Me Being Right

The internet is only as good an information source as the information that people put on the internet. Duh, I know. It's just that sometimes people seem to attach a sort of weight to stuff on the internet that may not be justified.

Often the information that people put on the internet is stunningly good. Or at least passably good. But sometimes, if the actual information that people have to put there is quite sparse, or mistaken, it's...not that good.

Following is a dramatically paraphrased version of an exchange I recently had:

ME: That photo you've identified as person X is not X, it's actually person Y.

PERSON: Explain how!

ME: Gladly. You see, the archives holds a vintage 19th century copy of that very photo, signed in pen "Yours, etc., Y." I take this as solid evidence that the photo depicts Y, rather than X, who is nowhere mentioned on it.

PERSON: We got this copy from someone who told us it was X. Also, Google Images has it with X's name. So basically, conflicting information, and we're going to leave the identification as is.

ME: Suit yourself. I'll just be up here thinking to myself about how wrongity wrong wrong you are, unless I can find some evidence suggesting that X was in the habit of signing Y's name to his photos.


I mean, yeah, I get that it's a pain to change a whole display (especially since there's no known photo of X to replace the current--wrong--one), and seriously, the guy's been dead for 150 years no matter who he was so it's not as if anyone is going to know the difference.

And sure, conflicting information, that happens. Sometimes--kind of a lot of times, actually--it's impossible to be sure who's in an old picture. But I have this PRIMARY SOURCE, signed in the very hand of Y (or X, if he liked to sign Y's name...maybe this was a thing they did for fun), and you have...Google Images, and someone who had a copy of this picture and thought it was X.

Gimme a vintage 19th century copy of the same photo signed "Yours, etc., X," and you have conflicting information. When you have rumors and a vague internet reference versus a PHYSICAL ITEM with CONTEMPORARY IDENTIFYING INFORMATION on it, you have...you being wrong.

Sorry about all the shouting. I just think this is kind of hilarious.

Don't get me wrong, I love the internet to pieces and I have every intention of literally marrying it as soon as that inevitably becomes legal (we've had same-sex marriage in Massachusetts for a while, so any minute now). But loving someone or some combination of software and networked servers means recognizing the flaws as well as the good things.

Oh, If You Want to Talk SENSE...

I've long aspired to be crotchety and cantankerous, which largely involves complaining about kids these days with their weird hairstyles and their terrible music, but an annoyingly sensible post on no cookies for me points out that this is not a very good attitude to take for most people, considering most people were themselves kids with weird hairstyles and terrible music not so long ago.

Not me, of course. My hair was always perfectly practical, and the music I liked was only the best music ever. But the rest of you should cut kids these days some slack.

Sigh...OK, I admit it, my hair was weird. The truth is, there were no glorious olden days, good people. 

Our ancestors did their best, no doubt, but they weren't in possession of some special ancient wisdom that has since been lost (they produced us, after all, presumably by doing the best they could).

The olden days were just days. For many reasons, we're glad they're gone.

So why do we think kids those days were in possession of some special ancient good-kidness that kids these days are lacking? I suppose it's just crotchety cantankerousness.

But I Might Want That!

Does anybody still want CDs? I was packing, and filled half a box with my (relatively unimpressive, I know) CD collection, none of which I've listened to in several years because all my music is mp3s now. I don't want to throw them away, that seems like a waste, but...what do you do with CDs anymore?

I haven't even gotten to my tape collection.

Or the floppy discs for my ancient computer. Or the computer itself, which, why do I want to expend the energy to cart that off to another apartment when I haven't even turned it on in a decade? (Does it even still turn on? I don't know.) And yet, if it still functions, it has copies of my college papers and such on it, and even though it's not as if I care about re-reading those (certainly I never have), I don't just want to throw them away either.

I mean, maybe aliens will land, and for some reason I'll be the person they wind up talking to, and it will be important that I convey some crucial point about Russian literature, and I'll be able to look it up in my old papers and basically cheat off my old self by stealing my arguments about Turgenev's approach to the transmission of wisdom, which I totally don't remember but could refresh myself on with a quick scan of those pages.

Hm. Even I have to admit that this is a pretty unlikely reason for someone to ever need their old college papers. And the fact that it's the best one I can come up with suggests that I could probably lose all access to said papers, and never miss it a single day in the rest of my life.

This is why our current apartment doesn't have room to add another person, you know. Because we're clinging to so many worthless, priceless relics from the past.

Don't Argue With Common Knowledge

I thought this was an interesting post on Butterflies and Wheels, about a downside of Wikipedia's "let the knowledge of the masses be recorded" approach.

It tells the story of an event in history about which common knowledge says a certain thing, but concerning which a single historian has uncovered source material supporting an alternate course. He tried to update Wikipedia, citing the primary sources he had uncovered, but had his edits reversed because these sources, since they contradict common knowledge, are viewed as somewhat suspicious.

As the author, Ophelia Benson, writes,

There is something fascinating about that. I do get the reason – there are always going to be more cranks and monomaniacs wanting to publish their “original research” than there are genuine historians and people who know how to do original research, so Wikipedia errs on the side of caution - but it does mean that mistaken conventional wisdom trumps accurate new research.

Indeed. Often it's going to be pretty safe to disregard a single person arguing for a revised view of some well-known fact...but on the other hand, sometimes conventional wisdom will be wrong.

I'm still not going to be telling students that Wikipedia is the devil, but this is another bit of evidence to support the contention that you don't want it to be the only thing you ever look at.

Warm Fuzzy of the Day

I'm back, briefly! Working hard to catch up on the important things that have been going on in my absence.

I recommend this nice story on the Library of Congress Blog explaining how the LC stored the first draft of the 1918 Czechoslovak Declaration of Independence--obviously a document of some historical importance--until it could be safely returned.

Vaclav Havel, then president of Czechoslovakia, received it in 1991 and took it back to be archived in Prague.

Priceless historical material carefully saved and then returned to its logical home! It warms the heart.

So Much Science...[drool]

I see (via Ben Goldacre) that the Royal Society has made its online archives freely available, so anyone can read articles more than 70 years old.

This would be the same Royal Society that has been publishing scientific papers since it originated the peer-reviewed journal back in 1665. So yeah, lots of interesting stuff published in there between then and 70 years ago. Fascinating look at the history of scientific experimentation and the development of scientific thought, etc.

Royal Society titles are not specifically medically focused, so they're not terribly high on the must-read list among the users at my library, but obviously there are going to be articles that are relevant to health topics, and anyway, even if there was no connection at all, it's just cool that they're all out there.

Nice one, Royal Society.

I'm less excited by your frequent slight-yet-significant title changes over the years, but it's all good.

Ancient Humor

So Don't Ask Don't Tell is now gone, and the profound thought I had is:

Will we still be able to laugh at the scene in The Simpsons when Homer's trying to join the military, and there's a question on the form that's been crossed out, but he of course reads through the ink and says cheerfully "But I'm not a homosexual!" and the recruiter has his hands over his ears and is singing "Lalala, I am not listening!"

Or will it no longer make sense, and we'll just yawn and look away?

Hahahaha! Yes, still funny. I sometimes quote that singsong "lalala, I am not listening!" line when I'm trying not to hear something.

I think the absurdity of it, as a historical artifact, will continue to entertain.

And that's a relief. I need to have some constants in my life.

Educational Movie Review: Sarah's Key

We saw a screening of Sarah's Key last night.

This is a movie about the Vél' d'hiv' Roundup in Paris in 1942, which is an event of which I was previously unaware, so I learned something. Learning is good.

The movie follows two parallel timelines, one the story of a little Jewish girl (Sarah) in Paris in 1942 who, with her parents, is arrested and held in the Vélodrome d’hiver before they're all sent to the camps.

Before leaving the house, she hides her little brother in the closet and locks the door with the key referenced in the title. As the story goes on, she works desperately to get back to the apartment to save him.

In the present day, a journalist (Julia) is preparing to move into an apartment which has been owned since 1942 by her husband's family. It is the apartment Sarah and her family lived in, made available after they were arrested and taken away, and Julia becomes engrossed in an investigation of the history of the place.

If I were to make a broad summary, I'd say it's a movie about how the past lives on inside the present; about secrets; about, obviously, the horror of the Holocaust and how people can turn on each other, or simply stand by and do nothing. Complicity. Guilt. Intentional and unintentional wrongs.

So there are some heavy themes, as you might imagine, but it wasn't overwhelmingly dark, nor did it seem overly didactic or heavy-handed about the historical information it conveys or the points it addresses.

It's mostly in French, so if you fear subtitles (and don't speak French), be aware of that.

I thought it got a little bit slow toward the end, as Julia is trying to contact members of Sarah's family in the present day and we lose the immediacy of Sarah's own timeline.

Overall, however, I would say it was well worth watching, and I'm glad I saw it.

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Overcome by Passion

If you've read some of the same bits of history I have, you may be familiar with the way uncontrollable sexual appetite used to be seen in Western society as a female characteristic rather than a male one (discussed in this NYT opinion piece).

You do kind of get the sense that a lot of times women's uncontrollably lustful nature was being blamed for the corruption of otherwise stolid men who would be spending their time in hard work or prayer or military triumphs or whatever, rather than merely being recognized as a sort of personal quirk. I'm not sure it was a tolerant/apologist "girls will be girls" as much as a "lustful girls will tempt otherwise virtuously nonsexual boys who would never do such horrible and undignified things."

If nothing else, though, it's an interesting reminder that cultural assumptions about who 'naturally' wants sex and who needs to be talked into it change, like lots of other cultural assumptions.

Possibly, in fact, people of both sexes may be interested in having sex from time to time? And possibly shouldn't be either shamed for feeling interest, or excused for acting like a jerk about it?

No, you're right, that's way too easy. I mean impossible.

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Non-Dull, Non-Gray History

I 'starred' this for later revisiting a long time ago, when I saw it in a couple of places, but I never got around to mentioning it. This must be remedied!

If you haven't, you should really take a look at these color photos taken between 1939 and 1943.

They were in an exhibit at the Library of Congress, and are reposted in larger versions by the Denver Post. There are 70 pictures, mainly of people in small towns or rural settings all over the United States. People working, or at school, at a square dance, at the fair.

They're really pretty amazing to look at. It's a little weird, actually, how amazing it is to me to see the world in color in 1939. You wouldn't think it should be that big a deal.

Because obviously I know the world wasn't black and white at the time even though most of the pictures are. Things had color if you were there.

But years later, not being able to see what color things were, even knowing intellectually that there were all the same common shades we have today, I still sort of think of the whole world being gray in the past. I can't help it. I know it wasn't, but I see it that way, because those are the picture I've seen of it.

So it's really kind of wonderful to see it in color.

What strikes me most, in a way, is the clothing. Look--they had brightly colored patterns on their dresses! Look at that bright red cap!

I think the clothes get me because I can't fill in color for them normally. I mean, I know what colors people are, more or less. When I see skin tones in varying shades of gray, my brain can kind of fill in the varying shades of pink or tan or brown that the picture probably represents in real life.

Also, I know what colors fields and trees and sky are, so I can sort of fill that in too.

But clothing could really be any color, and there's not much of a standard for it, so I think in a way I'm more likely to just leave it gray in my mind.

I guess my default image of the past is fairly normally colored people in relatively normally colored (though kind of drab) landscapes, all dressed in shades of gray. Living in gray houses, with gray furniture.

Seeing fabrics in blue, and purple, and red, and with different-colored flowers, really breaks up that default image in a dramatic way.

It pulls the past a lot closer for me.

Black and white means a long time ago, over on the other side of a line that divides history from now.

Color means, hey, this is actually the exact same world I'm in right now, just not at the same time. People wearing clothes with color, in landscapes with bright color that's not drab at all.

Yeah, you should check out those pictures. As I said, I saw them mentioned in a couple of places, but the one I remember at the moment was Sociological Images, which also has some interesting commentary.

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Archeological Update

Exciting news! Caligula's tomb has been found! Apparently it's near Lake Nemi, which is south of Rome. Judging from the photo, it's a very nice spot for a villa.

I expect it to feature prominently in the next version of Assassin's Creed. I can't even wait.

I saw this on Pharyngula, where I get all my news about tombs in Italy.

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News From the Past!

In recognition of the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the RAF Benevolent Fund has put together an awesome website, the 1940 Chronicle:

The campaign revolves around the ‘1940 Chronicle’, an online newspaper which breaks daily news of Britain at war from the same day 70 years ago, as though the Battle of Britain is happening in real time.

It presents historical information in a blog format, with posts detailing events in the war as if they were happening now, posted 70 years to the day after they actually occurred. There are Twitter feeds as well, along with photos and news stories.

It's a fascinating way to present history.

Thanks to Karra Crow at ...Fly Over Me, Evil Angel... for pointing me in its direction.

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Keep it Un-Secret. Keep it Safe.

I was talking about the archives at work the other day, so history has been a bit on my mind, and I really like this post by s.e. smith at this ain't livin' called "I Believe in History."

Here's a lovely bit that speaks specifically to archives (as well as anyone who preserves records):

And it made me realise the value of keeping and preserving records. Things that might not seem so important or interesting now could be fascinating later, as I’ve realised looking through subsequent original source documents relating to other historical events. You really do never know when or what might be relevant, how material might be used. And people who preserved things ensured that even if stories weren’t told at the time or official publications were incomplete, that the information was out there. It was available. For people who were willing to look for it and sift through it, it might provide an entirely new perspective that had not been considered before.

I like the point about how things that aren't particularly interesting now may be fascinating later--we really have no way of knowing what someone will want to see someday. Which is of course part of the eternal pressure of archives and libraries. You never know what someone will want, but you can't keep everything, so you have to make your best guess.

And, often, what people will eventually find fascinating, and what people will know, will be determined by what's been preserved and what is available to be known.

Let's say we don't know much about Ancient People X, because all we have of their culture is some pottery shards. We're really interested in those pottery shards because that's all we've got, and we've learned a lot based on those shards, but there's so much that we can't get from pottery and therefore will never know.

The past, out of record and memory, is unknowable, so in a sense it doesn't exist. At the same time, the past lives with us. Traces are everywhere from millions of people before us going about their lives. It's almost eerie, being able to get closer to them by looking at the traces first hand.

Respect the archives!

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King Me

In more time-travel-related musing (after last month's speculation on how well one might do if dumped 300-500 years into the past), Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection wonders whether a king from the Middle Ages would take the opportunity to live a middle class life in the modern day U.S., with our health care and casual luxuries, or would prefer the personal power of kingship in his own time.

Not being a king from the Middle Ages, or having much insight into the time, I can't say much about that, but I certainly wouldn't want to try it the other way.

Even if I could be a king, I'm not going back to then! I imagine the social conventions would be nearly incomprehensible, and often practically intolerable to me. (Plus I don't really want to be a man, thanks. Although I guess I might be better suited to manhood if I did have to live in the time period, what with all my thinking I have a right to opinions and what-not.)

Thinking about the differences in societies does make me wonder if, even if he felt himself objectively better off today with all the cool stuff we have to offer, an old-timey king might prefer to stick with the world and the society he understood.

I guess that would depend on his personal adaptability and tolerance for change. Which just goes to show that when we invite a king to make that choice, we'd better think carefully about which one.

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Comics: Better than Fun

Interesting post at Book Patrol about a comic book that served as a valuable educational tool for the Civil Rights Movement. It told the story of the Montgomery bus boycott, and explained nonviolent resistance tactics.

As the post explains, comic books made a good choice for spreading the word: "Comics are cheap to produce; lightweight; small in size; easy to disguise, hide or smuggle; and highly disposable."

Few copies of the comic still exist, but there are some in, of course, libraries. Preserve on, libraries. Hang onto the history.

Jessamyn at librarian.net pointed this out.

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Wandering Somewhen

I enjoyed this Respectful Insolence post about time travel (answering another post at Aardvarcheology), inquiring how well someone would do if dropped in a familiar city with no money or ID, 500 years ago, or 300 if we're in places that didn't have extensive cities 500 years ago.

There are lots of interesting answers in the comments, with some people coming up with practical plans to advance the sciences, and some others concluding that they would just immediately catch plague and die of general uselessness.

I'm going to put myself in the latter camp, having no very transferable skills. I mean, I'd say I could try to advance library science using the awesome bits of MARC Bibliographic that I manage to retain from one day to the next, but I doubt that society would be hanging anxiously on my words (especially since book-learnin' was not exactly admired in womenfolk back in the day). In all likelihood I'd just succumb at once to whatever flu was going around.

Or, as several commenters suggest, be executed as a witch.

I do have nice strong teeth for 300 years ago, but I don't know how far that would get me, beyond assuring that I could chew the food of the day.

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Peeking Over Walls

I was a callow youth 20 years ago, so while I remember the news when the Berlin Wall came down, I didn't really know what it meant. Berlin Wall?

What the hell is that, some kind of Wall in Berlin?

Jeff Fecke gives a nice summary of the historical background, and some personal perspective, on Blog of the Moderate Left.

I definitely remember the sense of unease he describes, of Us and Them dividing up the world, and what if They send bombs? It was no more than a vague backdrop for me, being callow and young and with no real understanding of history or politics, but it was there.

Interesting times. But then, all times are interesting, aren't they?

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Making Apologies

I see on Racialicious that California has approved a bill to officially apologize to Chinese American citizens for discriminatory laws passed during the Gold Rush and later.

Some of these laws, which "barred Chinese from owning land or property, marrying whites, working in the public sector and testifying against whites in court," were on the books until the 1940s.

The bill would also honor the ways in which workers from China helped make California what it is. Most notable may be the fact that they basically built that side of the Transcontinental Railroad.

This reminded me that on a tour of Havre Beneath the Streets we learned that Chinese railroad workers lived underground because it was safer for them not to be outside in town after dark. Although Chinese immigrants are not as big a part of Montana's history as they are in California, they were certainly there--and, unfortunately, apparently no better treated.

It's a good idea to acknowledge when you've been wrong if you hope to be right, so I think this is pretty cool.