Archive for the ‘Public History’ Category
Genealogy and history: love & hate
Boxes galore My hate story Recently I was talking about the main duties of the student archives technician at the National Archives, and it lead me into a tangent about perceptions of archives and the public’s idea that digitization is some panacea for records management, and an easy fix. What I didn’t get to are [...]
March 25th, 2012In which discussing my job becomes instead a tangent on why we cannot digitize everything
Old court dockets, relative to my hand. (Basically, they’re enormous!) I work part-time as an Archives Technician at the National Archives at Atlanta. During those days, half of my time is spent in the public area, meaning I am either in the research room assisting genealogists or in the textual research room observing and assisting [...]
March 24th, 2012My life is richer, simply because I asked
Subtitle: An oral history project, incredible families, much talk on adoption, China, love, and family, and how I found a title for this project Last January, I was struck with an idea for a project. I had read a book about a generation of Chinese girls who had been adopted into families worldwide, with a [...]
February 29th, 2012Where the Quilt is kept
Inside the NAMES Project Foundation headquarters, where the AIDS Memorial Quilt is stored: This corner is for quilt panels that have not yet been combined with others to make the enormous quilt squares (composed of eight panels, each of which is 3 feet by 6 feet). The squares are about as tall, when complete, as [...]
January 31st, 2012“In Small Things Forgotten”
The "aesthetic of the ugly" has persisted with the folk culture of making ugly-face pottery. Man, archeologists love them some old pottery, too. “Some things in our lives are so pervasive, that we give them little thought. A ballpoint pen, for example, or a rubberband. The coffee filter gets little consideration too.” It is a [...]
December 22nd, 2011The craft and character of oral history
Final presentations of our oral history projects, in this last week of fall semester My oral history class ended today, with the last batch of final presentations by my classmates. I want to remember this class forever. It was inspirational to listen to my classmates over the semester, to hear their tales from the field [...]
December 1st, 2011On people, or: “I didn’t want to start with an issue”
Peter Hessler, former English teacher in China and author of several books on Chinese life and people, both historical and modern, is a 2011 MacArthur Fellow and long-form journalist. In his interview in reception of his prize, he spoke on what it is to write about China and Chinese life, to him: “There’s always been [...]
November 26th, 2011Oral history in practice: find the people, and a project becomes real
Lots of kiddos at Best International School in Zhengzhou, China, May 2007 I’ve started putting into practice the things that up until this point in my oral history class have only been discussed, that existed only in theory, as things we would eventually have to do. I’ve begun the process of cold-calling a list of [...]
October 5th, 2011Telling stories without paper: human voices and created objects
Incidentally, the third class I’m taking this semester is Exhibit Planning and Production, and we are designing an exhibit to go in cases like this one, in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, in their E Terminal. Without realizing it earlier, this semester I am in two courses that I have been extremely excited to take, and that [...]
August 31st, 2011Artistry in the world, in our work, in ourselves
“William Morris told us to cease thinking of art as the rarefied expression of a mystically talented few, or as the peculiar possession of rich men. He argued that work is the mother of art, directing our study to carpets as well as paintings, axes as well as statues, and he bade us consider our [...]
August 28th, 2011