Note: This blog post previously appeared on the Teacher Programs blog. I am reposting it here to add to my personal “archive” of posts

The image above comes from a collection of photographs that we have here at the Newberry Library called the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Collection, or sometimes the Granger collection. The CB&Q railroad hired two photographers, Esther Bubley and Russell Lee, to document the influence of the railroad on daily life in the Midwest

Bubley and Lee didn’t stop at taking pictures of train stations and cars (which they did, and to great effect), but they took pictures of the places that the railroad made possible, places like Chicago. This particular image depicts Michigan Avenue at night. You can see the lit up signs and the blur of traffic. The image makes Chicago seem equally exciting and ominious. The signal light of the Palmolive Building sits in the distance like a sentry or watchman, scanning the night horizon. Life moves quickly in the city depicted in this image, yet people are largely obscured and unintelligible in their backlit windows.

We featured this item in our most recent document packet. The packet coincided with the TAS seminar on Chicago literature, titled “Chicago Defined: Space and Place, Homes and Journeys” and led by Bill Savage from Northwestern University. The seminar intended to explore how texts like short stories and poem, but also maps and photographs, construct our notion of Chicago as a place

For an example of how space is contructed, and the meaning of that space can change, it is interesting to compare the night time image of the city to the one above. We can see that the same section of the city is being depicted (note the Baker Boy Crackers sign in both), and yet these two images convery very different impressions of the city. In this second image, we no longer are confronted with a potentially ominous city. Instead, we see people celebrating in a parade. The city becomes a space for communal life and celebration.

Yet just as the night time image contained a contradiction, so does this image. Yes, people are present in this day-time image, and present en masse, but the city dwarfs them, reducing each individual to a speck, looming over their social activities.

These are just some of the interesting questions that primary sources like these can raise. If you want to see more images from the CB&Q photograph collection, you can visit our online exhibit.

When men were all asleep the snow came flying,

In large white flakes falling on the city brown,

Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,

Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;

Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;

Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:

Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;

Hiding difference, making unevenness even,

Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.

All night it fell, and when full inches seven

It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,

The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;

And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness

Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:

The eye marvelled—marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;

The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;

No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,

And the busy morning cries came thin and spare.

Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling,

They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze

Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;

Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees;

Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder,

‘O look at the trees!’ they cried, ‘O look at the trees!’

With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder,

Following along the white deserted way,

A country company long dispersed asunder:

When now already the sun, in pale display

Standing by Paul’s high dome, spread forth below

His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day.

For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;

And trains of sombre men, past tale of number,

Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:

But even for them awhile no cares encumber

Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,

The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber

At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.

 

A few years ago I got really interested in old computers, particularly old mobile computers. I ended up buying on Ebay a few old models including a Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 and an Epson HX-20. Both have tape drives–the TRS-80 uses normal cassettes with an external cassette player (I’ll take a picture of the whole set up later) whereas the Epson has a tiny built in micro-cassette drive. I have tapes for both but never really used them. I wrote a few Basic programs for the TRS-80 in BASIC and used it’s primitive word processor (journalists used this computer for writing “on-to go”)

I also have in my closet the Apple IIc that my parent bought for me when I was 5 or 6. Thsi has a built in 5.25 drive. I have old software for it but haven’t tried using it in years. I will fire it up tonight and see if it still works!

I had seen mention made of this essay about Pulp’s song “Common People” made on Twitter today.Tim Carmody responded to the original blog post:

The anger and honesty in Pulp’s “Common People” comes from a heady mixture of self-conflict and nostalgia.

This turned my mind immediately from “Common People” to the Pulp song that I love even more, which is “The Trees” from We Love Life. I like that in “The Trees” the problem of self-conflict, or inner divisions turns from being an internal, personal problem and becomes an external, ecological problem.

In the song, the singer sings:

Oh, yeah the trees, those useless the trees
produce the air that I am breathing
Oh yeah the trees, those useless trees
They never said that you were leaving

The singer basically blames the trees for not being more emotionally attuned to his needs, for being hostile to his emotional life. Of course, the irony is that the trees are absolutely essential to his life. They sustain the world, but are useless for sustaining the singer’s world

What I find really interesting about this ironic contradiction is that the singer isn’t projecting onto the trees, or anthropomorphizing them. Similarly the pathetic fallacy is not at work here (“According to Ruskin, grief has so affected this speaker’s mind, so distorted his vision of the world, that he attributes to the foam the characteristics of a living being”). The trees really are hostile to the singer’s emotional demand; his emotional life has no home in the natural world and is at odds with it. The division and contradiction that lead to grief and anger and alienation are not self-produced or by-products of some off-kilter world, but are, in fact, constitutive of the world itself.

During today’s LEEP on-campus session, we worked on installing the Greenstone program onto a publicly accessible web server which includes our own running instance of Apache to configure to our heart’s content. Greenstone is a funky platform that has developed over the course of twenty or so years. It includes a series of modules (called macros) that all work together to build collections and create interfaces. Getting Greenstone up and running basically involved creating a space for it on the webserver, getting the package, unpacking the package and compiling the code

I’m making it sound easy-breazy, which it was, with a little bit of hand-holding. The end result is a public-facing collection building and collection presenting tool, which you can see at http://classrm01.lis.illinois.edu:9001/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.cgi.

You can see that the default configuration and style is pretty terrible. The instructor keeps tellings us to ignore the style, but the wavy green lines kind of give me a headache. Of the collections listed, I have created two of them, which were really nothing more than experiments. For the first one–pictured below–I took a few items from the Beloved and Gothic primary source packet that I wrote about last week, and added a few of the items. Greenstone lets you add custom metadata to each record, which I did to help create nice browsing and search capabilities. I also heavily edited the results page (which is the image below) to make it look nicer and to present information in a cleaner way. The link to search the Newberry Catalog was something of my own devising, which entails nothing more that passing the title as an encoded text string to the catalog.

The Anti-Slavery Almanac = The%20American%20Anti-Slavery%20Almanac

The second example (http://classrm01.lis.illinois.edu:9001/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.cgi?site=localhost&a=p&p=about&c=estepno2&l=en&w=utf-8) was less successful because I was trying to harvest metadata that is embedded in simple HTML pages. The pages were created from notes that I took at the American Medical Association’s archive a few years ago about the quack doctor, William Estep. I did, however, do some pretty extensive CSS customizations, as seen below. I’m trying to get a Greenstone collection to look as much like a “modern” webpage as I can. Seems like a worthy task.

Since I’m planning to wrap up my MLIS degree in December, I had my official “last on-campus” session for my program. The LEEP program, which is an online, distance learning program, requires that you attend an on-campus day that is usually scheduled mid-way through the semester. With the exception of one semester when on-campus fell on my wife’s due date, I have been down the Urbana-Champaign six times now, not including a trip that my wife and I took to scope the joint out

Leaving this afternoon, I felt a sense of finality and was very aware that “this is the last time I’ll ride the bus” and “this is the last time I’ll see the Blind Pig.” Whether or not this maudlin sentimentality reflects reality or not, I definitely felt a need to process the occasion as marking the end of something

As I drove home, I thought more about what was coming to an end. It sounds ridiculous to say, “My young adulthood,” but that is what I settled on. Or, more to the point, my post-under graduate life; my life of questing after “the thing that I will become.” Not that I have become that thing (and what that thing is, is still highly fluid), but certainly my days of going to school to find out are coming to a close. I also realized that I started the MA at CU-Boulder a little over ten years ago last month. I’m not sure that I could have traced my path from there to here ten years ago, and I’m not I can really do it now, either.

William Still. The Underground Railroad. Newberry Library. H 5832 .839

The image above comes from a collection of stories about the Underground Railroad published in 1872. William Still, the book’s editor, was a prominent African-American abolitionist and organizer of the Underground Railroad. He compiled the stories in this volume to commemorate the deeds of the slaves and Railroad organizers who aided their search for freedom.

I selected this image and a few passages of text that accompany it for a document packet that myself and a collaborator created at work. For the last year, we have been creating these packets for teachers to help expose the Newberry’s collections to them by connecting items like this to the large themes of a particular professional development seminar. In this case, the seminar leader chose to focus on the Gothic conventions that Toni Morrison employs in Beloved to depict the harsh violence and repression of the memory of that violence that has marked the history of slavery.

We present a series of questions both about the large themes that run through the packet, but also about each particular item in the packet. The questions tend to be stated plainly enough that a teacher could feasibly place them in front of high school students and generate discussion. At the same time, the questions allow us to communicate to the reader of the packet what the document is about and why the person selecting it things it is significant. The challenge for me, having never been a secondary teacher, is to strike the right tone and to avoid asking leading questions.

After the questions, we present the selected document with a caption at the top. In the case of the image of Henry Box Brown, I selected the image and on a second page included two passages from the narrative that Still includes in the book. I was particularly interested in a brief description of one of the members Underground Railroad going to pick up the box supposedly containing Brown. The passage is crafted to convey suspense, and a sense of dread. In particular, the man fervently believes that he smell’s the stench of death hanging over the box, which ends up not containing Brown at all.

The second passage describes the scene during which the crate containing Brown is unpacked and the onlookers stand by in suspense. Here I foucsed on a very simple statement that “The onlookers would never forget that moment” and was interested in how the Gothic effects of suspense and horror helped to make the scene memorable. Or, put another way, the onlookers would never forget their encounter with the Gothic, and, by extension, neither would the reader.

The point of the packet, then, was to find documents where Gothic conventions, which even by the early 19th century had become easy targets for burlesque, provide a range of tools for affecting the reader’s or onlooker’s emotional response to an event, and thus their remembering of that event

I created this presentation about Zotero for work. There isn’t much commentary, and the slides are intentionally very spartan (which I tend to prefer when it comes to slides). Nonetheless, I thought it might be useful to throw up the slides as they are hosted on Google Docs.

I am planning to present these a group of undergraduate students who are participating in a semester long course at the Newberry Library, which involves a substantial amount of research and writing. For the work that I have done helping to create document packets for teachers who participate in our teacher programs, I have found Zotero to be both a helpful information management tool, but also a collaborative tool as well. I love that Zotero allows not only local access to your research, but also provides an easy (albeit limited) way to share your research with others on the web.

I really hope to learn more about the Zotero api, so that I can do more with extracting information from the Zotero database and manipulating, especially for presentation on the web.

Another thing that I’m interested in exploring at work is finding ways to produce documents in XML and import them into InDesign. The graphic designer uses InDesign for all of our in-house publications. It would be fantastic to be able to have templates ready-to-hand and import marked up documents into those templates.

The two main obstacles that I feel that I’m facing right now are getting a better handle on XML and figuring out how to get clean, validated XML (or really, from where). Since an XML schema can be anything, really, it is a bit hard to know where to start when one is starting from scratch (or should I be starting from scratch?). The issue of creating the XML is complicated by the fact that you simply can’t expect everyone to learn about the rudiments of XML. Also, I can’t decide how extensible and scalable the solution that I come up with needs to be.

My first obvious thought is to use Access to create a relational database to manage and create documents in XML. The nice thing is that it gives me more control over how users input information and how its formatted. I can basically hide much of the underpinnings and working of the format. Of course, this could have obvious disadvantages too. The bad things include the fact that some people find Access off-putting, that it requires figuring out a relational database model for the documents, and it needs to flexible enough to accommodate variation and change.

Just another project that I hope to spend some time thinking about in the coming months.

I love learning about ways to make work more efficient, and by making it more efficient it becomes more enjoyment. Of course, the reward of enjoyment often doesn’t come until hours of frustration. But, when you finally figure out how streamline a process that you perform over and over again, the results can be very satisfying.

At work, myself and others have been attempting to do online collaborative research using Zotero, a citation management database that lives in the browser as a Firebox plug in. Zotero is great, particuarly since it is pretty smart about screen scraping catalogs. Not retyping info that has already carefully been typed, ftw!

One thing that Zotero is not as good at, in my opinion, is managing large collections of external files. Really I only have had a taste of this, and, in all fairness, much of the tedium and frustration has to do with the convoluted work flow involved in retrieving files, renaming them in a sensible way, putting them somewhere that is at least as accessible as Zotero (which has a nice syncing capability).

<pThis problem of file management really hit home this weekend and today after having two conversations with former grad school colleagues who are working on dissertations (they're former, because I decided not to do down that road). Both of them have taken research trips in the last year and both are trying to work through mountains of data collected from these trips, particularly photographs

In our own small way, my department has had to deal with the problems associated with using small digital cameras to take on-fly research and reference images. It can be quite time consuming even trying to process and organize 40 or 50 images of objects that you have taken, much less 100s (or even 1000s). A colleague at work mentioned this interesting talk given by Shane Landrum, entitled “Camera, Laptop, and What Else”. The only unfortunate thing, from my perspective is that the article is very Mac centric, and that he doesn’t seem to share his shell scripts (just as a jumping off point).

Regardless, this article does begin to point at just a few of the ways that conducting research with reference images could be made easier and more efficient. I am hoping to experiment a bit in the next few months and see which processes and software seem to work the best. I have even thought about conducting some information surveys among the fellows that flood in the Newberry every year, each one facing the same problem, I’m sure.