Blogging the Archives

A vital interest of mine is access to archives. I've been interested in the possibilities inherent in the web and network for increasing access to archives and enabling a greater number of non-academics to browse, organize and surface archive holdings. One of the most significant ways of exposing the holdings of an archives is blogging the contents.

We really haven't got there yet, but I've noticed a small trend, which I hope signifies the beginning of exponential growth, of people blogging artifacts. I do not remember the first site I came across where a blogger was posting pictures of artifacts, usually photographs from an online catalog of a museum, but here are some recent finds.

Illustration Art

All Edges Gilt

If we could just get every artifact in the world's museums and archives photographed or scanned and online, give the tools to blog the contents to millions of ordinary people interested in telling the stories of these cultural objects, think of how rich that would be. I don't know if people will do this, but I do know that ordinary people have a lot to contribute. Academics cannot know everything, they are an isolated individual, no matter how expert they are, and there is a very Long Tail out there of family members, amateur historians, hobbyists and who knows who that know something about cultural and historic artifacts. Maybe they will be willing to contribute. It will likely be only two percent, like Wikipedia authors, but that small percentage can do a lot of good.

As an aside, author and developer Liam Quin has a site, fromoldbooks.org which has great potential to provide fodder for bloggers. The interface to this digital archive of old book scans is easier to use and better than ones I've seen institutions deploy.

I wonder, also, if this phenomena is not somehow similar to the Cinematheque, not just an archive, but concerned that people actually view or interact with the artifacts.

Update: Shorpy is a commercial site, which shows  how successful blogging the archives can be. The site appears to have developed a following, with, I imagine, readers checking in each day to see what new photographs are posted. The blogger acts as curator by selecting images that will be of interest to the readers. Arranging them into albums, possibly by narrative (using Tabloo would be a good way to achieve this).

This fits exactly with the idea of people being able to easily find images of their local area in the past and the idea of "blogging the archives" at its most simplest and effective. The power of simply posting images and their captions, without any commentary, is surprising. It is encouraging to see people are interested and willing to participate in the interpreation and "unpuzzling" of old photographs. One of the pleasures of old photographs is rediscovering what lies behind the mysteries the images present.

Fresh or Cooked?

In recent years tomato sauce was in the nutrition news. It turns out that cooking tomatoes makes Lycopene more available than in fresh tomatoes.

This went against the prevailing grain of nutritional thinking, which said that fresh was always better. Nutritionists argued that cooking reduced the amount of vitamins in food. They backed this up with scientific studies showing that cooking vegetables (or fruits like tomatoes) does reduce the amount of vitamins. An obsession developed over "keeping as much of the vitamins" in your food as possible. Steaming was touted as a way to avoid "losing" the vitamins into the cooking water. The typical English way of preparing vegetables was dammed as washing away nutrition. New technologies were advanced in an attempt to retain as much of the nutrients (known ones) as possible. Some radical eaters adopted entirely raw diets hoping to not lose a single molecule of nutrition. The trouble with this view, was that it overlooks the reality cooking can make certain nutrients available that are not available in fresh foods.

Why bring this up? I've been reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (well, actually I read it in two days and lent it out and haven't seen it since). I had thought of this before reading his book, but I was reminded of this "paper vs. plastic" debate brought about by nutritionism and of the importance of culture to eating. The question is, how do we decide what to eat, fresh or cooked? It seems to me that food culture provides the answer to this question. A cuisine or food way develops over a long period of time to satisfy the nutritional requirements, the survival, of a people. Embodied in this food way must be the right balance between fresh and cooked.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the cooking and crushing involved in the canning process makes the Lycopene in tomatoes more available than fresh, since canned crushed tomatoes are frequently the base of pasta sauces. Because Lycopene is fat-soluble, serving cooked and crushed tomatoes in an oil-rich sauce is thought to make the nutrient more available.

If we look at Italian cuisine, we are probably going to find an optimal balance of fresh versus cooked tomatoes, otherwise the people eating according to the Italian food ways would likely be very sick. That the cuisine offers a lot of cooked tomato sauces attests to the nutritional value of sometimes cooking away those vitamins. Here is a food way that encapsulates nutritional knowledge that food science took centuries to get around to counting and measuring. Ignoring the wisdom inherent in Italian food ways is another example of nutritionism and the reductionist view of nutrition, which only considers the parts we can count and measure. It ignores what our senses, our taste and smell can tell us.

The reality is that cooking foods makes available nutritional elements unavailable in fresh food, and very like fresh food contains higher levels of other nutritional elements than after cooking. The right answer is a balance between them. We really do not know yet what nutrients are made more available by cooking, combining or processing foods. Food traditions are a good way to make the decision, given that nutritional science is still in its infancy. We can make use of hundreds or thousands of years of food tradition to answer this vexing question: fresh or cooked?

The Growing Importance of Folklore

With publication of Pollan's In Defense of Food, I think we are seeing the emergence of folklore into the mainstream. Most people think folklore is something they have very little in common with. It is old fashioned music or people dancing around in costumes they wore hundreds of years ago. People feel it has very little relation to their lives. They also believe that we live in a scientific, rational world and somehow folklore does not belong. There is also an association between myth, legend and folklore as meaning fraudulent, fantasy, lies. This is a problem of perception and mis-perception, which is not new. Shortly after becoming literate, the Greeks abandoned and ridiculed their own folklore, the "myths" we read about today.

For a new perspective on what I call "folk knowledge" or what might be categorized as "folk culture" instead of folklore, since it is more correct and encompassing, we need only look to authors like Adrienne Mayor. Through long, independent research, she discovered that the ancient Greek myths about monsters were actually stories about people finding beds of fossilized bones of ancient creatures. These "geomyths" as they are called convey, real, true, factual information and represent a kind of scientific method even preliterate people engaged in, despite conveying them in a dramatic way.

In Pollan's book, food culture or food ways, as a folklorist would call them, represents knowledge that the best scientific nutritionists failed to see, take advantage of and learn from. The nutritional systems which evolved out of thousands of years of trial and error passed down by mothers through the generations, amounted to a better set of food choices than did a hundred years of scientific rational nutritionism.

In books like Blink, Albion's Seed and Stuff of Thought, we are beginning to see how our unconscious knowledge and folk knowledge shapes our decisions and opinions, sometimes without our knowledge, absorbed by osmosis through our culture. Frequently, this knowledge proves more accurate and useful than scientific rational knowledge, especially when the science is new, incomplete and arrogant, such as nutritional science.

If you don't think you participate in folklore or that it has a place in the modern world, take a look at Sadobabies, a film about urban homeless kids. Or Music District, a film about urban music. Everyone creates folklore, everyone lives in a folk culture, in reality, many folk cultures, for each folk way is a folk culture, you probably practice a food way, a work way, a everything way. You also build new ways out of old ones, from both things learned from your parents and neighbors and scraps of commercial culture. Rap is a folk culture. Commercial rap feeds into rap, and the folk culture cycle goes on. At work, if you are a programmer, you probably learned many things that are not in books on coding. This is "programmer lore" and is a folk culture and represents folk culture, which shapes the software we use in daily life, that controls elevators and space shuttles. If you don't think folklore affects your life, think again the next time you're riding an elevator.

God's Peculiar People

I've been reading Elaine Lawless's book, God's Peculiar People, which arrived here in good condition today. She explains how Pentecostals are in daily contact with the paranormal. They keep one foot in the spirit world, to place it in context with the notions of pre-literate cultures. The "willfulness principle" was observed by Lawless operating in these communities that held strong beliefs in the power of "witches" to influence events. The willfulness principle was coined by Barber and Barber to explain the notion that in pre-literate cultures, natural effects have supernatural causes, principally the actions of willful spirits. It is worth noting that in Miyazaki's films (Spirited Away and My Friend Totoro notably) there exists the same close association between the natural world and the spirit world Lawless discovered in her observations of Pentecostals. His films express this notion of a spirit world parallel to and mirroring the natural world, which is a traditional feature of Japanese culture, arising from the pre-literate period in which the willfulness principle operated. It is not dissimilar to the attitudes of Pentecostals who reject the natural world to keep one foot in the spirit world accompanying the natural.

This "abandonment of the world" appears similar to Zen's entreaty to abandon worldly things as causes of suffering, and entry into a spirit world of meditation, which can be likened to the "unspeakable joy" that Pentecostals feel upon receiving the "holy ghost" and their general happiness derived from their faith. The levels of blessing Pentecostals strive for seem to echo the levels of attainment in zen.

(In addition to Elaine's book, you can watch Joy Unspeakable on the Folkstreams website).

Most people don't understand Americans ...

"Most people don't understand Americans because they don't know how frightening it had been to leave home completely and to pull up your roots and face the wilderness." -- Alan Lomax

I was startled by how Alan Lomax in the film Appalachian Journeys anticipates David Hackett Fischer's findings in Albion's Seed, discovering evidence of British folkways transplanted to America. Speaking of the poetry and song of the Scots-Irish, Lomax observes "This 70,000 square miles of beautiful tangled green hills allowed this British tradition time to reshape itself ... when it was being cut to pieces by the industrialization of Great Britain, it was finding a new home here ... taking on a new life ... a life out of the corn fields, the feuds and the whisky stills..." Americans were shaped by the unique environment of a new land, but they were were also shaped by the persistence of old world culture.

Although, the unique flora and fauna of America, such as the poisonous snakes, "which few Britains had ever seen," shaped American identity and expression, "much also was carried over from Great Britain like this jumping jack and its jigging step" which was still popular in English pubs as well as the Appalachians when the film was made. Lomax makes many of the same connections between Great Britain and America made in Albion's Seed.

You can see the film Appalachian Journey on the Folkstreams.net website.

Citizendium: Multiple Truths Welcome?

I've been reading the Citizendium's approach to governing what goes into their content. This new attempt at a wiki encyclopedia favors an approach with less rules, greater oversight and tries to accommodate a multiplicity of views on truth.

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Neutrality_Policy

I wish they would not call it a neutrality policy. I strongly dislike the oxymoronic "neutral point of view."

I don't know how far the Citizendium will go, but I do believe multiple truths should be represented transparently. There is no reason not to accommodate multiple truths and no reason not to build information systems capable of accommodating multiple truths.

Contrary to popular belief, there does exist more than more than one truth. In genealogy, for example, the idea of multiple truths is necessary, since the same individual is frequently claimed by more than one family. Information about the past is sketchy and subject to interpretation. When the first online genealogies were being discussed on the GenWeb mailing list, it was ultimately concluded that there should not be a single unified global genealogy, since the "facts" could never be reconciled perfectly. There would by necessity be a need for representing multiple truths, based upon facts weighted by how much confidence we have in the sources (familiar to anyone who sources their genealogy).

Moreover, the truths we hold in our minds are imperfect, and emerge from our folk knowledge, through narrative and are based upon assumptions, which generally are made not on evidence (and probably can never be made upon anything else), but on the folk knowledge we absorb from our surroundings.

An absolute truth may exist and be determined by the physical universe, but there are many questions that arise about the human mind, society and the constructions of the human mind, which society is an example, which have no physical existence at all and it may never be able to determine what is true. There is also the nature of our knowledge existing only as sense perceptions, which makes science a kind of honorable delusion, as accurate as we can determine to agree on shared descriptions of phenomena. We have a reasonable idea of what we know is true or not through careful scientific inquiry, assisted by not guaranteed by reason, but in the end the only thing we know is: No one truly knows anything.

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

Last year I read Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, David Hackett Fischer for the first time, after seeing him on CSPAN BookTV several times and hearing a lot about the book. I was a rewarding experience and opened my eyes to many things and answered many questions. I can't say more right now, but this is an important book, perhaps one of the most important books you will ever read. It can change you mind about a lot of things.

He will open your eyes to the folk culture that informs our supposedly rational opinions and decisions, which amounts to a kind of folk knowledge that everyone absorbs by osmosis from their parents, neighbors, community and surrounding culture growing up. What is very striking, and counter intuitive for many rationalists, is how the behavior of people is shown to be determined more by a persistence of culture than by a framework of social or ideological forces acting on them in their own time. Or at least the culture frames the debates and decisions they make, the sides they take in culture wars. A good example is the consistent adherence to royalist sentiments in the ancient kingdom of Mercia to the later periods of conflict over hundreds of years. The social and political divides in England remained in place for hundreds of years.

Another example is how similar cultures in colonial America mirrored those in locations where migrations occurred. It seems obvious and simple that people would bring their culture with them, but historians have frequently overlooked the obvious and instead invented theories explaining American cultures as being the result of forces unique to the American experience, when they simply originated in the cultures where people migrated from.

Much of Albion is concerned with the persistence of culture.