Familiar Strangers

The old lady with the gum shoes

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:59:00 +0000

(Image from flickr)

In the last year of my genealogy work, I have come across a couple of stereotypes of genealogy work and genealogists which I would like to dispel.

First, I find that a lot of people assume that I am interested in tracing my family as far back as possible. While this is perhaps the goal of some genealogists, I am not really particularly interested in this. The reality is that once you get past the record-obsessed 19th century, you are swimming in murky waters as far as genealogy is concerned. In England, you can have some luck with parish and apprenticeship records before that time, but it is dicey. With common names, you have very little evidence that the William you found is actually the William you are looking for. It is highly circumstantial evidence, based on some educated guesses about birth dates and location and parental names. So while I do play around with these 18th century mysteries, I know that they are the most vulnerable entries in my trees. I treat them with emotional distance. I get far more passionate about the 19th century cohort, for whom records abound. For these people, I can actually piece together a fairly decent understanding of their lives and their families. The story becomes much more than something that can be captured on a genealogical pedigree chart.

The second common misconception I encounter is that I am interested in tracing my family back to royalty or some other significant person of fame. There are a few near-famous people on the tree, but what makes them interesting in my mind is that I can find out lots about them. Notoriety is a good way to ensure that you will be remembered well. These people provide the clearest window into a time and place because the time and place promoted them to a position worthy of writing about. I don't find my self-concept particularly enhanced by the presence of these people in my family. I think, however, that many of the genealogists of the past were, in fact, interested primarily in making a connection to fame. In the time before computers and the Internet, a famous relative probably meant a mother lode of information about the family which was available in no other place. Now, however, with the mass digitization of vital records, information about our common ancestors is easily accessed. Databases are great equalizers.

Another common stereotype (held even by me) is that most genealogists are retired men and women who, facing the denouement of their lives, have taken to history for a little excitement. Since I am almost exclusively an internet genealogist, I don't often meet in person the people with whom I correspond. My sense is, however, that given the current popularity of family history research, today's genealogists have little in common with each other other than an interest in poking around in their family's past. Again, I suspect that the old lady with the gum shoes stereotype derives from the pre-computer days when genealogy research required a serious time and money investment and retired people had significant quantities of both. Now a genealogist is simply someone with enough money for genealogy software and internet access and enough interest to type a forebearer's name into Google.

So then if I am not interested in tracing my line back to Adam, finding famous people, or looking for a little historical context before I take the big snooze, why am I so bloody obsessed with genealogy? Well, I can't quite say that this has nothing to do with my mortality. It has everything to do with placing my life within the rhythms of human history. This gives me a connection to the bigger picture of humanity and human foibles. Famous relatives aren't a big draw because it is the complications of so-called normalcy which interest me. I recently discovered that my great-great-great-grandmother had an illegitimate daughter before she was married. Her name was Emma and when the family emigrated to Canada from Cornwall, her illegitimacy was obscured because she was passed off as the legitimate daughter of my g-g-g-grandparents. (The secrets of the past are easily revealed when birth, marriage, and death certificates are all searchable…) Emma died young, only to be replaced in the family by the second illegitimate Emma, born to my great-great-grandaunt. Neither Emma shows up in family photos, although there are several which have survived from that time. To me, the story of the illegitimate Emmas is far more interesting than any knight, earl, or prince ancestor. Emma is important because she reminds me of permanent struggle of humanity: sometimes we don't always do what our communities and families want us to do and sometimes we pay the price for these transgressions. Our lives are complex and genealogy reminds me that this complexity is nothing new. Tempted as we are to think that we are better or worse off than our ancestors, we are not. Some things have changed, but others are not and it is the constant redrawing of this line between what is different and what it the same which keeps me interested, addicted and obsessed.

The past, the other, the virtual

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:26:00 +0000

Boiling it down, the basic premise for my project about internet genealogy will be a reflection on how the digitization of so many historical records affects our understanding about the past.

I guess that the hidden assumption here is that communication media are as important to an interpretation of the past as the content of that media. The availability of historical records online has radically changed the practice of genealogy. Even as little as ten years ago, anyone who wanted to seriously pursue genealogy or family history had to spend a lot of time doing grueling searches on microfilm in deathly quiet archives. While this is sometimes still necessary (a lot still has yet to be digitized), there is plenty available online to keep a researcher going. And it grows everyday. What is available online is usually both indexed and searchable. Some genealogy websites even search automatically for records relating to individuals on your trees. A lot of the basic research becomes effortless.

I think that the immediacy of these historical documents has done two things to my perception of the past. First, it has forced me to seriously question my assumptions about the past, particularly assumptions about the roles that women played in society. I think that is a rather common assumption that before the mid-twentieth century, women stayed at home and looked after children and the household. Of course, this is mostly true, but not totally correct, particularly in Victorian England. I cannot tell you how many examples I have come across of women who were masters accepting apprentices, women who worked in factories, women who worked at home, and women who had non-traditional occupations such as "warehouse manager". Similarly, I have found plenty of evidence that women had sex before marriage (the records don't lie), that they married younger men ALL the time, and that they sent their children to "daycare"(i.e., old women in the neighbourhood looking to support themselves). The past was not as simple as we want it to be. I have thought a lot about why we have such monolithic ideas about what previous generations have done. For one, I think we are restricted by living memory. The past is only what is accessible through our parents and, to a certain degree, through our grandparents. Living memory can, at the most, only account for about 100 years. More importantly, however, I realized that the past is a critical tool for understanding the present and it works best when it is either something that should be emulated or something that should never be repeated. We need the rhetorical "other" of the past to understand ourselves. I can only understand myself as a working mother in contrast to my mother and my grandmother who were stay-at-home mothers. A great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother who took over the family factory when her husband died gets lost in the need for a stronger, more diametric rhetorical need to position the present as "new and different". Through my ability to access historical documents online, however, these assumptions have started to break down for me, and break down further the more research that I do and the more mistakes that I make based on faulty assumptions. For me, this is an enjoyable part of the process -- it is like travelling without leaving the living room. I'm constantly setting myself aside and trying to reposition myself in that culture so that I can understand.

The second change that I have noticed in my conception in my past has to do with my understanding of "lifetime". One day, I busily clicking on buttons to automatically fill in my tree with new, distant cousins, I realized that I was filling in a hundred years of history in less than five minutes. I was skipping over generous lifetimes in a mere second. When I realized this, I thought about my own lifetime and how intractable and whole it seems to me, and how I too will at one point become a set of dates on someone tree, the whole of my lifetime boiled down into dates. It shocked me and made me feel callous -- surely these people deserve more of my time than a click of the button allows. It made me think of the Star Trek episode where Captain Picard experiences a lifetime virtually in a physically small span of time, the difference being, of course, that my virtual experience was NOT providing me with the true essence of this lifetime. The human details get easily lost in the big picture.

I'm not sure where I am going with this, but ideas are welcome!

About the photo:

Jessie Alexander was my great-great-great-aunt. Or something like this. She led an unusual life for a woman of that time. She was a well-known elocutionist in Canada who travelled throughout the country giving performances in the late 19th and early 20th century. She married her elocution professor later in life and had one child. She wrote two books with her elocution sketches. If I ever write a biography on one of my relatives, she's going to be the one!

Heard it through the grapevine

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Sun, 25 May 2008 22:16:00 +0000

Two weeks ago when I dropped Kai, my son, off at the daycare, his best friend Jean-Pierre had a ponytail on the top of his head. The daycare woman explained to me that Jean-Pierre's older sister had a ponytail and when Jean-Pierre saw this, he wouldn't leave the house until he had one too. A few days later, when I picked Kai up at the end of the day, he had a ponytail at the top of his head. And so did all of the other boys in the daycare. Every day since all of the boys have had ponytails and Kai gets mad at me when I take his out at the end of the day. A trend has been born!

Anyone who has raised a child knows that they are programmed to imitate, sometimes embarrassingly so. It isn't so surprising then that we still are prone to imitation as adults, is it? This is a particularly productive skill for us as children. And yet as I have read through papers on the word-of-mouth phenomenon I have rarely seen mention of this developmental skill. Again, I have to wonder if these people have children!

I have to admit that I am pretty fascinated by the notion of ideas as viruses. Jean-Pierre's ponytail certainly started an epidemic in the daycare. But why? Presumably there were other ideas to which the kids have been exposed which they haven't adopted. (For instance, Kai refuses to brush his teeth, although we have tried to model this for him on several occasions.)

In the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell would argue that ideas become viral based on their 'stickiness'. Perhaps. I'm sure that the two-year-olds could sense that the adults around them thought that boys wearing ponytails was funny. Gladwell also argues that there are people who are 'connectors' and who are 'mavens' and these people are responsible for the speedy transmission of messages through networks. These are people who wield more power in networks than others. In the world of the daycare, the role of connectors and mavens is probably flattened by the fact that a two-years-old's world is much more limited than an adults. They simply don't have contact with as many people. So every kid becomes a connector and a maven simply because the network is small and there are strong ties between all of the children. They are all information generalists.

I think that maybe the mechanism by which ideas are transmitted becomes somewhat clearer when we look specifically at the transmission of messages or information within human networks. Lin (2001) argues that "social capital facilitates the flow of information" (p. 7). Make sense. After all, information is a valuable commodity which we can give quite simply to our friends.

In an afterword to the latest edition of his book, Gladwell states that many people have asked him how the tipping point functions in a world of email. Surely, his readers have suggested, we don't need connectors and mavens in the world of viral communications. Gladwell believes that email doesn't change much. I would agree with him that it is likely that there are individuals who play important roles in the transmission of messages across networks, even in email-driven networks. However, I think that how a network communicates will in turn affect how the network functions and is composed. In the world of small children, networks communicate primarily by sight and in-person communication. As we get older, we become more adept at using information and communications technologies. Being a technological determinist, I can't help but think that the medium has to influence the message transmission.

For instance, it was presumably hard to extend social capital with telegraph. In the age of the telegraph, messages were condensed to as few as words as possible. I can't imagine that many people made friends via the telegraph (except perhaps the telegraph operators). With its immediacy, the telephone made connecting and staying connected easier. Still, long distance connections were limited by cost, and transmission of messages across the network was prone to severe degradation. The childhood game called 'telephone' alludes to this instability of the telephone message. Children sit in a circle and one person whispers a message to the person next to him or her. That person whispers the message to the next person, etc. By the time the message completes the circle it is often completely altered from the original message.

Email differs from the telephone in that it is an asynchronous dialogue. It is both easy and quick to replicate and resend an email message. This has to have profound effects on how we transmit messages within networks, in particular messages which have the stickiness to become viral. Connectors and mavens are probably still important in this system. Connectors are important because of the extent of their network. They simply have the power to reach a lot of people. Mavens are also important because of their credibility as information sources within the network. I am, after all, more likely to pay attention to an email from someone for whom I have respect as an information source. Mavens therefore have the power to influence people, including potential connectors. But the easy replication of the email makes message transmission all so much easier for the rest of us. We click one button and the message is forwarded intact to anyone we wish. We fill in the gaps between the mavens and the connectors.

This instant exchange of information probably has the potential to both reinforce and to extend networks. Good reliable information exchange can strengthen an existing bond or creates a bridge to a new network, even when the message is simply replicated verbatim. This can even presumably happen with trivial joke emails where the shared virtual laugh strengthens a bond.

So what happens then when a network starts to circulate wrong information? In my paper, I want to look at a situation where this happened. An email began to circulate which stated incorrectly that refugees were given more financial support from the government than pensioners. Many people were very upset by this email and sent a copy of the email to their local newspaper. Very few people, however, verified the truth of the email with government spokespeople. The rumour continued to spread and the email was altered to reflect both the American and Australian context. Those governments too had difficulty eradicating this myth. The power of the network and the power of the social capital that flows through these networks was far stronger than the credibility of Canadian or Australian governments. I find this potentially dangerous and I don't know how the government could possibly respond differently.

I think certainly that notions of truth and credibility function differently in the world of viral communications. What is believable is determined both by how many times you have heard something, who it was who told you, and this person's function in your social network. "Authority" and "expert" are being replaced by a more diffuse mechanism for determining credibility, one which functions much more like the mechanism of credibility determination in oral cultures. The big question is, of course, how does an organization like a government communicate in this new environment?

Gladwell, M. (2002). The tipping point. New York: Back Bay Books.
Lin, N., Cook, K., & Burt, R. (Eds.). (2001). Social capital: theory and research. Aldine Transactions.

Social capital - the concept

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Sat, 17 May 2008 20:28:00 +0000

I have spent a lot of time struggling to understand the concept of social capital this week -- I find it to be a ubiquitous concept that quickly slides away whenever I really try to understand it. Portes (1998) mentions that the concept is beginning to lose its heuristic value with such wide application and I see his point. However, I also like the idea of a concept that connects the thinking in many areas and allow scientists to compare notes. The common language facilitates the connection of ideas. In other words, through its malleability, the concept starts to act as a hub to connect disciplines and thinkers. There is value in that, but only if we are talking about roughly the same thing, which I think that for the most part we are. Basically, the notion of social capital refers to the fact that our relationships have value and that they influence us. The nature of this value and this influence seems to be where the debate is at.

The 'capital' part implicitly suggests that our connections give us benefits which is, of course, disputed by scholars (see Portes for examples). The people we know can also hold us back. Nevertheless, I think that the 'capital' part of social capital is one of the things that disturbs me the most (and I'm sure that I am not the only one). Through the commodification of our conception of relationships, we allow the possibility of exploiting them. I see this in my workplace where there is great deal of emphasis placed currently on developing networks with the private sector. We are pushed out into the world of business to build networks and presumably social capital. The problem is, of course, that the current orientation of the government is to NOT trade in the currency of relationships. In fact, we do everything that we can to work against social capital and the problems that a world based on social capital brings with it. Our hiring and procurement processes are complex and designed to be transparent and fair which means that no matter who you know you should theoretically have a chance at being the winning candidate or firm. No nepotism here, thank you very much!

However, I wonder if this isn't going against some basic human nature to privilege our connections. Oh, I know that there are serious problems with systems that trade solely in social capital. The rich get richer and the powerful remain powerful. Closed systems start to develop and equality becomes a problem. But I think that if you look at some of the major scandals experienced by the Canadian government over the last few years, you will find that they are basically situations in which someone powerful (political or bureaucratic) has tried to leverage their power for the good of their friends. We all cry 'patronage' when this happens, but maybe we are being too harsh. Maybe there is something inevitable and instinctive happening here.

And therein lies the problem with the concept of social capital perhaps - relationship building and exchanges within relationships are instinctive (witness the dance of coordination between mother and child) and what it instinctive often becomes invisible (and mysterious) to us. We know its there, but we just can't quite figure out satisfactorily. Just like we can't quite figure out what exactly it is that makes a woman go into labour or what gives her the ability to distinguish the cry of her newborn from the cry of others. We are stumped by the mysteries of our instinctive behaviour.

Portes, A. (1998). Social capital: its origins and applications in modern sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 24, 1-24.

Digital relatedness

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:13:00 +0000

Brian mentioned in class that he was thinking about looking at ambient intimacy in his project. His basic idea was that the minutia that gets shared on Facebook creates an effortless, ambient intimacy with people in our networks. For instance, I know that Brian had a sports blog, went to Vegas, etc., only from the fact that he is one of my Facebook friends. I haven't spoken to him in a year. We then went on to talk about the fact that intimacy is, in fact, based on knowing the minutia of someone's life. Big details are for acquaintances. Small details are for friends. (Look at it this way: Facebook allows you to post status updates, LinkedIn (the businessperson's social networking site) doesn't.)

In any case, I have been thinking about this idea of digital intimacy with respect to notions of relatedness promoted by the mass digitization of bureaucratic records and the development of social media-ish tools for the practice of genealogy. While I don't think that there is necessarily an "ambient" nature to the intimacy that you form with your ancestor, there is suddenly an abundance of minute details which you can learn about their lives. Finding this amount of detail is predicated wholly on the digitization and searchability of old documents.

I have found this to be particularly the case with my ancestors who lived in Ontario in the 19th century. Both of the major newspapers from that time are digitized and searchable. I have turned up a wide variety of interesting tidbits about my ancestors, particularly those who were either wealthy or prominent. For instance, I learned that one of my great-grandfathers was involved in a ship wreck. He survived, but that story didn't survive in the oral traditions of our family. From name searches, I have learned that my great-grandmother gave flowers to a Canadian Prime Minister, that my great-great-grandfather had stomach problems and endorsed a stomach tonic, that another relative from Montreal stayed a Toronto hotel ever once in a while (yes, this was recorded in 19th century newspapers)...

It is clear to me that the internet allows us to connect to our families and distant relatives in ways that were impossible before. I have read some (albeit non-scientific) articles which suggest that North Americans in particular are, for the most part, unable to name their great-grandparents. Some of this has to do with the mobility of our population, I'm sure. After all, it is a lot easier to remember your ancestors if you live in their house, own some of their belongings etc. The internet flattens this effect of mobility though -- we can now locate and connect to as many of our distant relations as we dare to.

Through the discussion of intimacy, I realized that the internet not only flattens the effect of distance on families, it also flattens (to some extent) the effects of time on families. Information about some areas of the past are just as available to me as information about the present. The Globe and Mail from 1890 is just as searchable to me as the Globe and Mail from 1990. In fact, I have more information from 19th century sources about my relatives than I do from the 20th century sources. The 20th century sources are either protected by privacy laws or, in the case of newspapers, were no longer a repository for local information.

The internet also makes our memories collectively accessible as opposed to individually accessible. While one person in the family may have been the family archivist in the past, this information is being increasingly digitized and posted on the net. The death of the family historian will no longer mean the death of the family histories. These stories will have a longevity previously unknown. It is not hard to imagine, for instance, that my grandchildren will be able to access and read this blog. Their process of family storytelling and research will involve distilling TOO MUCH information as opposed to our current process of putting together the little pieces...

On Bugs and Humans

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:08:00 +0000

The Lewis Thomas essay "On Societies as Organisms" reminded me that the instinctive coordination between human beings is often overlooked. When it does becomes obvious that human society has access to something like collective intelligence, we are surprised. As Thomas points out, it has something to do with our discomfort in seeing the power of the collective (p. 12). James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, talks about a similar phenomenon. We are shocked, he points out, to find out that the collective judgment of a diverse group is often better than the judgment of its smartest individual. In other words, we are distressed to find out that we are linked and that some force (biology, love, who knows!) connects us to other humans. This link, it turns out, can help make us better, but only if we realize it. This is hard in a world that values individuality and recognizes individual achievement primarily, argue both Thomas and Surowiecki.

I can't help but notice that both of these thinkers are men. I wonder if they have kids. I suspect that if we looked at the interaction of young children we might learn a lot about this mysterious link between us and the innate human ability to coordinate.

Of course, I am a relatively new mother so I am a daily witness to the coordination between my son and me -- 'witness' because most of it happens quite without any cerebral input from me. It came as quite a shock to me at the age of 37 to learn that my body could instinctively know how to be a mother. First, my body knew how to be pregnant and create a baby. (Bit of a surprise, that!) Then, somehow, when Kai was born I knew a few things about mothering that no one needed to tell me. When lying next to my son in bed, for instance, I immediately found a comfortable position lying on my side with my arm extended. I would put Kai in the middle of the triangle between my body and my arm. I later learned that this is position that most people instinctively assume when lying next to a baby.

Our bodies coordinated in other ways too, of course. I knew when he was hungry and he knew when I was full of milk. I heard a baby cry and my shirt would suddenly be soaked. Even now as he is older and no longer nursing, I am aware of some type of biological coordination between us. My eye, both literally and figuratively, is always on him. There is an ever-present awareness of him. When he is silent, I am suddenly aware of his silence much more than I was aware of his noise. In two years, I have never dropped him despite gravity-defying moves on his part. It is like there is an elastic band between us which gets longer and slacker as he grows older. There is a dance of coordinating going on between Kai and me and yet it is not a conscious one.

Sometimes, especially lately, I am aware of the effort of coordination, and I get irritated when it goes wrong. Now that Kai is two, he has his own ideas about how we should be coordinated and he will now often yell "no" when I hug him the wrong way or move my body in a way that he doesn't like. (Toddlers are notoriously uptight. Seriously!) His will has entered into our coordination efforts and now everything is much more difficult. Not only do we have to coordinate our physical beings, but our emotional ones as well. This is of course much harder.

So there comes a point in our development when we break free of this first dance with our mothers. The coordination becomes a burden and we have done a lot to protect ourselves from the idea that we need each other in the way that an infant needs his/her mother. So when exactly does this coordination or at least the conscious thought of it become oppressive? Do children in non-Western cultures continue this dance for longer? Are they more accepting of the notion that human beings are like ants and ants are like human beings?

Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds. New York: Double Day.

Thomas, L. (1974). "On Societies as organisms." In The lives of a cell: notes of a biology watcher (pp. 11-15). New York: The Viking Press.

The truth is NOT out there

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Sun, 04 May 2008 12:17:00 +0000

Derek passed on a provocative article to me. Frank Furedi argues that the recent spate of "false" autobiographies is a reflection of our therapy culture which both promotes the stories of victims and encourages a rewriting of the past as a mode of identity construction in the present. Interesting idea although I don't agree with the basic premise of the article -- that "real" history is being corrupted by our love of Dr Phil and Oprah. After all, I think that the writing of history is ALWAYS mitigated by the present in which it is written, whether it be a therapy-oriented culture or not, a point to which the author of the article concedes but doesn't apply to his own example.

A drawing of the Wartburg castle by Goethe

Let me use an analogy: history is a castle which we continually renovate to suit our present needs, even if our present needs involve rethinking the past. To illustrate my analogy, I will use the example of the Wartburg castle near Eisennach, Germany. This is an extremely important place in Germany history -- Martin Luther found refuge there, Goethe visited, and it is credited as the birth place of a modern united Germany. When I visited there in 1995, the thing that impressed me the most was that the castle had been renovated and redecorated several times and each renovation was a rewriting and new representation of the history of the castle. The East German government, for instance, renovated the castle in the 1950s. It is hard to imagine that this renovation didn't involve a discussion which explored what the castle SHOULD look like from the socialist perspective. Most striking to me on my visit, though, was the hall that had been redone in 1838 in the style of the Middle Ages. It was very clearly a Romantic vision of that time period with very little interest in historical accuracy. Did it bother me that there is no way that this could be an accurate vision? Hell no! To me, how we construct the past is far more interesting than what the past actually was.

Remember when the guy who wrote A Million Little Pieces was discovered to have made up significant portions of his so-called autobiography? People were really, really angry at this man, and the publisher even had to offer refunds to those people who had bought the book. This really surprised me. After all, aren't all memories a construction, an idealization of our pasts? My parents would write my biography much differently than I would write my own. Who's to stay which is more accurate? I find surprising is that there is very little problematization of ideas of "historical accuracy," "truth," and "honesty" in popular culture.

I guess that the problem with the author of "A Million Little Pieces" is that readers felt that he had deliberately embellished his autobiography and therefore deliberately lied to them. It had gone beyond merely small variances in memory. He had broken an implicit contract between author and reader and he was therefore called back to Oprah's show to explain himself. But aren't we being rather unfair here? Aren't all of our life histories a mingling of memories and plots which are deliberately crafted to be found interesting by others? Why are we so absolutely stuck on the notion of a singular truth?

Furedi quotes psychiatrist Derek Summerfield:

Any act of remembering is interpretative, driven by the concerns or ideas of the present. What a war survivor remembers will not represent a single, definitive narrative, will skip between victim and protagonist modes, will be shaped by the context in which the telling takes place and the purpose to which it is to be put.

Exactly. We are always, in some way, writing and rewriting our pasts to suit ourselves and our listeners at the time of the telling.

I suspect that our ideas of truth are strongly tied to the media on which we record our lives - stone (headstones), paper (Family bibles, typed accounts, bureaucratic records). Any genealogist will tell you to view all records with caution, even the carefully carved tombstone has been known to have errors or to reflect the survivors view of the dead person's life. Carving it in stone does give your message some longevity, but it doesn't necessary make your message "accurate". Maybe we have been confusing physical longevity of the message with the "truth". I suspect there is a much lower "truth threshold" for the stories we tell while sitting around with friends and exchanging anecdotes of our lives, anecdotes which are fleeting because the words spoken out loud disappear as soon as they are heard.

Read the first letter of each line on the inscription.
From www.snopes.com.

I just finished reading a book about the Mormons and the history of their interest in genealogy. The author basically deconstructs any possibility of genealogical accuracy. Whether it be from inextricable inaccuracy in the major genealogy database, the interference of social norms with ideas of biological parentage, or some other unmentionable nasties like incest or false paternity, any claims to genealogical truth are pretty flimsy. To give you an example, the author reckons that even using conservative estimates of false paternity there would be an 80% change of one line being biologically inaccurate in a tree which goes back 4 generations on both paternal and maternal sides. Of course, my reaction to this is "cool" and "god, I wish I could find out which one and hear that story"! (Mind you, I might be a little less enthusiastic if the error turned out to be with my own direct parentage!) Despite the obvious pointless of the search for genealogy truth, there is a strong commitment in genealogical circles to ideas of "accuracy", even when the fact at stake is a year or two difference in someone's birth date.

So I guess I'm wondering how our ideas of historical genealogy accuracy (and personal life story telling) are going to play out on a medium like the internet with its qualities of "secondary orality." Words have some longevity, but the publication of these words is not mitigated by authority or ideas of privileged voices. Anyone can tell their story and find readers. Hello cacophony of human memory! Moreover, stories on the internet are built in hypertext which allow readers to choose their own path through the narrative (1) (Hey, do remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series? Was this the beginning of hypertext?). The internet way of storytelling is a retrieval of the oral way of storytelling - stories are never exactly replicated but are adapted for the context of the storytelling. The difference here is that it is the reader who choses his path through the story. It is not the oral storyteller who makes these judgments on behalf of the reader.

How are we going to stick to stubborn ideas of singular truth (both personal and social) in the context of a hyperlinked, polyphonous world? Hopefully, we are not. Wouldn't the world be a much nicer place without the need to argue for the supremacy of one account over another?

(1) I got this idea from Stefik's Internet Dreams. Page 13.

Research is a road...

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:09:00 +0000

Note:
For our self-reflection paper we were supposed to create a questionnaire for ourselves about our learning in this last semester. I toyed with this format, but then abandoned it for something that worked better for me for reasons which will be obvious when you read it. Of special significance in this post is the first-time ever publication of my resignation letter from grad schools past. It is slightly embarrassing in the same way watching Rushmore is embarrassing. But it was time to let it be read :-) Enjoy.

Research is a road and the road is life

This is a story, rather than an interview. Oh, I know that I am supposed to interview myself for this assignment, but the format wasn't working for me, and, as you will see, narratives are central to my research journey. So please forgive this minor transgression and let me tell you my story.

A little over ten years ago, I concluded my Master's thesis on the feminine sublime with a quote from Jack Kerouac. In my thesis, I looked at alternative structures of narratives, ones that were circular and suspended and which had no ending as such. It is the journey of the narrative and not its conclusion was what was important to these authors. The Kerouac quote - "the road is life" - therefore seemed a fitting way to end my thesis. In retrospect, however, this was the beginning of the unravelling of my academic plans. It marked a slowly awakening realization that the road that I was on that time was not taking me to the life which I wanted to lead.

Nevertheless, it took another year or so for me to arrive at the turning point. I used my scholarship money to finance a year of study in Germany, a move somewhat deliberately designed to force my own hand in the matter of my future career. Being away, I figured, would force me to think about where I actually wanted to be. Not surprisingly, my uneasiness with my academic journey grew, and almost ten years ago to this day (god, I love this symmetry), I wrote my resignation letter and handed in to my only possible witness at that time, a young, unsuspecting German professor. My "letter" was in fact an essay about a canonical German novel by Goethe -- The Sorrows of Young Werther. It was also -- and this is the radical part -- an account of an impossible love affair that I was experiencing at that time of profound professional and personal doubt. It is, without question, one of my masterpieces (notwithstanding the fact that time has rendered my account of that love affair to be rather embarrassing). It was honest, it was passionate, and it was me.

My "letter" was not, however, anything that could remotely be considered acceptable research in academic circles. But why not? Because it was honest, passionate and personal. And that was my point exactly. Back then, post-modernism and critical theory were fashionable trends in literary criticism. These modes of thought call into question notions of objectivity, authority, reality and truth. However, this theory which I was being taught and which, to a large extent, I espoused, did not match the methodology of literary criticism that was being practised. Everything is subjective except the practice of literary criticism, or so it seemed to me. This lack of subjective space in the practice of research coupled with the undeniable abstraction of my chosen academic field (Comparative Literature) did me in. I could not negotiate the mixed messages which simultaneously promoted creative thinking but limited it to certain forms. So I left academia for an uncertain future where any internal inconsistencies were mine and mine alone.

Flash forward to the present. I had mostly forgotten about my epistemological angst of a decade ago. I had long since buried my resignation letter in a box in a closet. My thesis sits on a shelf unread and incomprehensible, even to me. For the most part, I like what life has thrown me in the last decade - a good job with the federal government, a kind, supportive, quite wonderful partner and a lovely child. However, the call of learning and books has been too strong for me to resist completely. I found myself back in a graduate program and ultimately taking a course on research methodology.

For obvious reasons, I came to the course with certain expectations and prejudices against the scientific method and the practice of research. I was surprised to find a methodological openness which allowed for students to align their epistemological inclinations with their research methodology. Every perspective is valued. What a refreshing change from the methodological tyranny of my previous degree! This approach quickly diffused a lot of my obsessively thought-out criticism which I intended to unleash on the course. In addition, I found this approach to be honest and respectful of the diversity of students, their interests and their backgrounds. I applaud those who designed this course.

This openness may not, however, solve my fundamental epistemological problem with academic research. I feel an obligation to respond to the Nancy of ten years past who passionately argued for her right as a researcher to tell her own personal journey. "If we absorb the lessons of post-structuralism," I proclaimed, "one cannot really argue for the supremacy of one discourse over another. The narrative of my life and my experiences is a discourse like any other discourse used to provide insight into a literary work." Yes, yes, indeed! I still believe these words. More importantly, I believe personal stories have a power to inspire, a quality often lacking in the objective voice of the scientific paper. Am I wrong to think that maybe this power of the personal narrative can be used to make research more readable, more interesting and more relevant?

When I re-entered graduate school, I promised myself that I would chose to do a final project for this degree which was practical. My partner is a practical man who has found a way to use his brilliant mind to help make the world a better place. I admire this and I want to emulate his example. When our instructor encouraged us to consider our research topics, I paused on the practical. I could easily think up a neat quantitative study which would presumably contribute in a minor way to thinking on important issues such as web usability. But then, I remembered. I remembered that I have my doubts about objectivity and the scientific method. I remembered that those doubts make me uneasy and that the uneasiness, although it starts as a whisper, has the very real potential to end as a long, passionate essay unleashed on some poor undeserving and unsuspecting assistant professor. So while my partner has found a way to use statistics for the greater good (oh, I am quite well aware of the irony in my choice of partners!), I think that this is not my path. My "practical" ideas got quickly abandoned for a topic in which I am quite passionately interested and in which I am a participant: family story-telling on the Internet. My intention is to interweave my own experiences with those of others who practice this craft and to marry these accounts with academic thinking on this subject. While this topic may not have workplace relevance, I am hoping that it will take me on a journey that will end in an interesting, and provocative paper that people, not just academics, will want to read.

The problem is, of course, that this story-telling approach to research straddles the line between qualitative research and some cerebral form of journal writing. It is just as unlikely now as it was ten years ago that my style of academic writing and research will be accepted as legitimate. Fortunately, there does seem to be a small group of academics who practice a qualitative model of research called "radical self-questioning". This gives me hope that I can find support for my style and I intend to learn more about this methodology. I am old enough now, however, to know that there will be a compromise here. I do want to get this degree and I am toying with the idea of a PhD. I will have to choose the places in which to use my voice and hope that my small stabs at authenticity might strike a chord. In the end, I think that this is where my strength and my power as a researcher and a thinker lie. And I am convinced that to follow my strength and passion can only result in good things and, hopefully, good stories.

Abstraction

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:28:00 +0000

Like my fellow MACTers, I have been struggling with my abstract, trying to wrestle a jumble of unrelated thoughts into something somewhat intelligent. To be honest, I find this process disappointing. My ideas always FEEL better than they sound. Still, deadlines must be met, so here it is:

Editable memories: writing and rewriting personal histories on the internet

The recent explosion of collaborative tools on the internet has enabled a large community of amateur genealogists and local historians to connect to each other and share their research which, for the most part, narrates the lives of their own ancestors. The world's largest genealogy wiki, www.werelate.org, contains over 2 million pages which are devoted to the life of one individual and which can be collaboratively edited by anyone. As editable spaces, wikis are a unique medium in which to record personal history. In my study, I would like to examine how choice of media influences our constructions of our recorded past. Does this process of writing and rewriting our pasts on a wiki mimic oral traditions? Do textual conventions of story ownership interfere with this collective process of remembering? This will be a qualitative study drawing from three sources: 1) my own experiences as a participant in the community, 2) available documentation at the web site, and 3) semi-structured interviews with other genealogists.

I think that my hesitation comes from the fact that I am also really drawn towards studying e-democracy and Government 2.0, topics which really inspire me and which have a practical application. Rationalization: looking a Web 2.0 applications in a different context can help you to contextual them in the government setting. OK, my internal devil's advocate voice is buying this rationalization for the moment.

Although maybe I am just struggling because it is April 20, and there is a snow storm raging outside my window.

The internet is my mind

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:06:00 +0000

I think a lot about McLuhan's claim that media are extensions of ourselves. Here is my latest insight: hypertextuality is extension of our essentially non-linear thinking patterns. Linear text in type can only go so far. Genealogy is a good example. A genealogical narrative is by no means linear. First, you have two parents, and they have two parents etc. OK, maybe that is still linear in a way. But then you add in elements of place, relationship to historical events, interfamilial marriages, non-familial connections, the connection of two people to one document... You get my point.

I also think a lot about how happy I am to live in the age of the internet. This makes me truly geeky, right. No, seriously, I am happy to live in age where every day someone thinks of a new tool to put on the internet to help me extend or reflect my mind. And just to prove my point, here is my latest find: www.mind42.com. I have mapped out my project with this tool and it was shockingly refreshing to be freed from a Microsoft Word outline template. You can see a bigger version of this here.

Click here to see a larger version of the map.

The traces we leave behind

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:55:00 +0000

Surprising, I can find a meditative place while endlessly searching Google and databases for the names of my ancestors. And in this place, I have thought a lot about the traces that we leave behind from our lives. The traces aren't what you would expect and they aren't something that we necessarily have control over, at least something that the normal mortals among us have control over.

Often, our families carve a stone in our honour when we are gone. But the stones get worn and eventually become illegible. Below is the stone of the infant son of Richard Metcalf who was born and died on the same day in 1885. Soon the carving on the stone will be gone and the one concrete trace of this little life will be erased.

(I should mention that getting to rest in your final place for eternity is a luxury afforded to North Americans. In Germany, for instance, you rent your grave for 50 years and after that your bones are disenterred and someone else gets your plot.)

Baby Metcalf didn't encounter the other most likely place to leave a trace behind: in the thousands of vital statistics documents generated by the Canadian bureaucracy. As we became better at regulating ourselves and our lives we also became better at leaving traces behind. These traces are finding new life as records are digitized, indexed and made available on the web.

No such luck for Baby Metcalf though. He may have been too young to warrant bureaucratic attention or his parents simply didn't feel that involvement of officials was necessary. I think that at that time the wilderness was still a stronger force in Canada than the bureaucracy.

Baby Metcalf has a new chance, however, to leave a lasting trace on this world. Genealogy societies in Ontario have been busy transcribing cemeteries for years. Now these genealogists are photographing the headstones and posting the photos online. They are also creating elaborate family trees (hypertextuality reaches it full potential in a genealogist's hands) and posting them online for other to find and copy. A photo of Baby Metcalf's headstone, the small (and deteriorating) trace of his life, has been added to the collection of information readily findable with the help of a search engine. It will be copied and reproduced and recirculated. Baby Metcalf now even has a wiki web page all to his own. Baby Metcalf, it seems, got lucky and has been recorded and remembered.

I have to admit that I find this comforting. Why I don't know. Mid-life, motherhood, natural inclination? Whatever it is, I take comfort in the fact that he somehow made it onto the list of things worth digitizing.

Incidentally, Baby Metcalf's parents had no other children. However, they did raise two of Baby Metcalf's cousins whose mother had died at the age of 34 after giving birth to her tenth child. (See the record of his birth below. His brother was required to formally claim witness to the dual events of his mother's death and brother's birth. "I have a distinct recollection of these facts," he claims).

It's hard not to appreciate both the powers of nature and the bureaucracy, isn't it.

Sticking to the familiar?

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy B) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:38:00 +0000

In this blog, I hope to keep a record/journal of my research for my final project for the Masters of Communication and Technology program at the University of Alberta.

At this point in time, my ideas for this project remain somewhat vague and mushy, but I know that I would like to look at the some of following areas:
- internet genealogy
- family and local history keeping on the internet
- the effects of technology on our ideas of relateness and place
- qualitative methodologies, including radical ones like self-questioning
- ideas of narrative
- orality and literacy and the internet

Too big an area? Ya, I know, but over the next few months, I should be able to whittle this down satisfactorily, I hope.

Of course, the subject of my project is not completely unfamiliar to me (thanks Olga for reminding me of this pun). While I was on maternity leave last year, I discovered how the world of genealogy had been changed by the internet. My grandmother died last March and in her honour I wanted to create a photo album of family photos. I was missing some vital dates for some of her ancestors, however. What started with typing names into Google has ended in a quite serious pursuit of family and local history. The photo album never got finished, but in its place I have been working hard at recording our family history online. I think my grandmother (and the potential recipients of the photo album) would understand.

I don't think that it was an accident that I became so interested in family history shortly after I started my own family. The standard plotlines in genealogical research (birth, death, marriage) are real, oh-so-real, to me now. Who can understand, for instance, the tragedy of lost children better than a new mother? Navel-gazer that I am, I started to think seriously about how we record our lives, who records our lives (mostly the bureaucracy), and how we can remember those gone before us. The internet, our tool of the future, is, it turns out, quite a good place to record the past. I can use blogs to tell my family about my research. I can use Google maps to map out the original homestead of a family member. I can look at the digital collections at Libraries and Archives Canada and find out that my great-grandfather almost died of enteric fever during the Boer War. This list is endless and this flurry of information, historical minutae, is all made possible thanks to our friend, the internet. How can this not help but change how we understand ourselves and our place in the world?

When I returned to work in September, I suddenly had much less time to pursue my twin hobbies of genealogy and internet exploration. When I started the MACT program, I vowed to write a final that would be immensely USEFUL. (There's some history here). But faced with the possibility of getting to spend more time playing in the internet sandbox, doing more genealogy, and THINKING about it all at a completely theoretical level was impossible to resist.

And with this, I hereby officially start this blog.