MLIS with a BA in Art History. Assistant Secretary and past voting member of New Jersey Bird Records Committee. Writer and photographer. So many interests, so little time.
Future blogging will take place at Vitrified Headers. This site will be taken down 1 May 2012.
It's time for my second week update for #sciwrite. Week two was a mixed bag: I had some success but I also didn't complete one of my goals. Several distractions have made themselves known.
Success side of the ledger: Literature review for P2. I read some papers that I had already found, and found some additional relevant papers and read them as well. As a result, I do need to tinker with the existing draft of the literature review for that paper, but the overall structure still works. The additional pieces are more in the way of fleshing out some sections, or making some points more prominent.
Failure side of the ledger: the statistical review for P1 remains undone, although I did at least pull out my data and look at it. Part of the problem is that when I created the survey which is the source of my data for P1, there are certain questions that I could have worded in such a way as to give more precise answers. For example, one of the things I'm interested in looking at is the use of print vs. electronic sources of information by birders; i.e., is one more dominant than the other? Because of the way some of my questions were phrased, some of the answers I got are a little ambiguous. Also, some respondents answered the questions with a greater level of precision (a title of a book) than others ("books"). This makes coding the responses a little tricky.
Distractions: a good day out on Saturday when I got to careen around south Jersey photographing historical sites and seeing four species of dove in Cape May. A webpage I'm working on about patterned brick houses in New Jersey. The Life and Literature conference on Twitter. Flickr. Ordinary mundane stuff.
Oh, and there's Paper 3 (P3). This was another paper I wrote for my MLIS coursework. It takes four different works on bird identification and examines how the language of identification texts has evolved since the 19th century. I pulled it out and reread it last week. I'm not crazy about it, but it does have potential for publication and I know what journal I would submit it to first. I looked at that journal's submission guidelines and discovered that I would have to lengthen the paper by a few hundred words before submitting it. Although I'm somewhat tempted to add it to the #sciwrite challenge, I think it's best to concentrate on P1 and P2, then come back to P3 later. It'll wait.
My goal for this week is to do the statistical analysis for P1 (again). I would also like to start the revision of P2; I'll probably begin with the lit review section and then attack the rest.
Although I graduated with my MLIS in May 2010, I have several papers from my coursework that I want to submit for publication. The #sciwrite challenge seemed like a good opportunity to toss aside procrastination and distraction and actually get something done on those papers. My goal for the first Sunday in December is to see two of my papers in review by then: either with one of the instructors for whose class I originally wrote them, or (if things go really well) a journal.
Paper one (henceforth to be known as P1) is about the information behavior of birders. I've already started revising and updating this paper, and I know what journal is my first choice for submission. Paper two (P2) is about the Flickr Commons project, and uses publicly available statistics in an attempt to quantify some interactions between Flickr members and the cultural institutions that participate in the Flickr Commons. I haven't decided where to submit this one yet.
I set low goals for Week One because I was going to be away for the weekend. Even so, I didn't complete Week One's goal until today. Oops. Anyhow, P1 was not touched. My goal was to reread P2 and see how well it held up. I was pleasantly surprised. The prose is a little on the dull side, but that's not a huge problem. I need to update the literature review. I should probably make the charts look a little better. Other than that, however, the analysis and discussion seem pretty clear and solid.
Week Two's goals will be to check and expand the statistical analysis of P1, and to find and read potentially relevant papers for P2's lit review. I'll let you know how I did next Sunday.
Another goal of mine for this challenge, apart from revising my student papers, is to use the challenge to get back into a more regular blogging routine. Hence this post and the others that will follow.
If you are participating in any crazy writing challenge this month, good luck!
The meaning of a place is frequently communicated by the means of markers. For example, a typical American convention for marking the site of a historic (read "culturally significant") event is by the means of a large boulder with a metal plaque affixed to it. You can see a lot of these markers at the Historical Marker Database site.
But there are other types of markers that communicate the significant properties of a place. Travel down the King's Highway in southwestern New Jersey, and you will find some old stone mile markers. The only significance of a mile marker is to communicate where that place is in relation to some other place, but to a weary traveler that knowledge could be very welcome indeed. (Here's a photo of a King's Highway mile marker at a place three miles from Salem and 31 miles from Camden.)
Another type of marker is detailed in this San Francisco Chronicle article (originally from AP):
Tsunami-hit towns forgot warnings from ancestors
The old Japanese stone markers described in the article are of different types. Some warn about what to what to do in case of a tsunami: "Always be prepared for unexpected tsunamis. Choose life over your possessions and valuables," reads a marker in Kesennuma, which was very hard hit by the 9.0 Tohoku quake and tsunami. Another marker in Aneyoshi reads, "High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point."
The article states:
"Hundreds of such markers dot the coastline, some more than 600 years old. Collectively they form a crude warning system for Japan, whose long coasts along major fault lines have made it a repeated target of earthquakes and tsunamis over the centuries."
I'd quibble with the term "crude;" it seems that the people who made these markers used the best technology they had at the time. Stone is a durable material, and markers in public places are visible to all who pass by. Granted, one needs to be literate in order to read the stone's message, but it seems likely that even illiterate members of the community would have known the message, if only because they had been told it by others in the community.
I'm sure that much more scholarship exists on the subject of these markers. I'm curious to know about the ages of the markers. I also wonder whether markers tended to be set up soon after a devastating tsunami had occurred; one point the article makes is that memories of tsunamis persist for relatively few generations. After the living memory dies out, people start building near the coastline again. Major seismic events occur on a very long scale of time, so a more permanent warning against their effects is necessary. Another thing I wonder about is whether those who made these markers intended that their warnings would still be visible centuries into the future.
H/T @Allochthonous
I've been remiss in posting here due to offline busyness, but I wanted to draw attention to this blog post by Rick Wright from the ABA Blog:
http://blog.aba.org/2011/03/jonathan-dwights-bookplate.html
It's always enjoyable to find birding and bibliophilia colliding. Bookplates, though not as in fashion today as they once were, are an interesting and artistic aspect of book culture. One of the links in Wright's post is to the journal Libraries and the Cultural Record, which has a bookplate archive. The bookplate archive also includes the bookplate of the Montclair Art Association, which I remember well. The Montclair Art Association became the Montclair Art Museum, and my first job after college was working as a library assistant in the museum library.
Bookplates are, in some ways, the equivalent of marginalia. Some book collectors like their books as pure and unmarked as the driven snow. Some book collectors like to see the provenance and history of their book written as addenda in its pages. Every book has a history. The pristine books are less forthcoming about their history than the ones that have been heavily annotated, but they also have their histories.
This morning, the blog of the Smithsonian Institution's libraries posted a birthday greeting to Mark Catesby. Catesby was an English naturalist who wrote and illustrated The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands: Containing the Figures of Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, Insects, and Plants. Quoting from Christopher Leahy's The Birdwatcher's Companion (1983 edition), Catesby's book was, "...the first comprehensive, illustrated (engraved by Catesby himself and hand-colored), accurate (given the pre-Linnaean state of early-eighteenth-century biology) work on the natural history of North America." Before there was Audubon, there was Catesby, though he didn't confine his observations to birds; according to Leahy, his main field was botany.
Catesby was born on March 24, 1682/3 in Castle Hedingham, Essex, England; the uncertainty about his birthdate in part comes from the difference between the Old Style and New Style calendars, and in part from the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars (the Smithsonian blog post has much more about this, which is no surprise to any genealogist who has researched people in this era). The post also shows Catesby plates of "the Great Booby" and the Blue Jay (albeit with a somewhat rumpled crest).
http://smithsonianlibraries.si.edu/smithsonianlibraries/2011/03/its-mark-cate...
For a bit more about Catesby's biography, here's a link from the Catesby Commemorative Trust.
As more and more information becomes digital, archivists wrestle with the issues of how to archive these materials. Complicating factors include a dizzying variety of platforms and types of software, planned obsolescence, usage licenses and copyright, and the sheer quantity of born-digital information.
But archivists are not the only ones wrestling with these issues. Ordinary people are faced with the same problems as they try to figure out how to save their e-mails, documents, photos, and other digital materials. Where once you could stick some handwritten letters in a shoebox and some family snapshots in a photo album and expect that they would last for a little while, you can't do that any longer. Of course, if you really want those letters and snapshots to last for more than a little while, you shouldn't put them in shoeboxes and random photo albums to begin with; ordinary people need help with preserving non-digital items as well.
There have been several recent events focusing on personal archiving, and I expect that this is a topic that will be getting more attention. It might even make a good career niche for enterprising archives professionals: how about a freelance archivist (or group of archivists) that you can hire to help you make sense of your belongings and advise you on how to handle them in the future so that your personal archiving process is as efficient and reliable as possible? Perhaps you can put them on retainer so that every six months or so, they can archive whatever has accumulated since their last visit. It sounds like a worthwhile service to me (as a potential customer), as well as something that could be a fun and interesting job (as a recently-graduated MLIS with an interest in archives).
The Personal Digital Archiving 2011 Conference was held in February 2011 at the Internet Archive. INFOdocket has posted a link to videos of the presentations at the conference; that post also links to other PDA2011 content on INFOdocket. Also, The Conference Circuit blog has summaries of the talks at the conference (since it's a blog, they're in reverse order); this links to the 'Personal Archiving, 2011' category on the blog.
Going back a bit further in time, the Library of Congress held a Personal Archiving Day on May 10, 2010. Videos from that event are now available on the web as well. Once again, INFOdocket provides an overview post with links.
Micalee Sullivan has written an interesting post on the blog for the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative.
http://chi.matrix.msu.edu/2011/03/10/digital-archive-and-copyright/
Sullivan, who is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Michigan State University, wanted to take digital photographs of letters held at Arizona State University's Archives and Special Collections and post them on a website as materials for her class. As she says in her blog post:
"Allowing students to view high res photos of the actual documents gives them the opportunity to struggle with interpreting the faded, spotty, and outdated handwriting just as a historian would and can be much more interesting to view than just transcribed material on a word document."
However, the copyright for those letters was not retained by ASU and they therefore cannot give permission to reproduce the letters on a public website, even if they have been reproduced for educational purposes.
Sullivan's post does a good job of listing the various ins and outs of the copyright advice she received from various sources. The post also highlights the potential pitfalls of using archival materials as a teaching aid (not to mention the restrictions archivists face when they make decisions about access to and use of their holdings).
The thing that really resonated with me was Sullivan's interest in using the original documents (or facsimiles thereof) in her teaching. Quoting again:
"As a historian, maybe it's naïve of me to think that history can be exciting to most people. But when your only experience with the subject has been confined to textbooks and lectures, it would be difficult to find the thrill of it all. Digital technology provides teachers with the tools to make history more than lectures and textbooks. When students are given a variety of historical materials they can form their own opinions about certain time periods and events, rather than just taking notes on them. While distance may seperate [sic] students from the actual artifacts of history, digital archives can provide a close substitute. Hopefully the legalities won't get in the way."
Maybe I'm naive too, but I believe history can be exciting, possibly even to "most people." Just look at the interest in genealogy, which essentially is a way of using research about your family's ancestry as a way of learning about history. Sure, some genealogists never get beyond "name-collecting," but others find their interest expanding to include the larger history of a location, or of a time period. The interest is there. The question is how (or if) historians, archivists, amateur history geeks, genealogists, and other interested parties can work together to support the cause.
H/T @ndiipp via @EinAtlanta and @archivesnext
At the end of last year, BirdFellow put up a photo essay about abused field guides. The books pictured in that post have obviously led very punishing lives, and the photos would probably make any right-minded bibliophile cringe or start sobbing.
Recently, in another post, BirdFellow promoted a comment from the abused field guides post and gave it its own moment in the sun. Commenter Bob Tarte wrote about two old bird books that he found in used bookstores, and he included this felicitous line, "...whenever I look up the birds in this book, I feel the presence of its original owner."
I'll come back to that thought in a moment, but first I'd like to share some images of my most-abused bird book, which is not a field guide but a bird-finding guide.
I was a relatively new birder when I bought a copy of Bill Boyle's A Guide to Bird Finding in New Jersey. I was a new enough birder that the idea of a bird-finding guide seemed extreme. After all, there were birds in my backyard. There were birds in the local parks. Finding birds didn't seem to be a difficult proposition at all. However, my guiding principle when taking up an interest is to buy as many books about it as possible, so I bought that bird-finding guide, even though it seemed a little silly to do so.
So this is what that bird-finding guide looks like today:
With that, I'll return to Bob Tarte's comment about the presence of the original owner. Book dealers like old books with little or no wear and damage, since wear reduces a book's value. The only exception would be if a book's marginalia came from a famous person, or if the book was signed by the author. This kind of wear isn't damage, but can enhance a book's value.
Most birders aren't famous, but a lot of them mark up some of their books as a record of their sightings. This happens most frequently with field guides. I've run across marked-up bird books in used bookstores plenty of times. If I end up buying those books, I'm likely to treasure them just a little bit more precisely because they carry the presence of the original owner and note-taker. That just goes to show that different people can look at the same book and arrive at a different estimate of its value.
This controversy has all the elements for a gripping thriller: Science. Art. Intellectual property arguments. Money (or rather, lack of it). And, above all, dinosaurs.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=art-in-the-service-of-scie...
In brief, Gregory S. Paul is one of the major figures in the paleoart community, enough so that his work is widely imitated. Paul, not surprisingly, is not happy about this state of affairs and has threatened legal action against imitators. He is defending his livelihood against those who would create knockoffs of his work and then underbid him to get illustration commissions. However, there are those who believe that Paul is claiming copyright protection for intellectual property that he cannot copyright (such as the pose of a dinosaur reconstruction).
Monoyios's post (a Scientific American Guest Blog) starts from there and fills in the larger context of "art for science's sake." Her clear summary discusses matters like declining funding, copyright in the scientific world, staff artists vs. freelancers, and other trends that are relevant to this controversy. She also has a list of links to other blogs with commentary on the situation.
H/T @BoraZ
