Global Community

In his book, James May’s 20th Century, the author writes, “The Model T was designed and built ‘for the great multitude….’  It pioneered the moving production line, and put the planet’s most forward-thinking people on wheels….  What it didn’t pioneer…is the standardized system of car control we now take for granted.”  (29)  In this same chapter, titled “Shrinking the World,” he lays out the history of the Volkswagen “Beetle.”  May notes that what started out as “the people’s car” under Hitler never took off at that time.  Few were produced, and those for Nazi officers.  The factory was eventually turned into a munitions plant, bombed, left in ruins and, post-war, offered to American car manufacturers, who mocked the possibility of ever mass producing what Henry Ford himself called a (insert blasphemous word here).  A British army officer named Ivan Hirst decided that resurrecting the little car, and the town with it, was worth a go.  May indicates the satire in the fact that the car eventually did become, “the peoples’ car.”  It just happened to do so with a completely different set of people.  (He also notes the irony in that, though it started out as a vehicle for the Third Reich, it became the quintessential peacenik car and an icon for hippies everywhere.)

“Global standardization” of cars is a reality and has been for generations.  Cars beginning in one country but ending in another, uniting a fractured planet.  The world-wide web.  A “global community.”  I plugged those words into google.  With parental controls engaged,  2,260,000 hits popped up referencing that phrase in less than half a second.  Obviously people believe in and discuss a “global community.”  But what does that mean?

I sat with my advisor and colleague today discussing “communities.”  The three of us met in a room which has the unwieldy moniker “University of North Dakota Working Group in Digital and New Media.”  It is an interesting room that, in itself, represents the layers of the discussion.  The room is not intended for graduate students in history alone.  Truthfully, I have no idea exactly which groups of people use that room beyond my colleagues and myself.  I know people do as they come and go in it just as I do.  We smile politely at each other and go about our business.

The room is filled with wonderful techno-gadgets to include some nice computers.  It is there that I sometimes jump into the world-wide web, access Omeka, and input data.  I become more linked with the program, (which, in turn, links to “the world”), than with those who inhabit my space.  Unless, of course, the interns are meeting with our professor, which we do on Tuesdays.  During that time we sometimes delve into programs together either learning something new, or helping each other (which generally means my peers helping me) explore strange new worlds, or parsing readings and et c.

I do know that everyone who has access to “the lab” is in some way connected to the university.  In some respects, we are connected to each other because we all use the same space.  Students come and go, not just on a daily basis, but semester to semester, year to year.  Neither the environment nor the population remains stable, but always in flux.

Airports function in much the same way.  They are points of departure, arrival, and/or transiency.  They are, like the proverbial rushing river, never the same from moment to moment.  When my spouse left for the Middle East last year, he departed from the local airport.  When he arrived home eight months later, I met him on the same spot.  Yet neither of us were the same.  Time had wrought changes in us, physically, mentally, and emotionally.  Nevertheless, airports represent community to me.  All the people in them, whether passengers, pilots, attendants, ticketing agents, baggage checkers, security officers, janitors, or food workers recognize this as a place of transiency.  We are connected by our understanding of that space, despite the fact that the space is in a continual, unstable state of flux.  Perhaps this notion of “community” evolved from my own upbringing.

My family of origin was, in effect, nomadic.  As I’ve stated before, my father was military.  As a result, we moved, on average, every year.  Despite the bad press often given to the military lifestyle, I never knew any families that were “unstable.”  Moving was a way of life.  It had purpose.  Friendships came and went.  Some remained and continue to do so.  They were not then, nor now, based on location.  We learned early on that the planet was a fairly small place and easily traversed.  Even before cell phones and personal computers we knew how to stay in contact and nurture our unions.  This, to me, is “community.”

My advisor approached the term “community” from a different vantage point.  He chose what was, to me, a shocking polarization.  (I am quite sure I came across the same to him.)  He used the examples of boundaries that metaphorically surround neighborhoods in larger cities.  (Understand, please, that this was for comparison only and to help illustrate his point.)  If I understood him correctly, he argued that things like ethnicity, time spent in a particular location, and ties associated with rituals (such as a long-standing member of a neighborhood restaurant shutting down their place of business for one of the “local family’s” son’s engagement party) all contributed to the definition of community.

I found this understanding of the word uncomfortably limiting.  Community, to me, is a state of being and not tied to a place.  It is, in truth, an “imagined” space that links people based on shared experiences and world views.  It allows for flux and change.  It understands that, as airports are places that bring happiness, sadness, or ambivalence, so does community.  The importance of the “space” is not the time that has passed nor who is there, but that the experience is shared, even if at different times.  It looks for the “tie that binds.”

The idea of local, closed communities that must share time, space, and history is too confining for me.  Perhaps that is because, (and I do not mean to overstate this), I have experienced such “communities” as an “outsider.”  I did not label myself as such, but was labeled.  Seeing “community” in the way that I do, I have never understood people who remain so guarded and inclusive that they eschew the new.  I have always assumed a certain amount of insecurity, selfishness, or cultural hubris on their part and, since I moved so often, certainly did not waste the friendships I could be establishing there on people that chose to remain sequestered in this way.

I compare  my spouse’s upbringing with my own.  He lived his entire life in a rural community of less than 1,000 people.  Stereotypically, this town should be a small “community” of people who, because they spent copious amounts of time together in limited space sharing daily, monthly, and annual rituals, (the “Corn and Clover Carnival” comes to mind), should be nearly inseparable.  Yet my spouse claims few actual ties to this place.  Those friends he continues to share “community” with do not live anywhere near it.  He has fond memories of his past and the townspeople.  He is liked, well-respected and recognized on those rare occasions when we drive through, but this place is simply a part of his life, and our lives have lots of “parts” which constitute the whole.  It was one more airport on his journey, so to speak.

What, then, does “community” actually mean?  My colleague in the lab googled the word and got a myriad of definitions, most of them quite limited.  Finding that unsatisfactory, I once again turned to Oxford for the roots of this word when I arrived home.  (Everyone really should own an excellent dictionary.)  To my delight, I found that “community” comes from Middle English and originates from “the quality of appertaining to all in common.”  Its use can be traced to 1561.  By 1587 it had come to mean “common character; agreement; social intercourse; communion.”  It is not until much later (1727) that we find “a body of persons living together, and practicing community of goods” (ie. sharing “physical space”) to be used as the norm.

If you’ll look at the opening paragraph of this blog, you’ll note that Mr. May, whose book is for sale on the world-wide web and therefore capable of reaching anyone on the planet, has addressed standardization in cars that “we,” as in “the global community” take for granted.  World-wide standardization is happening.  Selling books, and most anything else (both fortunately and unfortunately), is global business.  Authors are “speaking” to the world.  More profoundly, Mr. May recently had the opportunity to be one of those few blessed individuals who flew to the very edge of our atmosphere in a U2 spyplane.  He recorded his venture.  Hovering on that thin, frail, outer edge of the bubble that surrounds our planet, the blackness of eternity above, looking down at the sky below, seeing our world from that vantage point, he recognized that we are, indeed, one singular group of people.  I am not naive enough to believe that we will ever all get along, or that we can share every experience.  But, like Mr. May, I believe that if we could all but look down on this place we’ve named Earth, we would indeed comprehend that we are truly a global community.  The world is my backyard.  Hello, Neighbor.

(With many thanks to Mr. James May and BBC2 for the following preview.)

On Historionomy

 

“Historionomer:  One versed in the laws which regulate the course of history.”  So it is written in my wonderful 1955 Oxford Universal Dictionary.  I have to admit that, prior to looking at the many definitions for “history,” I had never heard the word “historionomer,” but I love it.  I love it because it so mirrors the term “astronomer.”  Both are professions which claim to be versed in laws which regulate the course of something, suggesting that we humans have the power to accomplish such a phenomenal task!  Of course we do not regulate either the past or the universe, but we do impose certain laws upon both.  The question is, “Why?”

It is a rather big question, which I will not answer here, or anywhere else, in full.  But I will address it.  I think it is because we see patterns in both and so attempt to order them so that they make sense to us.  Different people see different patterns, so they write about different things and create different laws.  We call these patterns “theories.”  Academics, and, (to my way of thinking), especially historians, love to debate theories.  In many ways, this is easier to do if you are a scientist, such as an astronomer, because the theories are testable.  Gravity, for instance, has worked pretty much the same since we gave it the name of “gravity” centuries ago.  History is more fluid and slippery than that.  It follows, then, that theories of history tend to be a bit more fluid and slippery as well.

I’ve recently read a theo-historical article titled “Christians and Postmoderns” by Joseph Bottums.  Written in 1994, the author dizzyingly discusses how postmodernists, because they were born, bred, and/or influenced in the era of modern theories, cannot divorce themselves from modernist thinking.  The new theories erupting from the union of the modern/postmodern union strikingly resemble medievalist, or premodern, thinking, sans God.  Yet, the author notes,  because time does not flow in reverse, this “new” thinking is not medieval at all.  My brief and naive description of this article is merely a teaser that barely addresses the nuances of its many complex themes.  Nevertheless, it helps to illustrate the debates that swirl around the numerous historical theories that exist.  As the author duly notes, the terms themselves become convoluted when writers use them not as they are intended, (to describe the history of ideas), but as eras.  Thus, even those who create the theories and laws sometimes break their own rules, or as Foucault would say, “rupture the discourse.”

I, too, enjoy the debate.  I enjoy discovering patterns as I read the translated letters of Paulinus of Nola.  I love the thrill of ordering these patterns so that they fill some gap left in the historiography of Late Antiquity.  I roll my eyes at some historians’ interpretation of the same readings, feel dejected when I find that one of my “discoveries” was made two decades ago, and relish the thrill of victory when a current expert in the field writes, “More work needs to be done on this topic,” when that is the very topic I am exploring.  Sometimes, however, it all swirls into a confused mass in my brain and I want to walk away and clear the fog.

This internship helps me to do that while still making meaningful, if not quiet, contributions to the field.  The Lakka Skoutara slides and digital pictures are all now downloaded into Omeka and I am helping to label them.  This work reminds me of gardening for many reasons.  The first is that I’m no great gardener and, as past blogs will tell, I’ve not exactly mastered the computer.  The second is that you can really see progress when you garden.  What was a mess of a flower bed after a long fall and winter, strewn with rotting leaves and the dead stems of last summer’s flora, easily becomes a blank canvas for this year’s masterpiece.  All it takes is pulling, raking, bagging, and preparing the soil.  In the same way as there are a  finite number of leaves and stems, there are a finite number of slides to label.  Every time I input data, I see progress.  I also know that I am ”prepping the ground” for future generations who may look to these slides for their own research.  Their research, in turn, is meant to enlighten and stimulate more debate, perhaps even changing the laws of history as we know them. 

Does that, coupled with my research, make me a “historionomer?”  I think so.  As a small example, I offer that I am agreeing with both a certain data base and my advisor that these slides should be ordered “just so.”  We are placing them in a pattern that makes sense to us in order to retrieve them in similar ways.  These “ways” are inherently fraught with meaning.  What works for us might not work for others.  At this moment, I am unconcerned with that.  Future generations, however, may find that our way of ordering things is incongruous with theirs.  They will change the laws.  The great debates, then, will continue.  One could even argue that, in this way, history will repeat itself.  Of course, time does not flow backward, so that’s not possible.  Since there is an ongoing argument among astronomers as to whether or not even that is true, however, well….

Sentient Beings

 

My nine-year old son asked a thought-provoking question as we sat at the table the other day.  He wondered if there were not only other sentient life forms in the universe but, more intriguingly, whether or not it was possible that some lived among us in microscopic form.  I countered by asking him whether or not it was possible that we were microscopic life forms that lived in someone else’s much larger world.  I’ve thought about that more than once in my life.  If so, are they aware of us, benign keepers creating an environment in which we thrive?  Or are they as yet unable to discover us?  Do organisms exist in infinite sizes, like the images in mirrors reflecting upon each other?  I suspect the question originated from a box of butter my son saw that had an image of someone on the packaging holding the identical box of butter in their hands, thus creating an infinite series of butter bearers. 

Whatever your own political, religious, or other stance on the topic, this conversation would most likely not have happened if my son and I did not make time to be together and interact.  Notice that I had to qualify that.  He and I spend plenty of time together.  We cohabitate, and I drive him to many of his activities.  A great deal of his time is spent doing things like going to school, practicing the piano, homework, playing hockey, chores, and hanging out with friends.  My time is also often spent otherwise engaged.  I, too, go to school, have homework, play chauffeur, perform chores, and address a myriad of other roles in my life.  On the occasion of his question, however, we chose to use our time to interact.

I’ve noticed that the word “time” is used a lot in the circles I run in.  Mostly I hear people saying, “I wish I had more time,” “I don’t have time for that,” or “When did time get to be so scarce?”  Interesting idea, isn’t it?  There is no scarcity of time.  It exists as it always has.  It is only our perspective of time that defines how we use it.  No.  Strike that.  It is our perspective of what is urgent and/or important that defines how we use time.  Then again, perhaps it is our perspective of what is urgent and/or important that defines how we misuse time. 

Somewhere along the way, Charles Hummel’s Tyranny of the Urgent (1967) became a mainstream reality.  I boldly aver that to be a mistake.  It seems to me that we have, as a culture, somehow mistaken the idea of “leisure time” with a “waste of time.”  By “leisure time” I mean personal interaction as the main focus of an activity.  The personal interaction may be the focus, or dinner, throwing a baseball, potting plants, fishing, whatever works best for you.  It means time where one’s thoughts and attention are primarily focused on the person/people who you are with.  It can also mean time alone, but time alone to think, not to be bombarded with stimuli.  Leisure time does not mean spending time with someone while something else competes for your attention, such as video games and television.  If your eyes, mind, and hands are engaged with the Wii, they cannot primarily be engaged with your companion.  Yet, somehow, we seem to think that if we are not overstimulated or engaged with electronic devices, we are being ineffective or under productive. 

Why?  When did we, as a culture, begin to embrace the idea that non-technoligically based interaction or time alone is somehow distasteful?  This question befuddles me.  It carries with it as much naive hubris as does the title to a conference panel I recently saw listed:  “Are Books Obsolete?”  The most basic premise of the question is absurd.  Of course books are not obsolete.  People have been writing them for generations.  Prior to that, codices, prior to that, papyrus and carving stone tablets.  All of these have, at the very least, historical value.  At the very most they are inspirational, meaningful, educational, and thought-provoking.  Besides, as long as there are humans that want to express themselves, they will write “books”  whether on laptops, coffee shop napkins (a nod to J. K. Rowling), or reams of notepads, they will.  The question, really, was whether or not paper books are obsolete.  I still maintain the question is absurd.  Obsolete to whom? 

The question is directed to those people with a steady and prolific stream of access to technology.  That excludes most of the world.  The scoffers might say that it excludes the most uneducated masses.  Perhaps, at least the formally uneducated masses.  But that does not mean that it excludes the ignorant.  Bright minds that do not have access to technology are still bright minds.  They take in the world around them, (sometimes through paper books which, thankfully, they still understand the value of), process it by whatever means they develop, and imaginatively create solutions to the situations they encounter.  Some countries that have a steady and prolific stream of access to technology make the conscious choice to walk away from it regularly.  They value their right to do so, and they value their alone and interactive leisure time.

Is there something they know that we don’t?  Am I making the best use of my time, the time I have in this life before I expire, by spending countless hours searching innumerable tomes for answers to questions in my research?  Am I crowding out ground-breaking, inspired ideas by focusing my brain on the many different avenues I can explore via the so-called ”world-wide web?”  Is instant access to seemingly everything the best option?  There’s the key.  We do not have instant access to seemingly everything.  Our laptops, our televisions, and our Wii’s cannot replace for us the world of real experience.  They can tell us what it is like to do something, but that does not replace the actual encounter.  I cannot use my laptop to climb a tree and peer over the leafy top to the land beyond.  Inundating my time to the exclusion of personal reflection leads to no original thought.  Further, technology cannot help us to do things like soak in the nuances found in the body language of the people we sit and talk with.  I know this for a fact.  My husband spent over half a year on the other side of the globe.  The longer we talked ”face to face” over Skype, the more my laptop became like Rowling’s “Mirror of Erised.”  I could see my heart’s desire through it, but I could never reach it, touch it, endure the richness of its presence in my daily life.  Rowling was wise to note that anyone sitting in front of that mirror, anyone who allowed their thoughts to be drawn to it all hours of the day and night, would eventually go insane.

Technology is a tool.  Time is a gift.  How we fill our time, and the choice of which tools we use to make that happen, is important.  Lewis Carroll was inspired to write his Through the Looking Glass (Alice in Wonderland) story while boating down a whimsical river in Oxford near the university.  I can understand this.  Because we spontaneously decided to pull over along a road in Icklingham and walk together as a family, we discovered the most delightful trees, (below), the kind which I imagine provided inspiration for the Ents in Tolkien’s work.  Precious time allowed our minds to become uncluttered and experience the world for what it had to offer us:  exponential, imaginative growth in our brains, shared experiences of wonder, and healthy peace.  I do not experience the same with my family when we are watching a movie “together” or playing video games.  Those activities have their place, but so does our time without such distractions.    

I’m not suggesting we eschew surfing the web or that we completely remove technology from our life.  I am proposing that we take control of the time we have, commanding our own destinies.  I am not convinced that we do our best work while spending the majority of our time wired.  I think using our time wisely, to include a large, healthy dose of being unplugged, will ultimately prove more productive and imaginative, and will propel us more quickly into new and exciting ways of thinking.

In doing so, we might even have time to figure out whether or not there’s an endless stream of infinitely large and small symbiotic sentient life forms who are as yet unaware (or are they?) of each others’ existence.  Just something to talk about the next time you’re actually with friends, or to think about the next time you find yourself alone.  Let me know what you discover.

Related Link:  http://www.becomingminimalist.com/2009/08/25/minimalism-blackberries-and-the-tyranny-of-the-urgent/       

      

 

 

Who Gets to Choose?

This internship continues to cause me to rethink the phrase “public history.”  As I’ve written before, I define public history as both a very tactile and intellectual experience that involves a journey.  History classes, likewise, fit certain parameters in my mind, including both “reading” and “writing” components.  This usually entails what seems like readings of never-ending tomes and innumerable hours of putting thoughts onto paper during any given term.  This internship extends, or perhaps redefines, these ideas.  True, our reading component involves some text, but text that examines the many faceted implications of digital technologies.  Hardly your “standard” history fare, (if, indeed, such a thing exists).  The writing component is even less conventional, which you can attest to since you are reading part of it at this moment.

Our latest readings discuss blogging as a writing component.  In order to illustrate the arguments I find most intriguing about this topic, I’m going to provide you with a few excerpts from a review essay titled “Blogging Anthropology:  Savage Mind, Zero Anthropology, and AAA Blogs.”  (American Anthropologist, Vol. 112, Issue 1, pp. 140-148)

“The fundamental value of seminars and salons has always been their opportunity to move beyond conventional limits by tentatively exploring new ideas in ways drawing on the freedom provided by the provisionality of the setting; the best blogs draw on these same dynamics….”

“Writing quickly without editors…increases incidents of logical fallacies, but the opportunities to explore ideas and arguments, share knowledge, and develop writing voices in a public arena without the controls of consensus and the gatekeeping of traditional publishing outlets make blogging an effective testing ground….”

“…blogging also presents opportunities to engage [non-practitioners in any given field] by directly sharing findings and analyses with the public, making it an important venue for expanding [a particular field's] audience and for those interested particularly in [that field].”

So where, then, does blogging fit in regards to scholarly writing?  That’s a real puzzler for me, and that puzzle is at the heart of my having to reassess my understanding of public history.  I have, in my own head, dubbed this a “crises of standards.”  I do not believe any argument to be truly two-sided, but for the sake of simplification, I will move forward in that vein.  On the one hand, blogging does provide an open forum for discussion and a place to discover and integrate new methods of understanding and doing.  I like this idea.  It’s “old school.”  It was this sort of idealism, at least nostalgically, that created a culture which inspired people like Thomas Edison to take pieces of things and put them together out in “any person’s” shed until electricity was harnessed.  It is an experimental, inclusive, messy, dynamic approach to learning.  There is a sort of “reckless abandon, we won’t know til we try” vibe to this that speaks to my adventurous nature.  For the most part, that’s what I read in the first paragraph quoted above.

I like the third paragraph as well.  I am naturally curious and always appreciate when I stumble upon ideas and arguments that someone has thoughtfully thrown out there for anyone to mull over.  I see the world as one big, fantastic puzzle that every human can have fun trying to piece together during their time here.  The more I learn, the more I want to learn.  Blogging is an excellent means by which to throw things “out there,” as I am now, for someone to discover and ruminate on.

On the other hand, there is a single word that disturbs me in that first paragraph:  “tentatively.”  I suspect that the author inferred “thoughtfully,” “responsibly,” or perhaps “respectfully” by making use of it.  The second paragraph argues that the inevitable logical fallacies that will ensue from a completely open forum pale in comparison to what is gained from such an exchange.  “Perhaps,” one side of my brain responds.  “Perhaps not,” the other retorts.

The problem with a completely open forum is that, by definition, it contains no set standards, academic or otherwise.  Yet, as Foucault would tell you, some sort of consensus must be arrived at in order to develop a discourse through which blogs and/or the blog topic can be defined.  In short, who gets to choose what is legitimate in a blog and what is not?  The essay addresses this to some degree, noting that some blogs have reviewers who set and maintain the standards of the blog.  But if that is so, is it truly an open forum?

I recognize that I’ve stepped across the threshold into the world of the philosophical, but I’m going to continue on for a moment because I believe that the idea of an open forum needs continued examination.  Having lived in third world countries, and realizing that the world is much bigger than we are often willing to admit, by “open forum” we are really saying “open to all those who have the technology to access blogs,” and that does not actually include most of the world.  Thus we have already limited the people to whom our thoughts will be accessed.  Are we not, then, guilty of the same sort of hubris that we often attribute to those who limited their wealth in the history of the earth?  Have we not chosen who we will allow to give input?

I also question the idea of the “tentative” exploration of anything.  Explorers, by nature, (if I may further reveal a bias here), are generally not tentative.  How do we tease out thoughtful “explorers” and those who have simply joined in due to riotous compulsion?  Can something be gained from both?

For my own part, I have yet to find consensus within my own mind over this debate and am aware that I am too far in the trees to see the proverbial forest.  As an explorer and adventurer, I believe that something good will come from this nether-world of blogging as we seek to define where it fits into the larger academic discourse.  I cannot begin to say what “good” it will produce.  Perhaps it will prove to be a marvelous pot from which everyone will be able to gain sustenance.  Perhaps it will prove an abysmal failure, and we will have learned at least that much from our trying.  My best guess is that blogging will eventually be compartmentalized somehow, will take on branches, and that we will have different ways of accessing different types of blogs.  For now, we are experiencing the developmental stages of blogging, and I am intrigued as I watch its growth.  The implications of blogging run across moral, ethical, academic, and a myriad of other lines.  Digital technology is indeed revolutionary as it forces us to again examine that historical question at the root of so many conflicts;  “Who gets to choose?”

“Big Steps ‘n Little ‘Uns”

Perhaps I can attribute this week’s blog to the North Dakota doldrums that most people experience this time of year in this part of the country, or perhaps there is something in the air, but I, like Sara, initially found little to write about my work this week that will inspire you.  There is nothing about the current particulars that is going to make you jump out of your seat and cause you to want to rush out and start your own public history works.  That is because I am simply…waiting.

I am waiting for the slides from Lakka Skoutara to be scanned.  I can not move forward until they are.  I am also waiting for spring.  That season comes much later in this part of the country and briefly buzzes through the year right along with the bees.  We have short summers and long winters.  By the end of February, a lot of people are taking or planning vacations.  It will be a while before we see that first green blade of grass, soft green leaf, or tiny bright bud.  Today there are windchill advisories and we will have periods throughout the day of high temps between -25 and -40.  I love winter, but I am ready for some color to permeate the vast, wide open, wind-blown monochromatic spaces of this agrarian river valley.  Spring seems a long way away.

James Herriot, a large animal veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales in days gone by, once wrote about one of the men whose animals he helped.  The man had grown up in the Dales and farmed his whole life.  He was tall, quiet, and wiry.  He spent his life taking long strides across the hills as he worked every day.  He told Herriot that he once visited a large city.  Herriot asked how he liked he.  He didn’t.  Why?  His answer, “Big step n’ little ‘uns.”  The mass of people he met on the crowded sidewalks of whatever city he’d ventured into did not allow him to take the long, powerful strides he was accustomed to while trying to get to his destination.  When he returned home he vowed never to enter the city again.

Life is like that sometimes, isn’t it?  “Big steps ‘n little ‘uns.”  I like to “stride,” unrestrained, over metaphoric grounds that provide me with beautiful vistas.  But I, like the majority of people, do not have that luxury every day.  I don’t have it most days, in fact.  Today, though I’m ready to rush headlong into the next phase of the Lakka Skoutara project, for instance, I cannot.  I long for days that will be consistent with my own desires and ways of tackling things, but, truthfully, who knows if they will ever come?  Most likely not.  Few of us have such control over our destinies.  So how to make the best of the fits and starts?

An African proverb holds the key to my answer.  Two summers ago, my then 15-year-old daughter spent her summer in Malawi, Africa helping AIDS orphans.  When she returned, someone gave her a calendar with an African proverb for each day.  The entry on February 21st puts today into perspective for me.  It states, “If sweetness is excessive, it is no longer sweetness.”  If today I cannot move at my own pace, then I must adjust it.  I have to do the same with my reaction.  That’s tough this time of year.  It’d be cathartic, in the short run, to just grump about having little to do.  The truth of the matter, however, is that I have plenty to do in other areas, whether I really want to tackle those things or not.  But if I recognize that the sweet things I want to do are only sweet because they occur rarely or, at least, seldom, then I, like A. A. Milne’s Eeyore on his birthday, when presented with a burst red balloon, can say, “Red.  My favorite color!”  Perhaps, instead of viewing the not so palatable tasks as terrible “have to’s” on my list, I can view them as the distractions found on every city street, as part of the many intertwining threads in the tapestry that is my life.  Woven together, they make a rather beautiful scene.  Besides, unlike Herriot’s friend, I love big cities.  I can take big steps n’ little uns’ and even enjoy it.  It’s all a matter of perspective.

I’ll still grump a bit.  It’s just that time of year.  When I’ve cleared that out of my system, I’ll face this time with those admirable British values that were imprinted on me in my youth and which Johnson writes of:  “cheerfulness in spite of all conditions, endurance, and gallantry.”  The warm, sunny Lakka Skoutara pictures will eventually be ready for cataloging and putting into context, and I need to patiently concentrate my abilities on less enticing ventures for now.

I do so look forward to getting on with it, though.

Tedium and Te Deum

Part I:  Technology Revolution Redux

Before posting my intended topic, I have to address Sara’s last contribution, (“Parents Just Don’t Understand”).  I’m amused because she admitted to me that I was the inspiration for it.  I needed to download some files the other day that needed “unzipping,” and, having never done this before, found the process difficult and frustrating.  Sara, through the wonderful medium of googlewave, walked me through the process and, at last, I had success!  What was for her a simple thing was new to me.

In her blog, Sara wrote, “being raised in the ’90s, my generation was not only raised on computers, but we are much more capable of adapting to new technologies than our parents generation.”  What a fascinating perspective!  I reiterate here that I find this entire discussion amusing.  It truly tickles me!  Sara is wonderful, bright, and extremely helpful, but I must take this chance to dialogue about my own, different, perspective, which is what blogging is all about.

I doubt very much that this generation is indeed capable of adapting to new technologies with any greater ability than my own.  I am nearly as old as Sara’s mother and have daughters nearly as old as Sara herself, so I have experienced what she is talking about.  In my lifetime a tsunami of new technologies have washed over the planet.  As you know from earlier entries, I grew up during the space race.  Watching rockets evolve into space shuttles hardly proved to be a gap in the evolution of technology.  Holograms and lasers were nothing to sneeze at either.  (I was one of the earliest to view the Laserium concert at Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles.)  I’m also not entirely out of the loop when it comes to computers.  My first university job, pre-PC, was at the computer lab at Wright State in Ohio.  Oh, and just in case the “younger” generation missed this, I, and my ilk, have been alive over the last few decades to watch, and take part in, the computer revolution that they have experienced today.  I even own, and use, (gasp?!), a Wii.

My point is this: I would argue with Sara that online data or technology of any kind is not reserved for different age groups.  I have chosen not to learn new computer skills til this point in time.  I haven’t needed to.  Both that fact and age, however, do not call into question a person’s ability to do so.  There are plenty in my generation, and older, who have needed and/or chosen to use the technology we share today.  As a matter of fact, some of them hold doctorates in these fields and teach this younger generation just how much their flat magic little boxes are capable of.  I have had the luxury of using mine for recreation alone.  Now I need to learn to use it as a tool.  The engineering side of my brain is usually bemused, actually, by what my laptop can’t do as it seems that creating certain applications really shouldn’t be that difficult.  We’ve come a long way from Fortran and Basic, but I’m not convinced that we’ve come as far as people would like to believe.  In fact, adaptability might explain just how much some people don’t need to use computers at all.  Adapting to new technology has been going on since the “invention” of fire.  Whether or not people use new technology is based on choice, not age.

Part II:  Tedium and Te Deum

This is the topic I originally intended to write about.  Tedium, according to my beautiful old Oxford Universal Dictionary, describes something that is “wearisome by continuance, irksome, disagreeable, painful.”  Te Deum, (from the Latin “Te Deum laudamus ‘Thee God, we praise’”), is described as “an ancient Latin hymn of praise in the form of a psalm, sung as a thanksgiving on special occasions, as after a victory or deliverance.”  Though the two are pronounced very much alike, their definitions stand in stark contrast to each other.  (Unless you’ve had to endure a particularly long Mass, at which time the two might coincide.)

Joking aside, these three words beautifully illustrate my internship focus this week.  As I mentioned in Our Extant Past, I am currently working on the Lakka Skoutara project.  Not all parts of the projects that my peers and I tackle are sexy.  Right now, for instance, I am renaming photos of the old houses I wrote about.  What was “DSC 0133″ needs to be renamed as something like “House 2_Image 3_Corinth_June 2009″.  There are hundreds of them to be renamed.  The work can be tedious, as in “wearisome by continuance” and even “painful.”  My back aches after a while, and I’m never pleased when I realize, a dozen pictures later, that I’ve missed a number and need to rename a few.  Yet I find that I really don’t mind the process.  In fact, I enjoy it overall.  In order to explain why, I need to tell you about music.

I have a bit of a commute everyday to school.  Along the way, I listen to music.  All kinds of music.  I have a multi-disc CD player in the car and controls on the steering wheel, so the drive can get pretty exciting.  Today, however, I stuck with a single CD:  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  The third selection, titled “The Knight Bus,” is some of the most chaotic jazz ever written.  It’s fascinatingly disturbing.  The composer, John Williams, is a true genius and one of my favorites.  I love this song because it is nearly impossible to follow the rhythm or to anticipate the next note, yet the song resonates and somehow “makes sense” to the listener’s ears and psyche.  The more I listen to it, the more I want to listen to it to try and figure out how/why that happens.  In a later composition, Williams introduces the most striking timpani solo I’ve ever heard.  Yes, timpani solo, the introduction to “Buckbeak’s Flight.”  This song, obviously, is about flying, but if you never knew the title, you’d understand that just by hearing it.  Williams’ songs are inspiring.  They evoke “Te Deum” and provoke the psyche to “praise” and to “be delivered.”

Let me put the last two paragraphs together for you.  John Williams, composer and conductor, spends countless hours not just creating fabulous music, but also writing thousands upon thousands of notes.  Notes, as in little black dots, on lines, on paper.  Page after page, ream after ream.  Some for oboe, others for flute, viols, cymbals.  I suspect that, at times, his back aches.  I’d lay money on the notion that he also has to erase and rewrite.  Obviously, the thought I am trying to convey is that tedium is, to my way of thinking, necessary to achieve Te Deum.  While I lack Mr. Williams’ gift, and while the work of Lakka Skoutara is not composed for thousands to enjoy, the act of renaming pictures of houses is made less mundane when considering the helpful contribution to the field that these photographs may yet make.  So the work is tedious, what of that?  It is not the individual note that is so striking.  It is the yet unrealized fulness of the project that matters, and I find that wonderfully inspiring.

Our Extant Past

A bit of Mr. Gust’s most recent posting sets the stage nicely for my own this week.  That, in itself, is interesting when you consider that, though my colleagues and I collaborate on projects, we rarely discuss our more profound inner musings.  Yet there it is.

Chris writes about the “that was then, this is now” phenom that generally applies to all things historio-archeological.  He also writes about the different perceptions that practitioners use when approaching their work.  Well done, and bully for Chris, though I, personally, tend to think of each paradigm less as narcissistic and more as a preference toward a concentrated methodology.  But I digress.

My discussion actually begins with my latest project:  Lakka  Skoutara.  (It’s worth noting that when I say “my,” I mean “our.”  We have divvied up the many different projects as they come available and/or according to our likings.  The project I’m about to share with you is one I am quite excited about.  The reality of our situation is that we eventually end up sharing most everything as we each contribute a certain skill set, or find we have a pause in our own work that allows us to help another.  Thus “my” is “our,” but mine.  To further muddy the waters, all these projects are actually the “property” of more professional people than us, but we take ownership in that we happen to care about them and contribute to them in very meaningful ways.)  From here on out, I really will attempt to stay on topic.

The topic:  Lakka Skoutara.  Lakka (translated “basin”) Skoutara is an abandoned rural settlement in southeastern Corinthia, Greece.  A small team of archaeologists have been recording the structural decline of  houses in this area over the span of a decade.  My current job is not very glamorous, but necessary.  I’ve been working on having the many photographs and slides taken to record this process scanned in order to integrate them with folders of digital pictures that already exist.  These must all be efficiently and correctly catalogued, then matched with the field notes and data that are meant to accompany them but which, to date, do not.  The project will evolve from there.

In an article draft that discusses the significance of this project, the author writes about the architectural features, understandings of settlement characteristics, archaeological signatures, function of these spaces, their assemblage and location in the valley, and so on.  All of this and more fuses together, cries out to us, draws us in, and helps us to reconstruct the ancient past.

That, at least, is the image that is brought to mind.  Would it surprise you to know that these are not ancient structures?  These houses are from the late 19th through 20th century.  Some have much earlier foundations.  Some look ancient, but all are fairly “recent,”  especially when compared to popular notions of archaeology.  That, however, does not change the fact that they are artifacts from the past.

We often don’t see yesterday as “past,” or “history.”  I’ve been mulling over what that means.  Is this because we humans see anything existing within our own lifetime as a work in progress, but view “the past” as something that is old, dead, and decayed?  Do we see our lives, (which, in actuality, means the time that has already passed…note the tense), as present?  Is this because we can “change” them?  Do we see them, from birth to death, as malleable, shapeable?  We say that we can “correct” past mistakes, “re-do” projects in an attempt to make them better, “become” something more than we “were.”  These statements reflect a belief system that promotes our personal past  as not “past/passed” at all.

The ongoing project at Lakka Skoutara suggests otherwise.  It is not uncommon for historians and anthropologists to conduct oral histories and write ethnographies to better understand the people around them. They are able to do this because the resources by which they do so, (people), exist in the present.  They study kinship cultures and local economies to enhance their work, for example.  These methods also work very well in Lakka Skoutara.  They are integral to the findings there, but are done by the archaeologists to supplement their work.  Because this area is rural, there is a dearth of official records of the daily activity of the people of Lakka Skoutara.  Yet people lived here, grew olives and grain, transported their goods to nearby ports, and contributed to the greater economy of this area.  They were active during German occupation.  Their movements reflected the changes of war, peace, and whatever else their environment brought to them.  It is not only their histories but also their material culture that speaks to all this.  What new insights does this evidence bring to understanding the evolution of Greek rural life?

This method of archaeology excites me.  The archaeology of the ancient is limited by nature.  Buildings and material culture from ancient times are coupled with the texts that exist, but the picture they paint is always incomplete.  There is simply too little there to help us to reconstruct the daily lives of the people to be satisfactory.  Granted, that also piques my curiosity and keeps me forever “digging” in whatever way I can to learn and discover more.  I love it.  But it does not offer the satisfaction that the project at Lakka Skoutara does.  The work at Lakka Skoutara incorporates an expanded, multi-dimensional approach that includes a sort of time-lapsed photography, oral histories, material culture, documents, and more.  It erases the tired old notion of archaeologists working in tombs and temple ruins and brings to light the realization that they also work at the intersection of past and present.  Without trying to make a political statement, the work at Lakka Skoutara will yield a wealth of heterogenous records describing the rural populace of this area.  Cities great and small exist in relation to each other and to the rural countryside, and vice versa.  Understanding that interaction leads to a more complex and, to my way of thinking, more satisfying understanding of the past.

This project propels the discipline of archaeology into refreshing new directions.  The work is not completely without precedent, but it is definitely avant-garde, especially in this specific region.  Of course, the implications of Lakka Skoutara are much more far-reaching that what I’ve inkled here, but hopefully they will get you thinking.  How fun to find that, right under our very noses, we have a rich, extant past to discover, decipher, observe, and record in much more complete ways than the ancients left for us!  I believe future historians will agree.

Flying Too Close to the Sun

I love the history of flight, from the mythical story of Icarus and Daedalus to when the Wright brothers soared to new heights at Kittyhawk, North Carolina.  I’ve visited that hallowed ground on many occasions.  Carved into the door that leads under one of the monuments there, you will find the most important moments in flight history recorded.  My favorite mile markers are the myth of Icarus and Daedelus, the conceptual work done by Leonardo D’ Vinci, the first hot air balloon flown by the Montgolfiers, and, of course, the flight at Kittyhawk.

My fellow interns and I, with the support of our advisor and others, are supposed to launch an on-line art exhibit within a couple of days.  I originally visualized the many projects we are undertaking in blueprint form in my mind.  I conceptualized a building made up of many rooms that acted as workshops.  In one, the on-line art exhibit, in another, scanning, cataloging and archiving slides that show the degradation of ruins over time, and so on.  I move from room to room depending on things like deadlines or availability of materials.  The more that I have worked on the on-line art exhibit, however, the more that concept has morphed from a blueprint into something else.  That’s where the history of flight comes in.

Many an educational soundtrack has begun with a statement something like,  “Since the dawn of time, humans have watched the birds of the air and dreamed of taking flight.”  Fulfilling this dream has taken a great deal of time and been accompanied by a multitude of errors, beginning with the mythical Icarus and Daedalus.  In an attempt to escape the island of Crete upon which they were imprisoned, Daedalus crafted wings from feathers and wax for himself and his son.  Inspired by the thrill of their cunning escape, and despite his father’s warnings, Icarus flew closer and closer to the sun.  The wax melted, and he plummeted to his death in the deep ocean below.

Leonardo did not rely on myths to create his flying machines.  Though only experimental, he explored many different means by which humans could take flight.  His designs reflect the earliest attempts at hot air balloons, helicipoters, human wings, and even aeroplanes of sorts.  His was certainly a more profound understanding of the realities of flight than the Greek tale offered.

Shortly thereafter, the Montgolfier family created the first hot air balloon.  Though it took people into the air, it could not soar like a bird, so the dream was only partially realized.  Finally, after much trial and error, the Wright brothers were able to lay claim to the most bird-like, working craft.

Creating an on-line exhibit follows in similar progression.  I can see the end product, can even see the steps that will help me and/or our group to achieve that end.  Because of this, I am usually able to move rather swiftly from design (Leonardo), to progressive step (Montgolfier), to prototype (Wright).  Rarely do I have to visit the earliest Greek stage which, more than anything else, is a reflection of their hopes and fears.

Daedalus feared for his impetuous son.  Often early attempts at anything are fraught with fear.  I have had them when it comes to dealing with computers.  There’s been no dearth in the number of people that have told me I cannot break the computer.  I believe them.  But I can lose data, thereby creating chaos out of order.  I have no desire to do that with my own information, let alone someone else’s.  Today I had to face that fear.

There are a series of essays on this fledgling on-line exhibit that needed an introduction.  I was tasked to write a draft and submit it to my peers for input.  In preparation, I visited the actual physical exhibit, revisited the artwork on the on-line site, and reread all the essays.  Like the author J. K. Rowling, I often write long hand using pen and paper.  It is cathartic, and I enjoy the process.  Sometimes I open up a simple computer program, write, and save.  Not this time.  I felt it was time to take flight.  I boldly entered our website and began to put thoughts to cyberpaper.  I was happy with the outcome.  The words conveyed the very thoughts and feelings I wanted them to.  Pleased to have been savvy enough to figure out how to traverse the sticky “web” and accomplish this task, I placed my cursor on the “Save and Return” button and watched every word immediately disappear into the irretrievable mists of cyber-ether.

Gone.

Like Icarus, my waxed wings melted and I plummeted into the sea.

My advisor was, as usual, most patient and helpful.  Despite his busy schedule, he, like I, excavated the website for my lost ruins, to no avail.

Enough time had passed that I could not remember the exact words that had flowed only a while before.  I attempted to reconstruct my thoughts, but they did not rival the beauty of that first set of wings.

Like D’ Vinci, though, I have learned from the trial of that experiment.  My ignominious defeat has served to help me progress, to better design, to come up with differing sets of ideas that will lead me to actually fly in the future.  At the end of this internship, I suspect I will have been able to present you with a prototype, no matter how crude.  I stated in my first blog that we would begin, and so we have.

Thanks to my patient peers, the “launch” of this on-line exhibit will look a great deal more like that windy day at Kittyhawk and much less like those wonderful old films of airplanes falling off of cliffs.  Make no mistake.  I will soar with the best of them.  Today just wasn’t that day.

“Outer” Spaces?

I’ve been asked to introduce myself.  I have no idea how to take 46 years and amalgamate them into something meaningful in a venue demanding brevity.  I’m practicing to be an historian, after all, and brevity is not central to that profession.

I didn’t start out as an historian.  I started out as an anthropologist.  That isn’t exactly true.  I, like you, started out as a child.  My upbringing had too much of an impression on my future career path for me to ignore it in this, my truncated autobiography.  It also helps to set up how my introduction ties into a blog about history interns and on-line museums, so I am compelled to mention it.  Intrigued yet?  Read on.

I grew up around scientists, test pilots, and astronauts.  That was my dad’s field, so that’s what I knew.  I not only watched the first, and subsequent, moon landings and jaunts into outer space, but was also privy to the preparation that took place to make them happen.  “Journeys.”  “Outer” space.  Important words that shaped my destiny.

I love journeys, trips, pilgrimages.  I love to seek out a destination, research it, and make preparations to travel to it by whatever means is available.  I care that I go through the process and arrive at my destination.  I care that, upon arrival, there is much to learn and explore.  In that vein, anthropology suited me.  It still does.

I was the director of a small but regionally significant museum for a short time early in my career.  I loved being the director of a destination, of my own little moon, if you will.  I worked hard to entice people to come, and they did.  I also loved the tangible, creative process of setting up displays to convey that bit of history that would most intrigue and inform the visitors.  They travelled from their world to mine.  My daily space was their “outer” space.  They explored and made discoveries.  The work was immensely satisfying.

This worldview makes it difficult for me to imagine a destination without envisioning the preparations and travel that take me there.  They are all integral to the whole.  I have as much difficulty creating a mental picture of a museum without walls.  Yet as a master’s level graduate student in history, I have been tasked to help create such a “space.”  My initial reaction is to ask whether this is possible.  Continuing with the cosmic metaphor, I feel that I have been asked to find a way to bring the moon to the earth.  If I am able, won’t those visiting have lost something without completing the journey that “should have” taken them there?

I found the beginnings of my answer in a speech given by John F. Kennedy to a university crowd in Houston on the 12 of September, 1962.  He said, “…all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and…must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.”  Creating an on-line art exhibit, a museum, and a blog, represents a new age of exploration for me, one that turns from the “outer” spaces of my world and life to the “inner” spaces of my computer and mind.  This journey is already creating difficulties as I move from macro to micro measurements, from hectares to gigabytes, from buildings to computers.

Computers move too quickly for me, so I will have to adjust my steps to keep up.  Sentiments concerning the speed at which change occurs are not unprecedented.  Kennedy, in the same speech, stated, “This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers.”  Laptops, in 1962?  No, Kennedy was referring to space travel.  He continued, “Surely the opening of vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.”  Kennedy was in the first stages of a pilgrimage.  His speech revealed that he had chosen a destination:  the moon.

I, too, have a new destination in mind.  It does not hang over the earth, caught in orbit, however.  It quite literally exists in my own, and my peers’, minds at present.  We will delve into the microcosm of cyberspace and experiment with its matter in an attempt to create a place that you find enticing.  I hope that asking you to accompany me on this trek will satisfy your need for exploration and discovery in the same way it does mine.  I am compelled to embark on this adventure for the same reasons that Kennedy urged the nation to go to the moon.  He said, “We choose to go to the moon…not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, …one we are unwilling to postpone….”  So let us begin.

Kathryn A. H. Nedegaard