Category Archives: General

I (might) need a New Camera

28 Wednesday Nov 2012

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I have two digital cameras, both of which came into my possession six years ago. I have a handy little Canon PowerShot SD700, a little thing which I bought before leaving for Scotland because it was the best camera in the store when it came to taking pictures of things through glass and I wanted something for use in museums. Later that year I was given a Canon PowerShot S3, which has a larger body and took better pictures.

Taken with the S3, 2006.

Sadly, the S3 has died (it only works if I hold the battery case very tightly shut, and even then it’s 50/50). The PowerShot works well enough, and has been traveling with me to archives this fall. However, I feel the need for a new camera (especially as my father and sister have DSLRs which take Such Nice Pictures!), and this leads me to a conundrum:

Do I continue to use the PowerShot in archives until it (eventually) dies and just buy a camera for taking out and about, or do I try and find a camera which will work in the archives and on the street (or at the parade)?

Taken with the SD700 at the National Archives (US) earlier this fall

Further, if anyone has advice about a particular camera they’ve used in archives that worked especially well, or a camera setup, please do share. Feel free to point me to some blog post which answers all my questions. I’m just looking for input.

Open Source Cookies

13 Thursday Sep 2012

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(Alternate title: and now for something completely different)

A common stress-relief activity among grad students is baking, apparently. I’m not much of a baker, but I do have one or two recipes I enjoy making. I am particularly fond of Will Shetterly’s Finest-Kind Cookies, which he describes as “an open source recipe.” (Shetterly is a novelist – his stories are as good as his cookies).  Therefore, in the spirit of open source, and because I’m in need of some advice, I present my variation on the theme. Continue reading »

Old Haunts, New Views

07 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by in 20th century, America, General

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This summer I’m working on a project which has to do with the history of the National Mall. It has been fun to learn more about a part of town with which I’m so familiar. Although I’m not a DC/Northern VA native, members of my family have lived in and around DC since the 1960s and we used to come visit at least once a year. I have fond memories of climbing on Uncle Beazley when he sat outside Natural History.

Today, despite the record-breaking heat, I ventured down to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to see the AIDS Memorial Quilt. It was the first time I’ve been down to the Mall since starting work on the Mall history project. Knowing what had come before made the very familiar landscape of flat, dying grass and beige gravel paths interesting again.

I metroed to Archives/Navy Memorial (to avoid crowds at Smithsonian and to get coffee at the Starbucks in the gold-domed insurance building on 7th) which obviously put me out near the National Archives. Or, in my new thinking, the site which once housed Center Market, where generations of Washingtonians bought produce, meat, and groceries. And, apparently, played billiards.

Then I wandered down the Mall towards 14th, passing construction just across from the sculpture garden which is, I think, roughly where there used to be temporary government office buildings.

I tend to see history wherever I go. Today I had more information and the memory of the many photos I’ve seen over the last month, making the past more vivid and certain than usual. I may have been to the Mall hundreds of times, but today it felt new.

How do we shuffle our cards?

11 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by in Digital Humanities, General, Quotes

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Over the past few months I’ve had a quote, more of an idea really, rattling around in my head. The artist James C. Christensen wrote about how he thinks about creativity and new ideas using the metaphor of a library’s card catalog.

I never knew card catalogs, so in time the cards in the metaphor have gone from being library catalogs to the index cards I was taught to use to organize quotes and ideas when writing research papers. What follows is the first and last parts of the section where Christensen uses the metaphor (the whole discussion spreads out over two pages).

Card Catalog?

image courtesy OSU Archives, flickr

“The way I see creativity and imagination is something like a library’s card catalog, except that the cards are made up of concepts, ideas, visions, pictures, all the faces of one’s personal life experiences …. The exercise comes about when one practices combining the cards and putting them together in new ways. All the Edisons, Einsteins, and da Vincis of the world were building upon stored information (cards they already had in their files), but they combined the cards in new ways. Their astonishing inspirations came about because they took what was known and saw it in a new light.”1

Christensen means his metaphor to apply across fields, using the names of an inventor, a physicist, and an inventor-artist to describe the sorts of people who combine and rearrange their cards.

When I think about this metaphor in terms of the study and practice of history, the cards are facts or sources. Some of us rearrange the cards in new ways, to look at history from a previously unexplored perspective. Sometimes people try introducing new cards (race, gender, furniture, clothing, editorial cartoons) to change the way history is seen.

And sometimes we use the cards in completely new and different ways. We lay them out in a grid instead of in a stack, or build castles and houses, or make a long snake of cards overlapping. Digital history isn’t necessarily something completely new and different. We still have the old cards, but we’ve added new ones to the stack and we’re shuffling them in ways no one thought possible thirty, forty years ago. With so many people rearranging their cards, who knows what “astounding inspirations” will be brought to light.

  1.  James C. Christensen. A Journey of the Imagination: the art of James C. Christensen. With Renwick St. James. (Shelton, Connecticut: The Greenwich Workshop, 1994), 40-41. [↩]

Week 13: Scholarly Communication and Open Access Open Source

20 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Clio Wired Fall 2011, General, Social

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When I started my Masters program at the University of Edinburgh, I had an idea – an ideal – of what Grad School would be like. I envisioned intellectual conversations about history, art, theatre, literature, and science happening in the flat at dinner, over a cup of coffee, or a late night beer. I believed that to enter Graduate School was to enter a realm of scholarly discussion and inquiry.

The reality of my MSc was that, outside of class, these conversations happened only with a handful of people: a few fellow students, occasionally one who lived in my block of flats, and frequent conversations about culture and cultural differences with my friends, a computer programmer and a translator.

I wanted to open with the above not to complain but to point out the importance of scholarly communication. Most academics/scholars benefit from and crave conversation with other scholars, about the topics which we study and about intellectual subjects in general. One of my main activities on Twitter is following conversations about digital history and humanities.

Continue reading »

Everyday History

03 Monday Oct 2011

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I’ve met a number of people for whom history is apparently something in the classroom or textbook, a dry (possibly dusty) academic subject. I don’t blame them for thinking these things, any more than I would blame people who likewise relegate chemistry, physics, math or literature to the school building. But just as we encounter chemistry in cooking, physics on the highway, math in our budgets and literature on the shelves of a local library, history is always present.

I’ve had two encounters in the past two days with everyday sorts of history, and I wanted to share them.

One

Yesterday morning I went to my parent’s church and was engaged in conversation by an older woman who sat herself down next to me. Learning that I am a PhD student in history, she proceeded to tell me how she loves reading history and finding things out. Her personal interest is in the history of regional groups in the US.

She said to me “of course, the more you learn the more confusing it is,” (roughly paraphrased) which I thought was such a wonderful expression of how studying history can sometimes feel like travelling down Alice’s rabbit hole, or wandering into Ariadne’s labyrinth without benefit of a ball of string.

She also mentioned that she grew up in south-east Washington, DC. Recently she’d been coming back from National Harbor with her daughter and they’d driven around the neighborhood looking for a Dairy Queen. They ended up in front of her grandmother’s house. Not only did she tell her daughter about her memories of that house, she went home and dug out a picture of her grandmother on its steps, tracked down the woman how now owns the house, and sent her a copy of the picture. Apparently the current owner is the third generation of her own family to live in that house, and she loved having a picture of its first owner just after it was built.

Two

Today Patrick Murray-John retweeted a link to a blog essay written by a person of color who went to the Occupy Wall Street movement to see what it was about and ended up getting involved. The essay discusses the demographics of the people in the movement and the people organizing the movement. It’s worth a read.  I was particularly caught by this passage, near the end:

And this is the thing: that there in that circle, on that street-corner we did a crash course on racism, white privilege, structural racism, oppression. We did a course on history and the declaration of independence and colonialism and slavery. It was hard. It was real. It hurt. But people listened. We had to fight for it.

When you live rolled up in history all the time, it’s easy to forget that some people don’t see it unless they’re made to.  I don’t want to say that all history is political, or that it should be, but it’s worth keeping in mind that some people are doing the politics without understanding the historical context.  That just giving a student dates and names may not offer them the resources they need to know why riffing on race and the Declaration of Independence might be problematic.

There is chemistry in cooking, there is math in my checkbook, and there is history in the everyday.

Access issue: what window?

14 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Clio Wired Fall 2011, Digital Humanities, General

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I’m currently reading the design and building oriented sections of Cohen and Rosenzweig’s Digital History, and remembered something I keep forgetting to mention. One of the issues which kept coming up about websites and web-based history interactives when I was with the museum was the fact that some minority populations primarily access the web via mobile phones (and not necessarily smartphones, either). How should/will this impact design of sites which want to do truly “public” history?

The Revolution in Egypt

11 Friday Feb 2011

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I have been wanting to write about following the events in Egypt, and how it made me feel connected to those observers who witnessed the French Revolution, as well as those who witnessed the American. I may still write a nice, scholarly post about it.

This isn’t that post. I read the news on Twitter and Facebook, and confirmed it on the BBC, that Mubarak had finally yielded to the revolutionary voice of the people (mostly peaceful voice!) and resigned. Egypt has a long road ahead, I know, but when I read that news I almost cried for joy.

Growing up a citizen of the United States, you’re taught that people are the voice and seat of power, even if sometimes it feels like no one listens. The world in which I grew up was shaped by popular, mostly pacifistic, movements: I can vote because of the Suffragettes, my schools were integrated because of the Civil Rights Movement, and I played on sports teams with boys thanks to the Feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s (Title IX!).  I am aware that I am very lucky to live in a country where my right to be heard is acknowledged and codified.

To watch the people of Egypt, whose government considered free speech a gift to be given and not an inalienable right, make their voices heard throughout the world, and then begin to achieve their goals? It is a truly awesome moment, in the traditional sense of the word.

Congratulations, Egypt. You have work ahead of you, but so many people are behind you, supporting you, as you move forward.

The Wilderness and the WalMart

25 Tuesday Jan 2011

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Just a quick note to say that today a judge in Orange County VA is hearing arguments about whether or not to take the issue of the proposed battlefield-sited WalMart to court.

Please note that although WalMart and supporters say it’s “not on the battlefield,” they mean the battlefield as currently preserved by the Park Service, etc. The site where the WalMart would be built was part of the active battle landscape in 1864.

More info: http://blog.preservationnation.org/category/issues/civil-war/

Thanksgiving

26 Friday Nov 2010

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When I was a kid, I had a paper cutout set that came out at Thanksgiving. It has a backdrop of Plimoth Village, and little paper Pilgrims – children and adults – as well as a handful of Native American men. I took great care every year in setting out the display, arranging it just so.

However, I don’t remember thinking that it was an accurate depiction of the First Thanksgiving. Somehow, early on, I was taught that the first Thanksgiving was more complicated, less neat, than the pretty story and paper people on the dining room chest. It may have been that I have an older sibling, and she read about Deerfield in school in maybe third grade.

As Thanksgiving approached this year, I thought about the paper set and my early Thanksgivings. How and when did I learn to doubt the nicely packaged story of a historic event? Is there an age at which you start to teach children to question the mainstream historical narrative, or do you begin there? How do you teach adults to dig deeper? Do you resist little things like toys which buy in to the mainstream story, just in case? I can at least answer the last one – not necessarily.

The paper set didn’t mislead me about history, but it might have encouraged me to think of it as something I could engage with. I asked after it yesterday, since I ate Thanksgiving dinner at my parents. My mom was able to lay hands on it immediately, despite the fact that they’ve moved a few times since I was a child. I took out all the pieces, and smiled. The set is a little piece of Americana and an artifact of my childhood.