ScottB's onMason

Can I use it?  Can I copy your notes on sources?  Where did you get this information??  I can not just say I used the National Park Service website as my source for information.  Deeper into the NPS site is info on soldier names, for example.  When I look closely I see the NPS says “the source for this data was General Index Cards into the Compiled Military Service Records“.  That would be a secondary source.  Or for regimental histories, can I quote Frederick Dyer’s Compendium of the War of the Rebellion?  I’m not sure.  Are Mr Dyer’s sources quoted?  Does he give credit to where his information comes from?  Unless the primary source of the material is provided, the student may not use that source.

Secondary Sources.  An example is when someone writes about someone or something else using primary sources.  Examples would be:

• A history textbook
• A journal or magazine article which explains or reviews previous discoveries
• A book about the effects of Vietnam

Topics we could research through secondary sources on soldiers in general:

• Changing attitudes, between when they joined to when they left
• Religion
• Diet – connection to illness
• Physical condition
• Recreation
• Clothing or lack thereof
• Weather

I won’t find information on my soldier’s boots but I could find information on the general state of boots at the time.

Gathering secondary sources into Zotero is very easy.  When I visit any page, the Zotero icon in my search bar does not always come up and I can not figure out why it sometimes does and sometimes does not.  But simply enough I can right click on any page, and below the cut and paste or back and reload options, a Zotero prompt is amongst the choices.

Is Zotero a verb yet?  Can I say I Zoteroed a page from encyclopediavirginia.com after I googled “civil war weather”.  I found this there:

“Meteorologically, the Civil War took place at the tail end of what is often termed the Little Ice Age, a period of general cooling and unpredictability that most scholars date from roughly 1310 to 1850. Despite what its name suggests, the Little Ice Age actually encompassed dramatic fluctuations in weather, with one year bringing an intensely cold winter and easterly winds, and the next heavy rains and raging heat.”

I Zoteroed a page from civilwar.com that told me this after googling recreational activities of civil war soldiers:

Free time was also spent in card games, reading, pitching horseshoes, or team sports such as the fledgling sport of baseball, a game which rapidly gained favor among northern troops. Rule booklets were widely distributed and the game soon became a favorite. Soldiers also played a form of football that appeared more like a huge brawl than the game we know today, and often resulted in broken noses and fractured limbs. Holidays were celebrated in camp with feasts, foot races, horse racing, music, boxing matches, and other contests. But while on active campaign, the soldiers were limited to writing, cleaning uniforms and equipment, and sleeping.

I find Zotero to be a really useful tool to catalog the sites I need for my research.

I really enjoyed this documentary on copyright infringement and sampling in the music industry.  My favorite anecdotal argument in favor of sampling was Walt Disney’s use famous fairy tales, fables and myths and creating hugely successful works of art from them.  I like a lot of mash-ups, house music, and other popular music that uses sampling.  I agree that it is an infringment when whole songs or melodies are used, but to take a small snippet of someone else’s work and put it into your own, I find it to be more of an homage to the other artist.  I suppose there needs to be a sampling percentage limit set on how much you can in your song but then the litigious repercussions would be even more outrageous.

Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod, Copyright Criminals (2009) (video – 56:29)

To Digitize or not to Digitize….that is the question.  Whether tis nobler to use analog and hear every sound in the symphony and risk losing the recording altogether after several hundred listens or break it down to 1’s and 0’s, lose some of the complete recording but have it forever (possible?).  Certain digitizations have proven to be almost more valuable than the originals: an original copy of Beowulf from the Middle Ages, which was covered by a paper, protective frame in the 19th century was digitized to discover words hidden by the frame providing the only extant record of certain Old English words.  Would they have ever been uncovered had they never been digitized?  Online resources are increasing the academic access to valuable documents, films, recordings, records never before seen.  Digitization allows the curious to examine something from across the planet at the click of a mouse that they may never have the access to in their lifetimes.  It permits a journalist in Massachusetts to consult a professor in Santa Barbara, and engineer in Berkeley, a Sun & Shadow Position Specialist in Barrie, Ontario, a scientist in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a forensic software programmer in Ashville, North Carolina regarding the backstory of a set of photos taken over 150 years ago.

But alas, I believe it was Abraham Lincoln who said, “don’t believe everything you read on the interwebs”.  I’m pretty sure he never said that.  He knew it was called the internet.  But seriously folks, how can we trust all that we see online when we are even given all that there is to find online?  My Google searches are tailored to me.  Through a series of algorithms Google decides what they think I want to find when I’m searching for stuff on the web.   If you and I put the same thing into the Google search bar, or Bing or Yahoo etc, our results will be drastically different.  This “filter bubble” is a contentious topic.  When I hit my return button, Google is searching hundreds of thousands of webpages for the frequency, accuracy, and commonality of what I’m looking for, based on my previous searches and my most popular websites.  When it finds a possible page I can use it runs a series of about 200 questions at it such as does the page have my search terms in its title? How often is my topic used on the page?  Are there synonyms for my search on this page?  And it does it all in the span of about .5 seconds!!  This is insane!!!

Off topic, my 5 week old son is now in an open crib instead of his Isolette.  No more feeding tubes, no more nasal canula.  No more tubes of any kind anymore.  He is still having apnea spells, reflux, and “de-sats,” which is when his red blood cell count desaturates to an uncomfortable level.  But he’ll be home soon enough.  His mom and dad think it’s only a matter of another week or two.  Yay!

Anyone else having trouble opening http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6116.pdf

George Karn.  Who are you?  Where are you from, when did you live and how did you die?  Is there anyone alive today who calls you a relative?  Or are you one of the many names of the many people who have walked this Earth and then pass, leaving little mark upon it?  I will find you.  I will recount your story of service and injury if possible, I will trace your ancestry to a modern man and tell him of your heroism.

The files provided will open some doors to your life story.  I hope to find others as well.  But is this merely Genealogy?  Where I trace your lineage through a family tree and account for names and names and names?  Will I discover the people and places you called family and home?  Or will I uncover your Biography; where I walk in your shoes and take years of my own life writing about yours?  Were you significant?  Did you cross paths with anyone who was? In which case I will write a Micro-history and write of your impact upon a bigger part of our Nation’s past based on the the accounts of your travels, service, combat injury, and origination. I will not fall into the traps of Taxonomy when I speak of you Mr. Karn. You are not just a hero, or a villain, victim or citizen at war.  You are all of those things and a farmer too.  A boy from Michigan.  A young man who agreed to fight for what he believed in.

Robert Kohn says we need more of a “social history of American soldiers”, we need to abandon stereotypes or else every soldier “will remain as anonymous as the unknown soldier at Arlington National Cemetery”.  And Jason Phillips states,

“Civil War soldiers were more than heroes, victims, villains, race warriors, and citizens. They were individuals from diverse places who formed enormous armies bursting with local colors and scents, myriad accents, and internal rivalries”.

I think this is a beautiful statement.  Generalizing pasteurizes our knowledge of individuals and therefore erases their uniqueness and individuality.  And who am I without that?

One more note on the reading, I especially liked Jill Lapore’s comparison of biographers and micro historians: the former treat its subject with love and admiration while the latter treats those they study unsympathetically as devices.

Having my first born son, a preemie, in the neonatal intensive care unit can be thoroughly distracting to academics, (don’t get me wrong, I would chop off my head for this little guy (he’s almost 5lbs!)) but my goal for this coming week is to manage my time more closely. Do the readings on Thursday, the day right after class so that the lesson is still fresh on mind and then I will be able to post my blogs by Friday. That way I have one less thing to try to get to in between hospital visits and work and other classes etc.

From the Cronon piece on “Getting Ready to do History”

Truths about historians:

• seek different perspectives
• know their sources.
• become immersed in the details of a specific period, not the big picture
• hate generalizations
• it’s about people
• look for documents or fragments thereof
• what have I got? What haven’t I got?
• they like complex answers
• different point of view
• storytelling/narrative

When reading historical documents –

1. sourcing
2. contextualize
3. close reading
4. using background knowledge
5. reading the silences
6. corroborating

I can relate most closely with the concept of reading the silences. In theatrical training we are taught to read between the lines; what is the underlying meaning behind the text? The subtext. What is being said by not being said? An example from Hamlet:

When asked by his mother Queen Gertrude, “Have you forgotten me?”

HAMLET

Hamlet’s subtext is, “you married my uncle, who killed my father; yes I’m sure I remember you”.

An historian reading not only what is written but what is not written will surely find more meaning than in the text alone.

I got on!  Excellent.

What I gleaned from the videos: there are lots and lots of abbreviations in the techno world, IP (Internet protocol) URL (Uniform Resource Locater) DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) ISP (internet service provider). Sharing is a core concept of the internet. The internet is a wire??! What?! Servers hold files. I am a client of a server who distributes usage of the wire (for a lot of dough$) Information is sent by packets.

I am the only person with my name, Scott Charles Blamphin so googling myself showed only a few surprises. I have a website already at www.scottcharles.com so all those pages came up. Several sites to purchase sheet music by my namesake and great, great, gre…(a few) grandfather Charles Blamphin came up.  For my acting career I have often used just Scott Charles so there are lots of different things from that that come up from just googling that.  One thing I did find interesting were videos of another actor named Scott Charles Jr. so that was pretty interesting.

I’m going to attach this link to my first post so I can always find it – http://rrchnm.org/robertson/hist390s14/