It's Always More Complicated

Okay, this will never not be a pet peeve and have the niggles niggling -

Calling things 'forgotten' when I think more accurate ways of framing the topic would be either a) 'have you heard about [X]?' or b) 'I recently learnt about this [cool/interesting/whatever] thing'.

Because (as I am sure I have far too often remarked) just because the person who is writing about Thing only heard about it 5 minutes before they started writing, it was not 'forgotten' and did not have to be 'rediscovered'.

(?Cite here to 'goldfish, in fact, have been proved to have rather good memories, and we no longer use them as a point of comparison'?)

I will concede that there are some things that fall within my Spheres of Expertise which are perhaps not entirely general knowledge, but even so, are not exactly lost from history, because, lo, I have been at conferences and seminars and had intense conversations with at least 3 other people who knew about them.

But I have also over the years, and since I was but a young thing, managed to acquire a fair amount of Bits of Trivia on an array of subjects.

Maybe I overestimate the extent to which this is common? (and I daresay people have a fair amount of titbits of info that Are Not Actually So swirling about, in the class of 'If you pick a guinea-pig up by its tail, its eyes drop out').

But today I encountered something described as 'forgotten', which, true, is something that I might well know as part of Sphere of Expertise, but which I first encountered through general random reading well before I got into the field.

Or, maybe, one just has to be around for long enough for a cycle of recurrence to occur?

Was contacted by former workplace anent a forthcoming researcher who is coming to research in area where a) I had a lot to do with the actual archives and b) am fairly well-informed about the subject in general.

(Am a bit Don't You Know Who I Am? that researcher hadn't made direct contact...)

But, anyway, there was a certain calling upon stuff that I would have hoped had been logged in institutional memory - like, some of this pertained to a particular institutional archive which we did not hold, even after recurrent attempts at negotiating transfer*, about which we had had numerous queries over the years, which I would have thought were recorded and searchable. (Wheels: let us not invent them.)

I also feel that I was summoning up from the recesses of memory information that at one time I had put into nicely collated, hand-curated sources guides, which now seem to have to gone to frolic with the dodoes, as they do not seem to be on the shiny shiny new website, or at least shiny shiny new interface is not helpful at getting at them. I would like to think they are on file, or a hard drive, somewhere, maybe?

Perhaps it is vanity and egotism but I think these (particularly if kept updated) would still be useful to researchers. (Especially as the relevant one included a note that the particular institutional archive in question was NOT among our holdings.)

It's all very well being A Living Archive, but I did hope that I'd downloaded a significant amount of accumulated knowledge, if not actual wisdom, for people to, you know, use and benefit from?

*Not saying you'll find its name engraved on my heart like Calais on Mary Tudor's, but oh, that was a depressing saga.

(Do people read the Pollyanna books or watch the movie any more? is she still a byeword for finding some sweet sugary good in the most adverse circumstance? enquiring mind wishes to know.)

But anyway: I was thinking, following a discussion to do with an event that went somewhat pearshaped and its repercussions, that sometimes the things that did not go right and were not famous victories nonetheless served a valuable purpose.

And the valuable purpose was not merely as An Awful Warning or a Horrid Example, but that although the thing that did not go right was not very agreeable for the particular people directly involved, its wider effects may have been more benign in the sense of a creation of visibility, an opening of discussion and conversation -

E.g. The Well of Loneliness may have been condemned as a work of obscene literature in 1928, and - actually I am not sure if in that year of grace such works were still ceremoniously burnt at Bow Street -

[T]he author’s own papers, which are set to be digitised, reveal the outpouring of support Hall received from members of the public around the world, who wrote to thank her for creating, in her heroine Stephen Gordon, a character with whom they could identify.

I am very like to suppose that many people first learnt of e.g. matters such as birth control through shock-horror stories in the press, sermons, etc.

Yes, of course women who have doctorates may quite reasonably be asked to be addressed by their title, and it is neither a sign of arrogance nor of insecurity, it is merely a descriptor indicating that they have put in the time and effort to obtain a higher degree -

But while I think of all the women who had expertise and authority in various fields, paging Molly Crowfoot: 'If you spend twenty-five years working on anything, you become the world expert' (quoted in Georgina Ferry, Dorothy Hodgkin), and were not able to acquite doctorates or any kind of recognised validation for their accomplishments, yes, wave it high, wave it high -

I also think of the knowledge I have which was lately described to me as 'encyclopaedic' and which is not, I think, particularly the result of any formal academic work I have undertaken but the product of a lifetime of very miscellaneous reading and four-plus decades as an archivist.

But anyway, there are people out there who have put in the hours and the effort to acquire the kind of knowledge that conveys a certain authority when discussing matters to which that knowledge pertains, without that accruing any formal accolade.

While one may feel that certain, if not yet quite Dead, Distinguished White Males may come to a stage in their lives when they - regrettably - think that there's no knowledge but they knows it, what they don't know isn't knowledge, and that is tiresome enough, it is a a good deal more tiresome when this attitude is manifested by social media trolls who do not, as far as one can tell, have any record of having made some Great Discovery some decades in the past and are now living off the reputation, and indeed, give every indication of gross ignorance (as in the adjacent Twitter stream mentioning some guy claiming that Gay Sex was Unknown in Classical Times: and not in some sophisticated acts vs identity, questions of definition, theoretically inflected way, but from being the sort of person to whom the name Plato conveys nothing whatsoever).

Is there anything like GoodReads or LibraryThing for short stories? This came up in the course of a conversation about keeping track of short stories and logging that one had read them and the impression they made, which of course one can do oneself e.g. in a spreadsheet, but that does not really provide the facility to recommend and promote further which those sites do for actual books.

But just because I don't know of anything doesn't mean it doesn't exist! It may simply mean that there are limits to my knowledge.

So does anyone know of anything like this? The particular context was sff and its generic penumbra.

Have been trying to resist moaning on about an exchange on a listserv I was engaged in over the weekend, because I seem to be being grumpy hedjog going 'these people NO NUFFINK' far too often these days, and it wasn't so much, in this instance, knowing nothing as having various assumptions about the transmission of knowledge and what knowledge was getting transmitted, on certain issues to do with health and bodily understanding.

So, anyway, was thinking about this, and how this sort of knowledge is fairly ungettatable unless you have people who were writing about in diaries and letters (and even then, could have been a taboo subject they didn't even talk about to themselves or close friends/relatives) or they survived into the era of oral history.

And, even if people had access to published texts (of which indeed there were a multitude at a range of discursive levels) what did they make of them and how did they relate them to their own bodies.

Which led me on to think about folk beliefs and popular understandings, and that if I had been thinking about this sort of thing several decades ago I might well have tried to get my paternal grandmother to record an interview (though I'm not sure how successful that would have been). Because the odd things I can remember her saying about various things that were clearly about some concept of the body and health and even, in my current state of knowledge, have some resonance with bygone theories, suggest that these were, in fact, lingering on into the post WWII era.

Not that I should be surprised when there was a medical anthropology study done during the 70s in a Home Counties general practice which found that many patients were still basically operating on humoral theory.

There were a couple of things about blood that my pg used to say: 'vinegar dries your blood up' and 'it's bad blood' (of my not-infrequent nosebleeds) that make me think that something very similar was in play there.

This was well into the era when women's magazines (which were pretty much the only thing I remember her reading) were all about the up to date health info for their readership.

That thing about people asking people they know/their mates to be on con panels, rather than other people more qualified? Happened to me yesterday.

There is Topic in early C20th British History which does fall within my general sphere of historical interest, but about which I am largely informed to the extent I am not from engaging in any depth with it as a historian but from cataloguing relevant archives (which does, I admit, enable me to make critical interventions to some scholars' wild assertions...)

But, not for the first time, A Person With Whom I Have Had Professional Contacts Over The Years has asked me to give paper on Topic at a workshop they are organising.

I have a legitimate excuse in that the timing would be really bad for me anyway, but I thought it worth pointing out that there are people a whole lot more active in the field of Topic Studies than moi.

But, you know, I am Known to Them (also they may be hoping that I would get any associated expenses paid by my munificent employer). So (obviously?) I am first choice. Duh.

Or is this just that gendered thing that others have pointed out?

(Though in this instance, thought of writing anything on Topic makes me projectile vomit with boredom.)

In my experience, high-profile male columnists jump on a subject like Syria regardless of what they might have to contribute, simply because it's a hot topic and they have to be seen to be addressing it. Heavyweight female columnists, incidentally, have told me that they avoided Syria because they thought it silly to start spouting on subjects that aren't an area of expertise.

It's not even just the Big SRS Topics involving diplomacy and war: I moaned and whinged some while ago about A Male Historian who had been asked to comment on Heston Blumenthal's back to the past culinary agenda at Dinner who was a) not a food historian and b) not exactly au fait with modern gastronomy, either, and demonstrated his iggerance in the area.

As someone who quite often suggests to researchers that I Am Not The Expert They Are Looking For, maybe I am doing the wrong thing and should just waffle whatever comes into my head on whatever the subject is.

*The whole thing about whether people feel they Need To Have An Opinion, and Let Other People Know What It Is (whether they want to hear it or not), is not entirely gendered but more, I suspect, about other personality issues. It certainly has nothing to do with how well-informed about the question the person is. (Though of course, they may believe that they are.)

There were a couple of bitch sessions at work this week about people who not only talk about 'hidden treasures' and 'unseen gems' in the archives but want us to come up with examples of same.

Which, when you have put all that effort into cataloguing material so that it's not hidden and needn't flourish unseen, and don't spend your time sneakily concealing the bestest bestest stuff from people unless they plead very, very hard, in fact do a fair amount of additional publicising, is deeply, deeply, annoying.

It also later occurred to me that another of my objections to this approach is that the 'gems' are not necessarily discrete, detachable, items but are embedded in a context that makes them meaningful. Plus, they don't necessarily look like gems, or at least, their primary appeal is not aesthetic or in visual gosh-wow. Or the value is cumulative.

(For some reason this for me connects to that thing I have complained about heretofore, when people see one particular victory as the war won, rather that a successful episode in a much longer and probably less spectacular campaign.)

Also, that, to change the preciousness metaphor, what counts as the gold dust or tiny nugget from panning through the resources being researched is actually going to differ for different people and their particular interests.

And I'm not sure whether this hooks on here or not, but I have long been irked by the assumption that, these days, people don't need to learn things or Know Stuff because It's All On The Internet. You actually need to know some stuff to work out what else you need to know, and things may not mean anything unless you have some knowingz already in your mind to relate them to. Not to mention that people are really bad at looking things up on the internet anyway.

Not sure whether this is at all coherent: this was the day when I finally went *flop*.

Yestreen was at a very good, if somewhat intense and perhaps rather too crammed, afternoon symposium on biography and its writing.

Just one thing that came up in a panel discussion jarred me, which was the claim that these days everybody's life is all over the net.

I feel that the people who make this claim are actually people who don't spend that much social time online and don't themselves engage in social networking beyond maybe Facebook for family photos and academia.edu, if that.

And that they're not actually talking about advanced levels of cyberstalkery ingenuity but just basic googling.

I think my invocation of the G+ nym debacle came as news to pretty much everybody in the room, just about, as did my connected suggestion that, actually, a lot of people have a significant web presence that isn't under their birth certificate/passport/driving licence name.

You can find out quite a bit about Dr [Legal Name] online, though you would have to be careful to a) distinguish me from other people of that Legal Name, at least two of whom are academics working in related areas and b) realise that some of those hits for Legal Name are indeed me doing something different from my academic/professional interests. (I am large, I contain multitudes: but I am not the baker of fancy cakes, btw.)

But what you would not necessarily find, if you didn't already know, would be me on DW/LJ, posing as an erinacine. Plus even some sites on which I appear under my real name I have under at least some level of minor stalker-prevention limitations on access.

While on top of that, even though I post quite a lot online besides basic info, it's not Everything All About My Life.

As I thought when someone was saying something about finding, if not the person the biographer was interested in actually alive themself, people who knew them, you really haven't been keeping up with the discussions within oral history, have you?

I.e. all the stuff about how people present themselves and what the silences and evasions mean, etc etc.

Even people who make a project of living their lives in the open online - how much do their observers actually know about them?

So, you know, I think a lot of the problems that biographers have always faced - does the material exist, how does one interpret it, and what does one do about the gaps and areas where only speculation can go - are going to continue to exist.