PBS

I am home to a slightly colder house without my cat. He was my study buddy and the best companion a college student could ask for - lapwarmer, purrmonster, and all-round best cat ever.

That aside, I am glad to be back to my coffee machine, desk chair, and slightly crazy basement. Today I have begun to select certain items to take with me to my internship. The first day of the internship was yesterday, and it defied and lambasted all of my expectations. Despite parking difficulty, I found myself with coffee and a pass to PBS that proudly displays my name in Comic Sans. My workspace is generous, with my own desk, scanner, and a CPU with somewhat ambivalent USB ports. My desk is located in the self-proclaimed 'nerd floor'. Sure enough, everyone seems to have a few Adipose or Sesame Street characters in their cubicle, and I've decided to bring in my own companions to occupy my workspace. Companions to be announced.

The work given to me is a good start for me, and my supervisor has truly chosen a good starting point for me. I'm performing a survey of a pile of papers to see what we have digitized and what we don't. It's a good introduction to the terminology and types of materials I will be working with for the next three months, and I'm taking the opportunity to create a few lists and databases of my own on my iPad. Each show has a four-letter code, so later on when I am working on the project in earnest I'll have a reference table for the codes and can make some notes for my reports. This first stage of the project is interesting to me as I'm beginning to familiarize myself with the area and subject matter, but it isn't so overwhelming that I feel intimidated. Rather it's measurable and I've already made some progress on my first day. The task is also something I can work into a routine so I can listen to a podcast or music (yesterday was Ramones, Operation Ivy, and Thrilling Adventure Hour, with TechStuff working its way in at the end). I enjoy learning about something without feeling stupid first - in the past, most of my first tasks have made me feel inadequate rather than posing a challenge that I am excited to meet.

In short, I really enjoy PBS so far. It feels engaging without overwhelming. Knowing that I have to take a left at Big Bird to get to my desk (and if I see Clifford the Big Red Dog I've gone to far) amuse me to no end, and to some extent the familiarity is comforting.

Conundrums

One of my most persistent questions is how to create an organization and classification system for these slides once they have been scanned and are on the computer. Many of the slides were not imported in chronological order, and many of the slides were mixed up over the last 60 years. My grandfather has written on some of the slides, giving the year and/or event it portrays, but many of them are unmarked.

With the trip to the Philippines, there are four different types of materials:

1. Postcards (front & back)
2. Pictures
3. Newspaper clippings
4. Spiral notebooks, used for grandpa's daily journals

Given these four formats, having a naming system is also problematic. As I don't know the specific dates for most of the pictures but rather I do know the general month, I have a few different options. The postcards are all dated and many of them have visible postmarks. In the case of a postcard, the naming system is relatively easy.

PC19890914KLB.jpg

In short, it's a postcard (PC) dated Sept 14th, 1989 and sent from Kalibo.

If I'm unsure about the date of a slide it would look like this:

SL19570000AK.jpg

Similarly, it's a slide (SL) dated 1957 with no further dates and it is in Arkansas. Here's where the trouble begins. For the Philippines project, the regions and cities are more important than simply stating 'Western Visayas'. These slides should be classified with Kalibo, General Santos City, Koronadal, and so on. For the family pictures taken stateside, I will be adding the states to the filename and both city and state in the notes. It's helpful that the Philippines and the stateside pictures don't overlap, otherwise I'd be in a pickle. However this still troubles me. I feel that if I'm going to create a system for their filenames it should be universal, which means finding codes for each geographical area.

I'm unfamiliar with any classification system that isn't MARC/AACR3, so I'm hesitant to dedicate a significant amount of time to cataloging every slide when there may be a better one out there for this project. In the meantime I am adding the years and notes on the physical slide to the iPhoto info area and beginning a database of people mentioned and locations in which they appeared.

Essentially I'm troubled by my inexperience. I'm reminded of the advice given to me by some of the archivists at the Meetup I attend: "Just do it. You'll learn more from doing it than anything else. Just do it." Therefore I am here in Kansas, Nikeing it up.

Back: Craig, Jeanine, Bruce
Front: Bill, Sherryl, Marjorie

The house is silent...

The cousins left yesterday, which means that the house is now quiet and I can concentrate on the project. Friday I visited the library here in Iola, and I have a few things to say about it.

1. This library is one of the most lovely libraries I've seen. It beats mine in Maryland by a long shot.
2. Their librarians are kind, approachable, and they take advantage of teaching opportunities (more on that later).
3. The area for genealogists is extremely well laid out and conducive to study.

I stepped in and wandered around a bit to get my bearings. The purpose of my visit was twofold. First, to locate said library and secondofly to inquire after back issues of the Iola Register. While grandma kept all the newspaper articles that make mention of their travels to the Philippines, there aren't any dates on them and I'd like to get proper full citations for the archive.

Having found the genealogy room, I stared balefully at the microfiche machine upon which I could read the Iola Register archive. My old ignored near-nemesis. This was the machine that in libraries growing up I was "too young" to use and when I got older I foolishly assumed that I couldn't use them for anything useful anyway. Now that I am going into a field where knowledge of... shall we say 'older technology' is useful, I recognize that I need to get along with microfiche and learn to be friends. It's important to note now that as a piece of older technology, microfiche is a little old-fashioned (though not as exclusive as the card catalog). The machine in the library was particularly old-fashioned as it is a small town midwestern machine, so I couldn't just walk up and introduce myself.

The librarian who helped me was kind and correctly assumed that I didn't know how to use the microfiche machine. She showed me how to roll the film and maneuver the screen as well as print off anything I found before she retreated into the other dimension where all librarians reside when they head back to the circulation desk. Once introduced, Mademoiselle Microfiche and I got along quite well. In fact I really enjoyed getting to know her and I think we'll be friends.

Pictures to follow.

[edit 1/7 11:33am: PICTURES ADDED YAY!]

Day the Second

Yesterday I imported about 400 slides and began to take notes. Bill came down for a few hours to give names and places so I could begin tagging the faces and geography. There were, it appears, several unphotographed hilarious incidents that I'll be relating elsewhere, but the stories are either typed up or recorded in Garageband. Bill & Marjorie's memory of the trip ('88-89) are impressively vivid and they remember many details as well as the finer points of the areas.

So their mission was this: to travel to Panay and help the farmers set up co-ops in order to sell their goods together rather than working as individuals. This involved the farmers buying shares and using the pooled funds to purchase things like generators and ice machines (for the fish farmers), locations, and other useful items in order to get their crops out to more buyers. These co-ops were directed by an elected board of the farmers who owned the crops being sold. The program through Volunteers Overseas Cooperative Assistance (VOCA, now ACDI/VOCA) was funded by USAID.

Bill was there at two separate times, once in Iloilo and once out of Koronadal. The second time he went, he brought his wife Marjorie with him to help him take notes and accompany him. Due to the danger in Koronadal they left four days early, and the next volunteer in the area left prematurely as well. Marjorie did keep newspapers from the area with particularly standout (read: terrifying) headlines as well as relevant newspaper clippings and all of Bill's notebooks and maps. The town paper here in Iola published articles she wrote and sent back during their travels. These will also be scanned and digitized. They are helpful to get an overall perspective of the trips and the mission.

I also discovered that not only did Bill work with VOCA in the Philippines, he also went to Poland on a similar mission. There are fewer pictures from that trip, so I'll be working on those as well. It seems there are not as many materials from that trip, but there are some photographs that will be added to the project.

Now, to work!

A Promising Beginning

I arrived late last night in my family's hometown of Iola, KS. While I've never personally called it 'home', it certainly feels like family here. The basement of the house has become my headquarters so I have space to stretch out and work, and the ping pong table has become my workspace. On one half is my computer apparatus (complete with headset, external HDD, Time Capsule, and other gadgets) and the other half is home to the slide scanner, notebooks, and stickies.

After arriving here around 4pm, I sat around with family members and enjoyed the usual Mentzer pastimes - football, cheese plates, and talking about the grandkids (me as well as my cousin's kids). As the Regehrs and younger Pumphreys began to make their way out it grew quieter and out came the tea. I spoke briefly with my uncle Craig and his wife Denise (who own the family farm here in Iola) as well as my aunt Sherryl and uncle Darren (the California-dwellers are here until about the 5th) about getting some stories. Many of the pictures I'll be scanning are not solely for a professional goal - some of them are my family's personal history, and I want to learn the context for the pictures just as much as I want to learn the who and where of them.

While a sizable portion of my visit is family-oriented, I am also here to develop my own skills and work on the undigitized portion of my grandfather's slide collection. For a time he was in the Philippines working for a co-op to assess and help develop their agricultural techniques. He went twice, and he's quite a picture-taker, so I will have a hefty task ahead of me. As those have yet to be scanned I'll be tackling those first and moving on to the rest of the family photos as I finish.

My Internet here is slow (3.26Mbps/.084Mbps), so I may or may not be easily reachable by video/audio chats. I am, however, reachable by Skype (zephyr42) as well as anything on the sideboard to the left.

I'm really looking forward to my next two weeks here before my last semester begins. This portion of my family is not one I've been able to spend a lot of time with, and I'm excited about both the project and being able to see them.

"The importance of numbers is best seen in a street mob, which becomes more tumultuous, more passionate, more a creature of instinct and less a creature of reason, the larger it is. So, too, the reading mob, as it grows bigger, becomes more emotional, more excited, it reads and talks with greater avidity, is increasingly vehement in its likes, dislikes, and opinions, forces the book on its neighbors with greater rigor, buys, borrows, gives, and lends more and more with the swift and sure emotions of instinct. The reading mob is, perhaps, the largest species. The numbers who read the lower bourgeois novel are fabulous. Those who read the higher bourgeois novel are very numerous. In the meridian of its glory the mob novel soars up to several hundred thousands."

-Henry Dwight Sedgewick, "The Mob Spirit in Literature". The New American Type: And Other Essays. 1908.

Welcome to the Internet

In my classes and in assigned articles, it has occurred to me that many of my classmates are unaware of what Reddit actually is. It is often mentioned in the same sentence as StumbleUpon, Digg.com, and Delicious. However Reddit is a beast of a completely different nature.

Remember BBS Boards? Remember IRC Chat? Remember the crazy range of topics, subjects, and interests those communications offered? Reddit is that - a massive online forum. Anything you want to talk about, learn about, or be trolled about, all in one place.

Reddit is the overlord forum, and within it are the aptly named "subreddits" - mini forums you can subscribe and contribute to. Each subreddit is formatted on Reddit thus: reddit.com/r/funny. It is therefore pronounced "Arr-Funny". The '/' is silent. There are many subreddits - numerous subreddits, to be precise. Just like your old BBS forums, there may be a large amount of crossover between contributors, but by and large each one has a unique clientele and givers & takers. For example, r/TwoXChromosomes (TwoX, for short) is a subreddit almost primarily made of users who want to talk about women's issues. This subreddit is a place to talk about women's health issues, sexism, accomplishments, or questions about feminine life. It is not exclusively for women, but it is about women. There is the male counterpart, r/OneY, which is essentially the same, but about men. Lately it's been about No-Shave November. In contrast, r/askwomen or r/askmen are a place for women to ask men questions or vice versa. The four forums do have an overlap of themes and topics, but they are all indeed very separate and individual from each other.

Now that we've defined "subreddit" and taken a look at the community-centered subreddits, let's take a look at some of the popular subject-centered subreddits of Reddit. r/atheism may be the one that you encounter first, and it is precisely what you would assume: a subreddit about atheism. More precisely it seems to be subreddit about anti-theism, as most of the subject matter is not about philosophical atheism, science, or skepticism (r/skeptic is for that) but rather about how ridiculous religion 'X' is. On the other hand, r/Christianity is a sub made up of the many different denominations of Christianity are welcome. Mormon, Catholic, Protestant, Mennonite, and other denominations all have their own other subreddit, but this one is the umbrella community. For religious debate, r/debatereligion is one of the few places the r/atheism and r/Christianity overlap. It's also the place where other religions (r/Islam, r/Pagan, r/Hinduism, r/Judaism, and so on) meet to debate.

r/atheism and r/Christianity seem to have a sort of online quasi-war between the them, as they are both large communities and the two most prominent religio-centric subreddits. Both subreddits appears to think the other somewhat ridiculous and borderline offensive. This kind of rivalry is a good example how how fractured Reddit is in all its idealism. For all that it is a place of international free speech and shared waters it is also a place where small squabbles can become Montague and Capulet-scale feuds due to the anonymity of the Internet. Seeing a user's identity as a comment rather than their comment history or another human being can be harmful, and unfortunately it happens a lot on any online platform. Due to the magnitude and scale of Reddit, it's rampant. While hate-speech is cause for banning, being disrespectful and intolerant more or less gets you a slap on the wrist or a heap of 'downvotes' (which means that you didn't follow reddiquette or contribute something meaningful to the conversation).

Spend enough time on Reddit and you'll find memes and ragecomics. Memes are insubstantial concepts and stereotypes portrayed through pictures, typically the same pictured recycled with user-made captions to relay the same theme. The subreddit for most memes is r/AdviceAnimals. One of the more popular memes is Ridiculously Photogenic Guy:

Made by Redditor beardedbrad

It's a great way to show how people react to Ridiculously Photogenic People - all they have to do is walk into a room (or run a marathon) and have an immediate and hyperbolic event! Search on Reddit for "Ridiculously Photogenic Guy" and you'll find many meme photos with him as the subject. There are similarly memes like First World Problems, Overly Manly Man, Overly Attached Girlfriend, Good Guy Greg, and Scumbag Steve.

I would be greatly remiss if I did not mention the primary function of Reddit: Cat Propaganda. Everywhere on Reddit are pictures of cats. Kittens, sphinxes, tabbies, happy cats, grumpy cats, white cats, black cats, and every kind of cat in between. They are the secret overlords of Reddit, and they rule supreme. Cats have their own mythos in the world of LOLCats, having the benevolent Ceiling Cat (usually a white cat that sites in high places and gazes benevolently or in an accusatory manner at the photographer) and the evil Basement Cat (which steals socks and hides in cereal boxes). Cats may be affectionately referred to as 'Karma Machines' as posting a picture of your cat may earn you upvotes and increase your total karma score. Some cats have lived long enough to become memes, more recently as with Grumpy Cat:

As linked to by Redditor boyinice

This cat's real name is Tard (short for 'Tardar Sauce') and he has his own Tumblr.

There are many more memes, and more than I can put here on my blog without feeling like I'm sullying my webspace. Take some time to familiarize yourself with them, as they can be great to illustrate a point in PowerPoints and Keynotes while adding a bit of spice and humor.

I hope you learned something about Reddit. May your forays be cautious and tiptoey. If you are unsure where to begin, I recommend you begin in r/funny, r/bestof, or r/trueReddit. Stay out of r/circlejerks, r/spacedicks, and r/wtf. You notice I didn't provide links, so I'm serious... beware of those subreddits. r/trees is not about the environment (hint: it's about marijuana). Don't click on anything that says NSFL (Not Safe For Life). Good luck.