on newspapers as sources

The PhD ate me again, but I’m recovering.

I’ve been working with newspapers lately, and have gotten to thinking about them as historical sources. My supervisor warned me early on that newspapers should only be used when you have a very good sense of what you’re looking for, or you’re liable to get lost in them. Having vanished thusly on several occasions in the past month or so, I’ll endorse that view, and supply a few of my own running thoughts on them; as usual, things I wish someone had told me before I started.

Warning: history geeking ahead. The uninitiated may gawk at the bookporn instead.

• Have a list - a list of articles you want to look at, or failing that, a list of specific themes or questions you want the newspaper reading to address – anything you can use to keep yourself disciplined. Stick it on your laptop screen if nothing else, and every time you read an article, look at your list and think: will this article answer any of my questions? If not, move on; life is too short. PS: This applies to archive work more generally.
• Even if you’re reading for impressionistic feelings of a period, try and find a thread of some kind. Perhaps you could read fuzzily around a momentous event – read articles leading up to the event, and read articles covering its aftermath. Perhaps you can follow a certain column or feature over time. Newspapers are periodicals, so they are beasts of habit; remember you can exploit their predictability. They often feature similar categories of information in the same place in a newspaper, often even the same page, and they don’t change their formats that often, so you can often jump straight to the information you want.
• If you’re looking at event-based coverage, don’t just use one newspaper – find the same event in other newspapers, even in other languages if you can. In many cases, I’ve found, the differences in their coverage will probably be revealing and interesting.
• If you’re lucky enough to have recourse to full search of a digitized newspaper, don’t fall into the trap of only reading articles that your keywords throw up. Let the contents of one article lead you naturally to another; it will yield a fuller, more nuanced picture of things.
• Use existing secondary literature to point you in the direction of interesting articles, veins of discussion, exchanges or features. Smart fuzzy reading around them can yield a lot of gems and insights.
• Keep really, really scrupulous notes. Newspaper, date, page and author are the staples, but get the metadata too. Remember that you want to be able to find any given article again in the future. If you’re looking at the newspapers on microfilm, note the archive and the reel call number. If you’re looking at hard copies in a library, make a note of which library. It’s part of a wider principle I’ve found essential in long-term research: always, always cater for your stupid, forgetful, future self.
• Don’t neglect the letters and the advertisements – the two most human parts of newspapers! Keep an idle eye on them as you browse; they can give you a real feel for the period. If you’re following a run of papers over a time period, be mindful of familiar names popping up in letters columns; after a while you can come to get to know them as people – the way they write, the issues they raise, their idiosyncrasies. And advertisements are particularly prone to remind me, on small, amusing scales, in what radical ways a world can change. Behold, in 1939: men and women, clamouring to gain 5lbs in 7 days; in 2009, men and women, clamouring to lose 10lbs in 5 days.
• In sum: Be open to serendipity, but not to the point of distraction.

I’m still trying to get better at taking notes on things I find in newspapers. How much should one quote of an article? How much is too much? Perhaps more difficult a question: how does one take good notes of trends over time, which is what newspapers are really about? Sometimes I’ve taken scrupulous and plentiful notes on articles over a period of time, and found at the end of all the reading and note-taking that the general idea behind all of them can be summarized in a few sentences. But I wouldn’t necessarily be able to have grasped that summary from the beginning. Is there a more time-efficient way to do this?

NB: If I get enough cool tips in the comments, I’ll re-write this list as a proper piece of source advice, for the benefit of researchers/historians-to-come.

links for 2009-05-22

• Boston Molasses Disaster – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  via Sam Anderson: "Okay, seriously, forget it: I hereby release you to go look up the Boston Molasses Disaster. A giant wave of molasses destroyed an entire Boston neighborhood 90 years ago, swallowing horses and throwing an elevated train off its track. It took months to scrub all the molasses out of the cobblestones! The harbor was brown until summer! The world is a stranger place than we will ever know."
  (tags: boston molasses disaster history strangetrue)
• In Defense of Distraction
  au contraire, Mr Anderson: I read your article from start to finish! albeit, mostly out of guilt that, had your article been about something else, I might not have. note to self: remember the value of attention. (I guess that's why they say we "pay" it).
  (tags: samanderson nymag attention internet psychology declineandfall future inspiration)
• Expenses row: MP who claimed for 500 trees accuses constituents of 'jealousy' | Politics | The Guardian
  "We have a wretched govern­ment here which has completely mucked up the system and caused the resignation of me and many others, because it was this government that introduced the Freedom of Information Act and it is this government that insisted on the things which caught me on the wrong foot, which if I'd been cleverer it wouldn't have done. What right does the public have to interfere with my private life? None."
  (tags: weasels justdesserts)

bookporn #41: books from heaven, books from earth

This is Tian Shu (天书) by Xu Bing (徐冰), often translated as Book from the Sky, but sometimes called Book from Heaven. It’s perhaps the most widely known contemporary work by a Chinese artist, so it’s a little mortifying that I only just discovered it this morning, reading about this and that in the Australian Journal of Anthropology.

Tian Shu, a modern art installation four years in the making (1987-1991), is comprised of a display of books spread in a large rectangle across the ground, above which voluptuous scrolls unroll in long, pregnant arcs. The books — four hundred of them — are handmade with reverential adherence to the standards of traditional Ming dynasty fonts, bookbinding, typesetting and stringing techniques. The fifty-foot scrolls are printed in the style of Chinese outdoor newspapers.

To make them, Xu painstakingly carved Chinese characters into square woodblocks, in just the way his ancient printing predecessors would have done, had them typeset and printed, and the printed pages mounted and bound into books and scrolls.

The result is a truly spectacular display of bookmanship — volumes fit for an emperor’s library.

Yet, there’s the astonishing, Borgesian catch:

Out of the three or four thousand Chinese characters used in these volumes and scrolls, not a single one of them is a real Chinese character.

They are made up of recognizable radicals and typical atomic components of Chinese characters, but Xu laboured to ensure that while they all retain the unmistakable look of Chinese script, they are all, so to speak, nonsense. They do not exist in any dictionary, and do not mean anything. Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers alike approach the books with the same sense of wonder at their beauty, and the same sense of incomprehension at their content — though, for Chinese readers, the frustrated impulse to read might detract somewhat from their aesthetic enjoyment of the art piece. I’ve heard that some Chinese readers have spent days attempting to locate a character they can read — to no avail. It’s a piece of art whose meaning is to be found in its meaninglessness.

Some twenty years later, in 2006, Xu Bing followed up on Tian Shu with another installation called Di Shu (地书) – literally, Book from the Ground, or Book from Earth. Where Tian Shu is understood by none, Chinese or non-Chinese speakers alike, Di Shu was composed to be understood by all, irrespective of their language and nation. As Xu himself says,

我的艺术多与文字有关，这是从二十年前的一部叫《天书》的作品开始的。称它为“天书”，因为它是一本包括我自己在内，世上没有人能读懂的书。现在我用这套 “标识语言”，又写了一本说什么语言的人都能读懂的书。我称它为《地书》。事实上，这两本书有共同之处 : 不管你讲什么语言，也不管你是否受过教育，它们平等地对待世界上的每一个人。

“I have created many works of art relating to language. This [piece of work - Di Shu ] has its origins in a piece I made twenty years ago, called Tian Shu. I called it Tian Shu because it it is a book legible to no one on this earth, including myself. Now I am using a “language of signs” to write a book that any speaker of any language can understand; I call it Di Shu. In truth, though, these two books have something in common: No matter what language you speak, or what level of education you have attained, they treat all people of this world equally.”

Whether from Heaven or Earth, both his art pieces — and in this way they are something of backhanded tributes to the written word — are to be understood (or not understood, in the case of the Tian Shu) by the educated and non-educated alike.

For me, amongst other things, Tian Shu is the purest veneration of the written word and the form of the book: not for the knowledge they contain and convey, but simply the very fact that they are, and that they are, or can be, so beautiful, without even reading a word, and even without meaning anything at all. This is, in short, bookporn at its most essential! Who among us has not walked into a bookstore or a library which contains not a single book one can read, but which nonetheless takes our breath away? Who has not been touched by beautiful calligraphy, by brushstroked words on fine paper, by sensuous lines of scripts that dance provocatively on the page, inviting comprehension? Beauty can move without language. Here is my internet Hat taken off to 徐冰先生. May he continue to frustrate the literate, create beautiful things, and do his bit for bookporn around the world.

Pictures from xubing.com and Google Images.

links for 2009-04-13

• Chinese Etymology: 宝, 寶
  the word for "treasure" is etymologically rendered as "jade (玉), cowries (贝) and pottery (缶) under my roof (宀)"
  (tags: chineseetymology linguistics erosionofmeaningthroughmodernization 中文)
• Chinese Etymology: 显
  look at these changes!
  (tags: chineseetymology erosionofmeaningthroughmodernization 中文 linguistics)
• Chinese Etymology Home Page
  I am now obsessed with this website
  (tags: etymology linguistics 中文 reference chinese visualization history dictionary chineseetymology)

links for 2009-04-11

• How To Predict The Future Of The Past Tense
  In which some Harvard mathematicians conceive of linguistic development in terms of natural selection. "Just as genes and organisms undergo natural selection, words — specifically, irregular verbs that do not take an '-ed' ending in the past tense — are subject to powerful pressure to 'regularize' as the language develops." And they come up with an algorithm. A verb used a hundred times less frequently, they say, will evolve 10 times as fast – a squeezing, conforming effect. Result: all new verbs entering the English language (googled, facebooked, delicious'd) are universally regular.
  (tags: linguistics sciencedaily verbs english language)

loanwords as social history

I went to a fascinating seminar some time back at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, given by Dr Uri Tadmor on the subject of Malay and Indonesian loanwords. Loanwords, by their nature, can often be strong evidence of sustained cultural interaction — ephemeral contact is often not enough to stimulate widespread borrowing — but they can do more than allow us the rather facile conclusion that, for example, Persians and Indians were, once upon a time, in contact with Malays. What Tadmor was really concerned with was to showcase the potential of linguistics, in particular the study of loanwords, for investigating the social history of a region, sometimes even against the grain of received (or convenient) wisdom.

liberal arts 2.0

some time ago (by which I mean, nearly two months ago now), certain smart & savvy nooks of the internet were all abuzz with the New Liberal Arts. It’s time, they say, to rethink what we want our liberal arts education to do for us in this twenty-first century world, in which our present curricula stands rigid and trembling under the pressures of great changes: in a neat syllabus of “art, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, history, mathematics, and science”, where is there space for the digital archive, water and food crises, social networking, financial ethics, global warming, internet laws, avant-garde photography, new journalism, electronic music-making, and the crash course in internet life skills? What, in short, does the class of the twenty-first century need to know?

links for 2009-03-18

• LRB · Stefan Collini: HiEdBiz
  fabulously biting article on the miserable state of higher education in Britain, by that doyen of smart snark, Stefan Collini
  (tags: stefancollini academia lrb awesome snark via:adammyers)
• Intellectuals at the Gates by Adam Kirsch, City Journal
  Kirsch reviews Charles Kurzman's new book, 'Democracy Denied: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy 1905-1915' – intellectuals who were, as Kirsch puts it, "deluded about their peoples’ readiness for democracy. They were ahead of their time, a misfortune not just their own, but their countries’."
  (tags: review history intellectuals revolution toread)

fragile things

[first posted on HNN]

If you haven’t already heard: an archivist’s and historian’s nightmare has transpired in the city of Cologne. A treasure trove of 65,000 original documents dating from the year 922, including a clutch of Karl Marx manuscripts, letters by Hegel, the personal papers of West Germany’s first Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and an unbroken series of Cologne’s carefully preserved town council meetings dating back to 1376, was destroyed in minutes when the archive building collapsed some days ago.

Being a young student of Southeast Asian history, I came to best know the turmoil of the Japanese Occupation and World War II not through lived experience or by reading memoirs, but through the deep chasm that tears through Southeast Asian archives, hollowing out three years and splitting the twentieth century into two halves: pre-war, post-war. Archives are destroyed quickly in war and conquering: when a new power seeks an erasure of the old, in the upheaval of battle and destruction, in bombings and air raids. Or else they are destroyed slowly by time: crumbling, fading, disintegrating — the gradual, inevitable entropy of all living things, including memory. But in Cologne, and in other tragedies of this sort, so much vanished in so little time, and in such an absurd, absurdly preventable manner (some think that the Cologne building, state-of-the-art and less than 40 years old, collapsed only because a train line was being built right underneath it — a claim corroborated, I think, by this photo) that my reaction is more one of bewilderment than anything else. A kind of chasm has opened up in German history now, and time will tell how deeply the loss will be felt.

being eaten up

monstrously, I’ve disappeared from the internet for some time. It’s that stage of the PhD where things are clarifying and sources are pressing themselves upon me from all sides, demanding to be considered and consulted. Inevitably, the vast banquet of sources is giving me indigestion. How did you all do it?–juggling sources and books; keeping up to date with journal articles and email correspondence; managing meals and groceries and bills; keeping up some pitiful semblance of a social life; hunting down leads in the archive; pinning down those irritating, niggling little queries that flap about your reading and multiply so alarmingly on a sea of hastily scribbled Post-its; deciding how to allocate your time; following up a thousand references; making phonecalls and having long inquisitive chats with librarians; writing reviews and papers; trying desperately to read things unrelated to the PhD; and all the while keeping one’s research questions firmly overhead and one’s thoughts in some order–and–is it possible?–I haven’t even started teaching yet!

more soon, I hope–in the mean time, the state of politics in my country continues to chew industriously away at the boundaries between reality, science fiction and outright farce.