730-1740 and am willing to generate the map if anyone is interested (it'll only take a few minutes), but it's so incredibly sparse that I wanted to make a better quality 1740-1786 map to stand alone. If anyone wanted to make a real map before 1740, they'd have to read through sources and gather the data themselves; there's just not enough extant correspondence to do it programmatically. Before 1730 is even worse.
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
I have to go to bed now, but I'm planning to get it uploaded this weekend, and then I'll pass on the link.
:-DDDDDD
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
I'm super stoked about this. :D
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love
Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love