In keeping with a previous post about my wife’s relative, 서상돈 (Seo Sang Don), here are a few more pictures for those interested in such things. These are from my wife’s family albums and they depict the Seo family in Daegu in the 1930s and 1940s.
The family enjoyed some degree of status judging by their attire (the tuxedos alone signal that). The older gentleman sitting in each of the photographs is the son of 서상돈. In the pictures from the 1930s he is wearing clothing befitting a certain status within Korea at that time. In the picture from the 1940s, much of the family’s attire has taken on a much more Korean bent.
The Seo Family of Daegu circa 1934 looking incredibly dapper.
Terribly sorry about the big gap of space there, but I was proving too impatient to edit these photographs after scanning them. The picture below is (I am guessing) from the same photography shoot and there is some more extended family in this one, including my wife’s grandfather (in glasses, far right).
The Seo extended family in more casual clothing circa 1934.
The final image is from the 1940s with the same location and most of the same people. This is post-liberation in the interim period between the end of World War II (and Japanese rule) and the beginning of the Korean War in June of 1950. According to my sources (my wife), one of the brothers (I want to say the man in the very back on the top far left) was taken back to North Korea during the war.
The Seo Family in the late 1940s in a familiar location but post-liberation.
My wife’s mother is in the arms of her grandmother off to the right along with her grandfather (the man in glasses in the back row). He was a professor at Hanyang University (한양대) and historian.
Also of note in this photograph is the young Cathy Hardwick. She is a fashion designer in New York City and has been quite successful over the years. She can be found in the middle row, sixth from the left (not counting the baby).
I would be hard pressed to find media descriptive in its simplicity. A straightforward family portrait at the crossroads of so much history. Regal and modest; old and new; escaping from (Japanese occupation) and on the cusp of (the Korean War) so much turmoil.
서상돈 고택 (Seo Sang Don's Old House)
I found this on Oh My News! and I am fairly confident this is Seo Sang Don’s house, still preserved in the heart of downtown Daegu. I ask my few dedicated dear readers to compare this house with the house that acts as the backdrop of the very first picture in this post. Is it the same? I think I want it to be, but I am not sure.
In the midst of my dismay on not finding good online resources for exploring Korean history and culture, I stumbled across the Korean Studies’ Digital Resources page at Harvard University.
In hindsight I should have started there. It seems that the librarian there has done an admirable job assembling these resources into some coherent page (Mikyung Kang, please forgive me if you are not the librarian there).
Korea Knowledge Portal 국가지식포털
The official gateway to South Korean government documents operated by the Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion (한국정보문화진흥원). This full-text database links eight national institutes and is searchable by keyword, author, publisher, subject, format, language, and date.
Korean Database 디지탈한국학
An extensive database of Korean art, culture, folklore, history, literature, philosophy, and religion, developed by the Academy of Korean Studies (한국학중앙연구원). This database is searchable by keyword and can be browsed by subject.
National Digital Library 국가전자도서관
The largest information database for materials on pre-1950 Korea with particularly rich contents on the Japanese Occupation period. Old newspapers (pre-1945), official gazettes (1894-1910), periodicals (pre-1950), more than 1400 Korean academic journals, and the original images of Korean rare books and old maps are available online through more than 70 databases of eight Korean national libraries: the National Library of Korea (국립중앙도서관), the National Assembly Library (국회도서관), the Supreme Court Library (법원도서관).
They provide lesson plans as well, which seemed quite reasonable explorations of the history.
PROCEDURES:
1. Before viewing the Lesson I documentary clip (either as
streaming video from the website or a video from the DVD):
a. Ask students to discuss what they know about Korea or what they
think when they hear the words “Korea” or “Korean.” Place responses
on board. Point out stereotypes and critically examine them
b. Find Korea on a map.
c. Encourage students to brainstorm. Write down five
to ten reasons why they might leave America to live in
another country. Share their answers. By keeping a tally,
students should look for and share similar responses.
2. Using Concept Definition Mapping (see attached), look up, define,
and discuss the terms: immigrate, emigrate, migrate, and diaspora.
3. Introduce the documentary Arirang Part I in
its entirety with this perspective:
It begins in the late 19th century as Korea is grappling with the
issues of modernization and imperialism. It ends in 1965. It brings
to light the significant events that impacted the development of
Korean America, Korea and also the world. The Korean immigration
experience is both “like others and like no other,” reflecting problems
special to Koreans but also fitting into the immigration patterns
experienced by other peoples. It addresses the struggle that new
immigrants have confronted in building their lives in a new world.
4. Show Lesson I documentary clip (8 minutes) or as much of Arirang Part I
(total length 57 minutes) as time permits. As students view the film Arirang,
they should note reasons why Koreans immigrated to the United States.
5. Discuss why Koreans immigrated.
Looking at immigration in general, it seems a good attachment point for a socially critical pedagogical approach, something championed by Freire. Students could really benefit from a discussion to explore the power agents at work on people who immigrate. It is a story that effects us all, but so few understand the myriad of forces at work.
Anywho, be sure to check out the Korean resources.
It has been a few months (5) since my Uncle Larry has passed away and rather than reflect on the loss itself, I decided it would be worthwhile to recreate the experience as a learning threshold, a point where knowledge expands upon itself in some sort of portal experience.
My Uncle Larry and Aunt Joanne
I suppose there have been a few things I have learned based on my Uncle Larry’s passing, not specifically based on the passing itself. Since I have some Teutonic blood in me (much to the chagrin of my Gaelic forebears), it seemed appropriate to relate these in numeric, bullet-point form. Yes, he would have appreciated me trying to quantify and categorize the passage of life and that complicated mass of emotions that live in its wake.
1. Death is loss- There is less. That is an absolute. Part of me died with him and I am not the only one who can make that claim. That is not even a rarefied bunch, much to his credit.
2. Close is close- I still plot my next moves with him in mind. I still imagine the historic underpinnings of my movements, actions, my next plot point. Let’s put it this way. If I were to move to Donegal, my Uncle Larry would implicitly understand the gesture. If I were to move to Rome, he would spout Latin and I would counter with Shakespeare. That is the way we rolled. None of that has changed. I still have grand gestures up my sleeve. I just have to make them grander to push the message through to the other side.
3. Life is one gigantic learning experience- There is a reason for every action. A thousand reasons, perhaps. There is a plot point to every dream, a complication to every measure. Map it, but don’t suspend it. Do not let analysis lead to paralysis. Life is meant to be acted upon. Informed contemplation should lead to absorbed decisiveness.
4. Fear is pedestrian- I stand before my Uncle Larry and know that I am not afraid. I am done with fear. I am mortal and I certainly have a healthy respect for that. But I am not beholden to that. I am a living, impressionable, unflagging individual. Full of hope. Full. Thank you for that, Uncle Larry.
So, teachers. How can we transform life into learning? How can we take our cultural equivalent of Uncle Larry and let a living inspiration turn into a metaphysical transformation? Are we meant to be socially critical and towards what end? What does it mean to accept and live and love? How can we take loss and strengthen ourselves with it? I do believe this personal experience is the beginning of our students interactions with discomfort, with a troublesome knowledge. I was just lucky enough to have a figure like Uncle Larry (amongst others) to walk me through it. How can we transform our students’ experience with loss and make it constructive?
The only reason I refer to the video above is because the last time I talked to my Uncle Larry, we talked about our (Jen and I) trip to Tunisia, especially Carthage. I mentioned how incredible it was to see the horizon into Italy exactly how Hannibal would have seen it. And this was most definitely it.
My traveling companion is Dr. Siro Masinde, the definition of both a gentleman and a scholar.
In keeping with all things digital library, I wanted to briefly mention the new Korean Digital Library that has recently opened (both online and as a physical location) that seems like a real step in the right direction. The only real problem I can sense is the comedic fodder provided by the name of the library. But more on that later.
It seems like an interesting attempt to portal all information resources on the national scale allowing, presumably, for greater access to the average citizen. Advantages are greater ease of use for the average patron, greater cost savings (presumably as the nation would act as a consortium and further assuming they include paid resources at some point), and just overall point of access (people know exactly where to go to begin their information searching).
My paranoid Western mindset also makes me think this structure would be much easier to censor, but whether implicit (as an access issue) or explicit, censorship is still censorship and it happens everywhere. Either way, this is a moot point as the information currently provided online is limited to free and open access resources.
According to the Digital Library, which shall remain nameless for the time being:
“Users can access master’s and doctoral graduation theses, research data, and meeting data produced by major foreign organizations in digital format.”
And the list of resources they are mining from is extensive (number-wise). What is striking about this list is that there isn’t a single Korean resource on there.
Which really got me thinking a bit. What is it about Digital Library that made me think it would be specific to cultural assets or special collections or archival materials? Is that a culturally-specific view of what the phrase digital library means? Generally, the majority of digital libraries I encounter are of the special collection variety. A place to gather all kinds of materials that are presented electronically, materials that often tell a story about a slice of history, a place, or some thing. I would view the Korean Digital Library as more of a database than a library, but what really is the difference?
Korea views the term differently (in a perfectly valid way). They see it as literally a digital collection of information from outside sources (at least in this manifestation), data with specific and well defined uses (statistics, theses, etc.). I am curious to see how this develops online, but their physical facilities (scroll down to see images) seem more in line with how I would define a digital library. Kudos to them for trying to make the library experience more interactive, more kinaesthetic.
Korea, if you are listening, what I would like to see is a Korean Digital Library that tries to tell the narrative of your country, the story of your people. I want audio, images, video, interactives. I want to hear the music, listen to the speeches, see the insides of your houses. I want to trace the path of your greats like 이순신 or 세종대왕 or 태조 with maps, writings, routes, commands, and inventions. I want to soak in your legends and stand in both disbelief and understanding as your past informs your present. And I want to do all of this from the comfort of my computer. Does this already exist, Korea? If so, point me there and I will remain your biggest fan.
And so to the name. The people who bring you this all thought that the Korean Digital Library should be named something that is easy to remember. In all their infinite wisdom and their utter lack of sarcasm, they have brought you this:
So, anyone who works there is a Dibrarian. Rules for the Dibrary: Loud talking will result in death. Returning overdue materials will result in admonishment. And then death. Death is the constant in the Dibrary. Accept this.
Yes, this is another post on digital library type resources that I find, for lack of a better term, cool. Further, it is another example of a digital humanities center doing some interesting things with multimedia and technology. There are several examples of these so I won’t bore you with a review of the rest, but the one at Columbia University is among my personal favorites.
The Columbia Center for New Media, Teaching, and Learning (CNMTL) has done some amazing work and you should subscribe to their blog if you want to learn about a constant array of interesting projects. For African-American History Month they have produced some awfully good projects, including (descriptive text taken from CNMTL’s website):
The Amistad Digital Resource is a multimedia website that shares hundreds of rare and iconic photographs, audio and video clips, oral history interviews, maps, and descriptive text explaining significant themes and key events in African American history, from slavery to the 21st century.
Mapping the African American Past (MAAP) is a public website created to enhance the appreciation and study of significant sites and moments in the history of African Americans in New York from the early 17th-century through the recent past.
Southside Chicago is a research archive that provides students with direct experience in social science research. This project is part of the Urban Research Workshop (URW), which is analyzing Chicago‘s Southside black communities, with particular focus on changes in these communities since the early 1990s.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X Multimedia Study Enivronment (MSE)*presents Malcolm X’s memoir with links to critical annotations that provide perspectives beyond the written word. This MSE provides four “lenses,” or perspectives, that illuminate the political, cultural, global, and faith-based aspects of Malcolm X’s life and legacy.
The one that most interests me is Mapping the African American Past (MAAP). It is a really well designed multimedia exploration of contextual materials explaining the history of African Americans in the New York City area; the archival materials are amazing and sit quite well with many of the other narrative constructs, especially the maps.
In my opinion, this is part of the realization that made Google Maps and Google Earth so exciting when it first appeared (and still now). There was this promise that I would be able to make my own maps and tell my story. All good stories sit in a time and a place and these maps (much like these on MAAP) allow stories to be told in context. You can see the streetcar, not just read a description. I can see Lenox Avenue and look at what used to be Seneca Village and understand a little more clearly the life at the time.
Also, like all good multimedia explorations worth their salt, there are quite a few learning activities designed to incorporate these materials into the classroom. If interested, be sure to give them a look. I especially found the section on the role of African Americans in building New York quite interesting and suspect that Howard Zinn would have been proud.
The images above are taken from the Mapping the African American Past website. They include a map of Wall Street (constructed by African Americans), Harriet Tubman and family, and Langston Hughes.
In the spirit of Langston Hughes, I will leave you with my favorite poem of his. It is titled Democracy and although it is not specific to this project from Columbia University nor New York City in particular, it does fit well with the spirit of equality.
“Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.
I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.
I want to confess that I am a huge Sugar fan. I love Husker Du as well, but let me stress that the Bob Mould-led trio of Sugar was the essence of everything I listened to in high school (circa 1992-1993 in particular). Sugar’s album Copper Blue was one of the greatest albums of my youth and I literally bought it for the fifth time at Princeton Record Exchange about six months ago.* Why five times? Clumsiness, trust in friends to return it, and general carelessness on my parts when moving from place to place (thank you Korean Post).
I remember falling for a girl simply because she loved Sugar, but that was then (1994). Now is now and my love for Sugar is eternal, knowing no limits or bounds. So, in the spirit of cooperative friendship I bring you a few tracks from an EP they released immediately after Copper Blue. Click to listen, but be sure to enjoy.
* Princeton Record Exchange is an amazing record store full of young kids working the store who think they know all about all things hip only to shudder when you walk to the cashier with five CDs from their bargain bin ranging from Manu Chao to George Gershwin. Generally, they think they personally discovered ‘music’, but I don’t argue as I love their selection. I chuckle as they struggle to come to grips with their pseudo-counter-culturalism’s resistance to swiping my credit card and I giggle more when they disdainfully give me the slip to sign. But it is all worth it. Truly one of the last great record stores. Even the New York Times think so. Give the article a read.
File this one under “How did I not know this was within striking distance of my home?”
I stand in amazement at the number of small, medium, and large museums and archives that dot the East Coast of the United States. They are everywhere and have absolute treasure troves for those who love all things original, ancient, or primary (source).
I will add another to my list. The name of the museum is the Rosenbach Museum and Library. It can be found at 2008 Delancey Street in the center of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It houses a number of wonderful individual collections with materials ranging from (text from the museum’s site):
Bram Stoker: notes and outlines for Dracula
George Washington: more than one hundred personal letters;
Lewis Carroll: more than 600 letters, his rarest photographs, books, and more;
William Blake: original drawings and books;
Cervantes: an extremely rare copy of the first edition of Don Quixote and documents in Cervantes’s hand;
Phillis Wheatley: first editions of the first book published by an African American;
Thomas Jefferson: an inventory of his slaves;
Charles Dickens: the largest surviving portions of the manuscripts for Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby;
Joseph Conrad: manuscripts for two-thirds of his literary works, including Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent;
Dylan Thomas: the manuscript and typescript for Under Milk Wood
Marianne Moore: manuscripts and letters. Her living room from her Greenwich Village apartment is recreated in its entirety in the museum.
However, the real reason I am intrigued (if I were talking to you face to face, I would say intrigued as all get out) is the autographed manuscript they have of James Joyce’s Ulysses from 1920 (predating the publication of the book by a few years). If you can, please be sure to check it out online at their collections page for Ulysses, but I provided a rudimentary screenshot below.
"Aeolus,” the seventh episode of Ulysses, takes place in the offices of a Dublin newspaper. Taken from the Rosenbach Museum at http://www.rosenbach.org/learn/collections/james-joyces-ulysses.
They have supplementary materials for the Ulysses collection that contextualize the manuscript a bit. This seems appropriate as Ulysses was so incredibly situated in time and space, so rooted on that day (June 16, 1904) and in that city (Dublin). This was intentional on Joyce’s part, judging by this now legendary quote:
“I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”
That is just about right. The beginning (sort of) and end locations of the story, the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom, takes place at 7 Eccles Street. Unfortunately, this particular location no longer exists, but not to worry as the Rosenbach Museum has thought of that.
In 1950, Harvard archaeology professor Phil Phillips captured one of the only known photographs of 7 Eccles St., Dublin—the Blooms’ fictional home—as an inhabited house. Taken from the Rosenbach Museum at http://www.rosenbach.org/learn/collections/james-joyces-ulysses.
Brilliant. There are plenty of other materials to keep you entertained in the Rosenbach Museum so be sure to give them your patronage if passing through the Philadelphia area. Or show them some social media love by following their Twitter or Facebook channels, or even read their blog. Or even all three.
Either way, get thee to a copy of Ulysses and the Rosenbach Museum and savor the following quote.
“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” -James Joyce
Or perhaps savor that my name (like a dime a dozen in Ireland) is found in the book in the scene where Stephen Daedalus is perusing through Leopold’s Bloom stacks of (decidedly normal, somewhat respectable) books and starts cataloging them in his head. He encounters this one and reads the inscription (taken from Google Books):
“Short but yet Plain Elements of Geometry written in French by F. Ignat. Pardies and rendered into English by John Harris…Having ink calligraphed statement on the flyleaf certifying that the book was the property of Michael Gallagher, dated this 10th day of May 1822 and requefting the perfon who should find it, if the book should be loft or gone aftray, to reftore it to Michael Gallagher, carpenter, Dufery Gate, Ennifcorthym county Wicklow, the fineft place in the world.”
So there it is. County Wicklow in Ireland must be the finest place in the world as I said close to 200 years ago. Wondering about the odd-looking f’s in that paragraph? Those were the old type-set s’s. You can see when the typeset was corrected using the Data for Research service. Just do a search for it.
A mixed bag to say the least and often a real missed opportunity. National Libraries are meant to be spaces for presenting the story of a nation contextually. All the material is there; it becomes a matter of piecing it all together systematically and coherently. Every nation has a story worth telling, but like any other story it often gets garbled in the telling.
I will point to the British Library (and Museum) as a notable exception. They generally provide a clean interface (nothing fancy, just clean and easy on the eyes) and get daring with certain aspects of the site. Good lesson there for aspiring web designers; not everything has to be daring, just reserve a space for innovation and people will know what to expect.
I saw a Twitter post from them about a new interactive timeline they have just released that seems quite useful for teaching and learning. It explores about 800 years of historical texts, including (copy taken from the site):
Manuscripts by Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Mozart, Beethoven, Wordsworth, Florence Nightingale and Dickens
Original records from the Black Death and the Great Fire to the French Revolution and the abolition of the slave trade
The first printed book of the western world, the first cookery manuscript, the first English bible and the first postage stamp
Posters, advertisements and illustrations documenting everything from public executions and magic shows to plague cures and séances
In other words, neato.
I did a screen recording of the timeline, which is available from the Learning News & Event page. I was impressed overall as the facets were useful in limiting the scope, the tools for investigating the objects were stable enough and it allowed a variety of ways to contextualize everything. It is rather resource intensive (ie a touch taxing on my fading desktop), but that is a minor gripe.
From my experience as a teacher/learner, I find it is significant as a tool for contextualization. It allows students to place disparate items/facts/texts/ in the context of a chronological narrative. It draws associations, creates a narrative, that sort of thing. I could see this being used in classes quite naturally as I am under the impression that learning most easily takes place when ideas are presented in time and space. It is natural to want to slot ideas in a linear narrative and a good teacher will be able to interject when it is necessary to interject doubt (just because something follows something chronologically, doesn’t mean they are causally related).
The British Library also has a host of other materials for teachers and students that I found useful, including some interactive items like creating your own Sacred Book. There are large collections of images that would be useful for teachers especially.
As always when presenting so much diverse content, navigation becomes an issue. Good collections/images are buried 10 clicks in to the site, making it unlikely that students would be inclined to find their way in (or more importantly, work their way out). I am not sure of an alternative to this, though; hopefully smarter people than myself are working on it. Perhaps an Open API would allow for others to rearrange and present content in ways meaningful to them. Perhaps this could happen at a district or consortial level where online resources are created across a host of resources in a contextually based format (adhering to their specific learning objectives). Either way, when presenting historical content an interactive timeline is always a good first step.
Either way, huzzah (imagine my hand going up there) to the British Library!
In the spirit of genealogy, families, and connectedness, I have turned my attention momentarily away from the pursuit of all things Gallagher and towards my wife’s distinguished family tree.
My wife’s surname is Hyun (현 or 玄), but she is descended from the Seo (서 or 徐) family of Daegu, Korea. The Seo family was of relative importance in the area around the turn of the 20th century. The patriarch of this family was a man named 서상돈, whose picture is above. 서상돈 (Seo Sang Don) was a merchant whose family moved from Seoul to Daegu in his early youth. He made a small fortune in textiles (or so it seems) and then worked in local government for some time.
서상돈
He also seems to have some patriotic appeal for Koreans as well. Korea at this time (until 1945) was a Japanese colony and there was some resistance occuring in various parts of the (then unified) peninsula. Kim Il Sung’s family was supposedly slaying Japanese (and American sailors) with their bare hands and a host of other liberation movement and future Korean leaders were establishing their bonafides. 서상돈 went a different route.
서상돈 helped organize and execute something called the National Debt Repayment Movement (국채보상운동을), which attempted to develop some economic self-reliance to avoid relying completely on the Bank of Japan for funding (often at rates deemed extortionate by Koreans). Overall, this movement failed, but it was remembered fondly enough by Koreans in Daegu to build a park (국채보상운동기념공원이다) dedicated to the movement and to include a bust of 서상돈, my wife’s great-great grandfather.
서상돈 in all his bodyless glory
Also of interest to this 서 family is their Catholicism. The family was Catholic stretching back to at least 서상돈’s grandfather, which places that towards the beginning decades of the 19th century. The history of Catholicism in Korea (or of any Christian religion) is complex (it still is). Generally, it is believed to have started with a convert named 이승훈 (Yi Sung-Hun) who was baptized in China and returned with Catholic texts and materials. He was later executed in 1801. If interested, there is a decent historical overview available at the Chon Jin Am site.
The Korean Catholic Church did not receive any foreign (French) priests until 1836, so it stands to reason that the 서 (Seo) family converted a bit before then. They luckily managed to escape the persecutions that followed (several), especially the Byeonmin Persectuion of 1866. This particular persecution (thousands were executed) is the basis of the Jeoldusan Martyr’s Museum, an interesting museum in Seoul of Korean Catholic history. I suspect this is part of the reason that the Seo family moved from Seoul to Daegu when 서상돈 was younger.
서상돈 in cartoon form
Besides, you know you are relatively famous in Korea (and Asia) when they put you in cartoon form.
Note: the research here is as sketchy as my rudimentary Korean. Please feel free to let me know if I have misquoted or am erroneous in any of my conclusions.
I have been doing some thinking about modern literacies recently. What does it mean to be literate in an information driven world? Does literacy pertain to technological skills, the ability to navigate a series of systems and tools? Does literacy refer to traditional textual literacy, the ability to read, write, and disseminate textual information? Or is there a heightened social intelligence that is necessary to be considered truly literate?
I don’t have answers to any of these questions, but I am encouraged that people are starting to ask them. The discussion above has been prompted by technological change; a series of tools and services that have allowed us to do things we would have otherwise not been able to do. One aspect of this shift that I find most interesting is the approachability of the previously unapproachable, those bastions of what it was to be considered genius, talented, refined.
Rigmarole aside, I am referring to music. The ability to compose and perform music.
In other times, those skills would haven’t been synonymous, but they would have been more logically linear than they are now. When Mozart composed a concerto, there was the expectation that he could perform the work as well. We have evidence there of a conceptual and technical acumen. An idea translated into a skill.
A piano, aka another musical instrument I can't play.
To compose and to perform were always separate entities; traditionally, they have blended into some sort of composite. I would think less of my favorite bands if they couldn’t perform the songsthat they composed. As well as my relatives. It just wouldn’t seem right.
But they really are separate skills. To compose is to construct, to author. To play is to recite, to recreate. They are different. And now technology has blown those two things apart a bit further.
A piano application for the iPhone.
It is conceivable that I can create music without any ability whatsoever to play it. I can string together sounds using tools (perhaps this was always the case?) and never have to produce those sounds on the actual instruments themselves (the non-virtual ones).
In the inverse, I might be able to play without ever being able to compose. This seems to be the case for most musicians now. They are recreative practitioners.
Does technology make music more accessible? Does this represent a leveling of a previously unassailable field? I believe so. I have apps for my iTouch that can attest to this for music, art, and photography.
One is reaching a point where limitations exist only in one’s mind. What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this technological coil.
For this Thursday, I bring you music from two favorites of mine. Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate are absolute legengs in Africa, both hailing from Mali.
Below are the two tracks followed by some explanatory text of why the music is so good. Just click on the link to listen or right click to download.
Diabate is descended from griots; Ali Farka Toure is not. Diabate is from the south of Mali around Bamako; Ali Farka Toure is from the arid north around Timbuktu. They met and recorded an album (relatively soon before Ali Farka Toure died) called In the Heart of the Moon. It is a classic and an album that serves as a perfect introduction to the music of West Africa.
It is hard not to tap your foot and imagine a summer dusk when listening. Jen and I would drive all around the rural areas of central New Jersey in the summer with the windows down, this music playing, and we felt our imagination take hold. Excellent music. Below is some explanatory text for the album:
“The duet album, In the Heart of the Moon, brings together two different traditions in Malian music. Toure plays rural desert blues and comes from the Sonrai tradition of Northern Mali, while Diabate, a griot, is influenced by the Mande tradition of Southern Mali that dates back to the thirteenth century.
The two artists found common ground by recording music from the 1950s and 1960s that developed during Mali’s struggle for independence from France. Recorded in just six hours, In the Heart of the Moon is, according to an Irish Times correspondent, “stunning by virtue of its relative simplicity and subtlety,” and the album was deemed by All Music Guide’s Thom Jurek as “nothing short of remarkable.”
“Prolific inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) has had a profound impact on modern life. In his lifetime, the “Wizard of Menlo Park” patented 1,093 inventions, including the phonograph, the kinetograph (a motion picture camera), and the kinetoscope (a motion picture viewer). The collections in the Library of Congress’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division contain an extraordinary range of the surviving products of Edison’s entertainment inventions and industries. This site features 341 motion pictures, 81 disc sound recordings, and other related materials, such as photographs and original magazine articles. “
These recordings are brilliant and a must witness for any teacher, student, curious onlooker, or amateur historian. The quality is good, the audio crisp (relatively), and the images are clear (if a bit on the compact side).
I am including some that I enjoyed below as they really are worth a look. If interested, you can view the entire list of motion pictures available.
The above video shows Johannesburg, South Africa in 1917.
The above video shows a Chinese Funeral Procession in San Francisco in 1903.
The above shows the funeral procession for President William McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz.
From a historical perspective, it is hard to imagine a world without moving images and recorded sound, as if life were a series of still frames. As a (former) teacher, I am especially curious how that influenced the classroom dynamic and the ability of the students’ to piece together pieces into a larger, fluid coherent whole.
I think back to the events that I saw unfold live from my youth (and adulthood): the Towers collapsing on 9/11 (with my wife in Seoul), the Challenger Shuttle exploding (live from my elementary school classroom), the Berlin Wall falling (as a high school student), the Tiananmen Square Uprising, even the 2002 World Cup in Seoul (the sheer spectacle of it). Most of that was captured forever for me in film, a series of moving images. We heard the cheers, the jeers, the screams; we saw the emotion, the passion, the despair, the fortitude, the tragedy. It forever burned itself into our memory.
To think there was a time when this multimedia did not exist is conceptually possible, if emotionally distant. To think that Americans imagined the Civil War through newspaper descriptions (if at all), that the only music one would hear in a lifetime would be performed live. That sheet music was the equivalent of an MP3.
So, I will leave you with a few audio tracks from the Edison Collection that I actually enjoyed (not just as a historical curiosity). Yes, the first one I actually searched for; I always plug in my name to these types of things. Just click on it to listen or right click to download it to your computer.
Be sure to visit the Collection at the Library of Congress to pay due respect to their fine work. If you can spare the time, the American Memory Project is a good way to lose hours upon hours of your time wrapped in historical bliss.
Last year roughly at this time, I participated in the The Genographic Project at the National Geographic. It was a project designed to “chart new knowledge about the migratory history of the human species by using sophisticated laboratory and computer analysis of DNA contributed by hundreds of thousands of people from around the world.”
It is a five year project and all participants (at least in certain developed nations with the economical means) were expected to purchase a kit to test their DNA. Basically, you swab the inside of your mouth, seal a tube, and mail it in. Easy as that.
The one I took was a male specific test. Results identify the ethnic and geographic origin of the paternal line. Not to bore you with science, but it included a balanced panel of twelve Y-chromosome Short Tandem Repeat, STR, markers. It is used to affirm or disprove a genealogical connection on the direct paternal line. When another person shows identical results within our database, you are contacted (if you opt in). Just in case, you thought I was smart, I took most of the last paragraph from the company that offers the test.
The screenshots above will show how my genetic markers made their way from Africa towards Spain and Ireland. In layman’s terms, awesome.
Granted, there were privacy concerns and the general consensus of Hollywood that all DNA testing leads to cloning (and eventual Gallagher zombies, perhaps?), but I soldiered on in the name of science. This was all a year ago.
This past year, I stumbled across a website dedicated to Gallaghers the world over and saw an entry for the Gallagher Geneaology Project and was intrigued if only to know that Gallaghers were capable of organizing anything. This way led on to way and I realized that the test I had submitted to National Geographic could perform double duty for the Gallagher Geneaology Project as well.
Long story short, I submitted my test to this project. It was accepted and put against the database of thousands of other Gallaghers who also submitted to the project. My results were further cross-checked against the entire database to see if I had exact matches outsie my family name. The results were fascinating as all 98 of the exact matches (12 point-not absolutely definitive, but close) did not share my family name.
Another set of 12 marker matches with a genetic distance of 1 (not as strong a match as the 98 mentioned before, but still quite strong) were produced and those were all Gallaghers. I have no idea what to make of any of this, but I am absoltuely hooked on geneaology now.
If interested, give a look at Family Tree DNA, the organization that provides the test, the database, and the research.
Below is a chart from the Gallagher Clan site showing the breakdown on Gallagher households in Irish countries from 1848-1864 (post famine). Donegal it is, then. Endlessly fascinating.
I am returning home from the American Library Association Midwinter Conference in 2010. We just pulled into Mystic, Connecticut (yes, from Mystic Pizza) and I wanted to remark how pleasant the whole train experience has been. It is remarkably different than the last time I took the train to Boston, a much more heavily traveled route and I am assuming more efficient.
I had a good time in Boston, mostly at the site visits I did at Brookline High School and Emerson College. Good sessions, good people, good energy.
More importantly, I am now headed home to my wife, to my bed,to my routine. I am starting back at the University of Edinburgh today so I might be a little quiet on the blog front as I get my academic bearings back.
On a parting note, the Long Island Sound at dusk is gorgeous. All these boats are moored and the water stretches forever. Now pulling into New London, Connecticut. Time to stare out the window a bit more and daydream.
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. -Hamlet
Vincent Van Gogh bounded within his infinite space. Van Gogh painted Starry Night from an asylum in Saint-Remy in 1889. Retrieved November 2, 2009, from http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/starryindex.html.
Once again, Hamlet refers to dreams (in this instance, as a negative). This is a statement of learning self-assessment. Hamlet could live blissfully ignorant were it not for this nagging consciousness of this other reality, this smooth space. It demands attention and wants to to break out. It is vast and omnipresent and interferes with the existing learning construct.
So what is the role of this bad dream? It is a bit of new information that intuitively feels important (intuition as learning). We just know it is important when we see it. Hamlet not only saw it. He heard it, interacted with it, let it consume him. Learning-wise, this bad dream is bad because it challenges existing constructs; it runs against the grain of an established worldview. It simply doesn’t interact well with existing filters. This requires creative destruction. Filters must be torn down and rebuilt; with each iteration, the filters become more refined and aligned with the learning reality of the individual. It is the scientific method; each successive iteration produces something better.
Failure is also recognized as a highly powerful learning tool; each iteration is an admission that the previous one didn’t work or has simply outlived its use. In project management circles, this might be seen as fast failure, that desire to eliminate erroneous logic or constructs early and often. Learning is essentially a push for fast failure. Hamlet recognizes the impact of “bad dreams” on existing paradigms; it essentially causes them to fail. These bad dreams are the ethos of smooth spaces; they are limitless possibility informing striated logic. Hamlet cannot continue on with the new information he has. Things must change.
The play’s the thing,
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. -Hamlet
Play is the creative, seemingly illogical pursuit of knowledge simply because it is interesting. There is no obvious reward, no pragmatic gain; it is simply the pursuit of fun. Creativity is encouraged precisely because there is not inherent structure; stimulation is provided from the bright sun of sheer limitless possibility. Within that space, the learner is free to pursue whatever strikes their fancy. However, with each successive choice, with each point visited, a path begins to emerge. A logic will begin to be applied and a striation will appear. When confronted with this limitless smooth reality once again, sheer possibility will dazzle the learner into playful exploration. Our inherent curiosity as humans demands this.
In play, realities are forged from dreams, even bad ones. This oscillation between the smooth and the striated, this meandering path between infinite points in an open environment is revealing. It reveals the learning faculty of the individual; it reveals the structure of their worldview.
I thought some upbeat numbers would help us all move through the cold and lack of sunlight and lethargy for this Wednesday, January 13th, 2010. I like both of these bands not so much for the musical ability, but for their ability to stay upbeat (and even on beat). The bands are We Were Promised Jetpacks and The Go Team. Nothing too earth shattering here, just good clean fun all around. And yes, one of those photos above is not like the others.
I appreciate both the names of these bands, if only for giggles. Not unlike I appreciate Throw Me The Statue. Just click on the link to give it a listen and head to iTunes if you like their music.
I will be doing a few site visits for some teaching and informational sessions, meeting some very enthusiastic librarians and other information professionals, and manning the exhibition booth with a steadfast determination and a smile. I will be heading back late Monday.
In hindsight, I suppose I should have made the music for this post Boston-themed. Hmm. I could have included The Lemonheads, Morphine, The Pixies. Perhaps another time. Just pretend that you can hear that music now and it will be yours.
We are awash in information. We drowning in our communication channels. We have access to everything so we can process nothing. All is lost.
I don’t believe that. I imagine most of you don’t either. What I do wonder is how memory and cognition play in to discernment, that ability to identify and extract information from the noise. Does it have an upper limit?
Let me take stock of my own channels. Twitter (x2), Facebook (x2), Blog (x2), Google Alerts, Flickr, LinkedIn, even email. A fair amount of incoming data and these are mostly textual streams (except Flickr). Many more to include for other multimedia.
Each of these channels have their own natural modes of etiquette and rhythms. We enter these worlds, participate, and adhere to these cultures by abiding by them (to a point; utility still trumps cultural norms-I use Twitter as an instant messenger quite a bit). Despite the uniqueness of each channel, the multitude of tones across channels often blends to noise.
I immediately think of George Miller and the magic number 7. Miller’s “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information“, published in 1956, espoused that general human memory is limited to remembering seven objects, plus or minus two. Miller himself was not sure if this was just coincidence or something to do with the regularity of the number seven in various constructs, but it does not matter.
My table and seven (+-2) objects for discussion. AKA, my camel and a few other things.
We catalog information bearing this number in mind; website designers tend to not have more than seven options at any given juncture in an interface. In the United States, telephone numbers were exactly seven digits long for this purpose (sans area code).
Miller made allowances for chunking, that is putting objects or numbers in particular orders or grouped together to aid with association which in turn led to greater recall. Three is a likely chunk and social security numbers in the United States are a further example of chunking (123-456-789). Even with chunking, the social security numbers are within the +-seven calculation that Miller put forth.
The only chunk I care to commit to memory. Chunk from The Goonies.
Is this upper level of seven applicable to learning? Are there upper limits to the layering of learning? Are we limited by our senses, or some combination of sensory perception? Are seven channels (give or take two) enough or too much?
I suspect that the answer to this will depend on reconstituting these channels into a larger construct (a group project using different multimedia to create a presentation or report, for example). However, does this filtering process, this general discernment, sit with the student or the teacher? Won’t the teacher inherently gravitate towards some and avoid others and subsequently pass that along in their instruction?
If memory is limited to seven objects (plus or minus two) then is the amount of input itself limited to this number? If everything after seven is regulated to noise, can complexity in learning be truly represented?
Alright you smart people, what's changed? My camel moves for no man. Only my wife.
“A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.” -W.H. Auden
Taylor in Living Digitally provides an interesting mention of lucid dreaming in response to users in these virtual worlds lending their agency to body-representations and willingly interacting with others who have done the same (50). I am intrigued by this lucid dreaming and think it has some application. A lucid dream by definition is one where the individual is aware that they are dreaming and can, in some instances, even manipulate the outcome of the dream.
Charles Dickens' Lucid Dream, full of characters and permutations and thousands of different exchanges.
#1 In order to enter a lucid dream, one needs to be asleep first. There is a lack of awareness (asleep) before there is awareness (lucid dream). One must first willingly enter into a state of unawareness. In Second Life, this might be the initial phase of avatar creation and exploration.
#2 After falling asleep, the individual then dreams (of the non-lucid variety). The individual is not controlling the dream and is not aware that they are dreaming. This is a distillation of their waking reality. This is living in Second Life as a living individual, fully embodied and blissfully unaware of any parallel activity elsewhere.
#3 Within this dream, the individual enters into a state of lucidity. They are aware that they are dreaming and may be able to control the outcome of the dream. Once I developed purpose (academically) in Second Life, then a lucid calm entered into my participation. I began to see the man behind the curtain, but still participated. I lucidly assumed two roles, one as participant and one as observer.
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” -T.E. Lawrence.
This being aware of self as participant and observer has cultural implications. To my own mind, it feels like a dualism, a split. How am I to be two conscious entities at the same time? What concessions will my role as participant make to my role as observer? How can an immaterial mind cause anything in a material body, and vice-versa? These are all questions that apply to our participation in Second Life, especially as a conscious participant. We inform the body (the brain) with our immaterial mind; our body informs our mind with feedback from this participation and all the while we are consciously aware. I hesitate to refer to this as a momentary suspension of disbelief; we are not disbelieving. A momentary suspension of corporeal reality might be more appropriate. We choose to participate and we know that. Once we realize that, we begin to observe. Once we observe, we are aware of our participation and these seemingly competing roles emerge.
It is not a mental split for everyone, however. If one uses Buddhism, this is a conscious moment of being an observer and a conscious one of being a participant and they are melded in the present. They are destroyed when the next pairing come along to represent the next moment, but the two conscious states are not mutually exclusive. They co-exist without any perceived detriment to the overall perception of reality. A lucid dream is a good analogy here; for the Buddhist mind, participation in Second Life would be a combination of moments of consciousness all intertwined in the immediacy of the present.
Pics from Nairobi Heritage & Technology Symposium http://bit.ly/c7vBtS. Rock Art, GIS, digitization, and preservation of African Heritage. 13 hours ago
