I used to be more chatty on these bloggy things. Twitter is a ball of fire right now. So many communities built up over the years, real connections and friendships and vast investments of time, destroyed because one man is a vengeful petulant twit.
Sigh.
Well, at least I have my research.
I've been puttering about in online databases for the last year looking for info about a traveling medicine man, and I accumulated something like 1000 different articles and advertisements from the 1880s that talk about him. The problem is that, when I started, I wasn't looking ahead to anything so I was not taking formal notes. I was truly just farting about. When I got in deep, I realized that a bigger project had started. I still don't know what, but I have recently used the word chapter.
Ominous.
I tried to update my handwritten notes. I redid at least a month's worth. Honest to god, though, I'm pretty sure what I have is currently unusable. What I really needed to do was merge entries from different newspaper databases into a single chronological story, and the notes that I took were spread across something like 6 different notebooks, sorted by chronology, but separated by source database, and then when another, related topic came along, that was stuck in there too. It was so bonkers that I came up with an index for my notes. And it's still unusable. Clearly, if I knew where I was going when I started, I would have come up with a better, more complete note-taking system.
You know who was organized? Walter Ong. That dude had an extensive filing system for...all knowledge ever. I worked in the special collections of the SLU library around the time that his papers were accessioned. It was a prodigy of organization. I am not that thing.
So, what's the solution? Nothing that doesn't involve a lot of work. I've settled on Zotero, I think. It's working for me. When I signed up for the various newspaper databases, I digitally clipped articles, then printed out the clips to take notes from. Turns out if you have the Chrome plugin for Zotero, you can go back into those databases, view everything that you have ever clipped, sort it chronologically, and then bring up each of those clips in a different tab. When you add that clip to Zotero, the citation manager recognizes a lot of the metadata, almost enough to do a respectable bibliography.
I said almost.
So, over about 2 weeks, I went through everything and added copies of all those clips to my Zotero collection (and, yippee, shared it across several computers I work on). The main problem now is that all the entries all have basically the same title: "Clipped from [source name]." At least the ones from newspapers.com do. All the other info is there. So, I'm going through and giving everything a name based on the content of the clip. For sanity's sake, for once, I've decided on a pretty simple scheme. There are only about 3 varieties of newspaper clipping here. One is a news article or adopts the form of a news article: if it has a headline, I use that as the title. If it falls in a "Local Notes" column or something similar, I use the name of the feature. There is a style of ad that has no headline, but is just a paragraph maybe, visually set apart from other text with a dividing line or a space. For these, I just use the first few words without capitalization as the title. If I've clipped what is unambiguously a paid advertisement from Kit, and if it has capitalization or large print or whatever, I take the first line of that as the title. This is not what MLA or APA wants you to do, but I truly, truly despise citation styles. When I teach citation, I tell my students that a writer's job is to make reading as easy as possible for your reader, who could honestly be doing literally anything besides reading what you've written. Part of that duty to the reader is to make it as easy as possible for them to find your sources. So, parenthetical citations (or footnotes or whatever) should lead to an alphabetized works cited. Your citation should have all the elements that your reader will need so they can decide whether or not to find that source, and if they do decide to do so, that they can find it easily. Be complete and be consistent, I say. Hence, my little method.
My god, style guides are such a scam.
So, this new method has me doing a lot of updating of metadata. This will take a long time. I had thought of seeing if my research budget would allow me to take on an undergrad research assistant. And then for whatever reason, I thought, meh. Anyway, I am tearing through these a couple dozen at a sitting, not rereading them, just retitling them. Next, I'll go through and read them more carefully and add tags that describe the contents. This too will be really helpful, but I expect vastly more time consuming. If there were only some way that I could automatically do OCR and tag proper nouns. That would be ideal.
Hey, it turns out I had at least one more blog post in me!
B
