I had a powerful experience recently.
I had a powerful experience recently.
Posted at 10:29 AM in Documentation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I had some time to burn before catching a flight recently, and found myself in an academic rare/used bookstore. Today I picked up the package of books I asked Alcuin Books to send back.
Can I say how lovely it is to walk into a bookstore, be asked "can I help you", say "I'm looking for 6thc archeology, particularly Kent, or Anglo-Saxon textiles, but also the Mediterranean" and be handed a folding chair and pointed to three places? Just smashing.
In the box for me were:
(St. Agnes - I love how her over dress is hiked up to show the terrific sash end and undertunic embellishment. I'm sure Julian could tell me what that sash is called. Brenna - this is what I meant when I said that I was really curious about how the collar and cuffs might work...I so look forward to your interpretation!)
Early Christian Mosaics from the Fourth to the Seventh Centuries: Rome, Naples, Milan, Ravenna. Fourteen Plates in Color. Translated from the German, 1946.
I bought this because the quality of color reproduction was the best I've seen so far of early mosaic. It has the common image of Empress Theodora and her retinue...but also some great garb shown on saints. The detail, considering its made with bits of stuff, is amazing and wonderful.
(Ah, sprang. I have Collingwood's book, and someday I will get to play with this technique. So very interesting. Did anybody else notice that in the recent CGI Beowulf, Wealthow wears a sprang cap in the confab scenes in her bedroom? Very cool.)
The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved. P.V. Glob. 1969, 3rd printing (1975). Translated from the Danish. Great black and white pictures of finds, not so great on dating, but good maps, and very accessible writing.
(Whoopsie, kind of large...but this way you all can see the little beasties, running around the cabochons. So much fun, all the animals in this placetime...I'm going to have a hard time choosing decorations for my camp gear!)
Archaeologia; or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating To Antiquity, Published by the Society of Antiquaries of London, Vol. 98 (1961). This is a collection of topics...but has a 46-page article on "The Jutish Style A. A Study of Germanic Animal Art in Southern England in the Fifth Century A.D." Fabulous detailed descriptions, black and white photos and line drawings showing bucket mounts, belt plates and slides, brooches, strap ends, "tubular object"...lots and lots from Kent. Here's a typical description of the pic above, to show the quality:
This volume also contains papers titled:
The bookstore had several other volumes from the Archeologia series, though no others held so much promise for me, I'd expect other researchers to find lovely things in them. The owner of the store said he'd be happy to read off titles, or even scan/email title pages. I paid $50 for my volume, and consider it fair value for at least the one paper, but there are three of ultimate use to me, so I think I got lucky!
Posted at 09:05 AM in Documentation | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Uh oh.
Posted at 09:26 AM in Documentation | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
[This entry is feeling hard to write, because the project did really well, and good things happened to me, and I don't know how to say it without the results seeming like I am blowing my own horn. But I want to share with you all, so suffice to say that I feel really really validated and humbled. At the same time. Which is pretty awesome, from my side of the line.]
Onward.
As promised, here's the PDF of my documentation. Download Coptic Embellishment-A Simple Method for Picky and Patient Re-enactors2 I didn't take a picture of the setup (stupid!), but I'll reassemble it and blog it soon.
I got really great encouragement, comments, suggestions, and prodding as to "where to take this next." Even better, I find I've still got enough interest in the topic to keep going in those directions, some of which are Very Ambitious. So this isn't the end of Coptic tapestry weaving...not by a long shot.
I also got a terrific score: 19/20.
And I won my level, which was Beginner. I felt odd registering as Beginner, since I know I'm very different from most beginners, but the criteria is "have you been awarded a Meridian Cross?" Since that answer was a fact, and a "no", then it was out of my hands.
Continue reading "Results of Midwinter A&S for Coptic Embellishment entry" »
Posted at 08:44 AM in Documentation, Garb- 6thc Coptic, Weaving | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
I've been finishing up the documentation and display for my first Arts & Science entry, to be shown this weekend at Midwinter A&S. For the non-SCAdians, think Science Fair, but for medieval crafty types. I'm having a blast.
Per usual, the gory blow-by-blow appears on my LJ blog, and I got a couple of questions that I thought might be universal enough to address here, and keep a category about. So I introduce "Documentation" to the increasingly long category list at right, and the preceding two posts are about that. There may be more.
It occurs to me that not everybody has 1) a master's degree that required them to learn to write a book; 2) a mother who publishes articles in information science, and discusses it over the dinner table; 3)graphic design education; 4)a blogroll for 'learning about learning'; 5) other possibly OCD traits that demand shuffling and reshuffling data in order to Analyze It More.
Because everything tastes better Analyzed, you know. (Winky thing.)
Anyway, so if you all want to ask anything more about how I write papers, or design classes, or read and analyze books/films/buildings/charts/whatevers, have at it in the comments, and I will reply here for everyone's benefit.
Posted at 12:41 PM in Documentation | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
How do I keep track of books and other references? In digital lists, which contain items that look something like this:
1. ITEM CITATION (as appearing in a standard bib, whatever format I feel like, probably an amalgamation of APA and was it ALA we did in high school?)
Who owns it - Me? Which library did I borrow it from? Who can I get it from? Have I seen it, or just heard about it? From whom, and are they important/superknowledgable?
What the book is generally good for; my own description. (Now I'm ready to assemble an Annotated Bibliography, which if I ever encounter one in other people's work, gives them Major Brownie Points in my opinion of them. Annot. Bibs save major academic time.)
a. Image/quote 1
= Images and quotes that I think I need, along with the point I'm
trying to make when I need them. Because Very Frequently the axe you
think you're grinding at the beginning of the process turns into a
Kitchenaid mixer by the end of the thing. I find I need to be reminded
of what my original point was. Page or figure numbers of said images,
so you can find it again.
b. Image/quote 2
c. Image/quote 3
2. NEXT ITEM CITATION
Owned by
Whas' it good for
a. Image/quote 1.
b. Image/quote 2.
c. Image/quote 3.
You do this process enough, and it becomes 'dropping breadcrumbs so that someone else, or a future version of you, can follow your mental path and replicate your results.' Just like science experiments.
I wish I could throw up a real life example nicely organized like this, but these things tend to exist in fragments littered throughout my computer, and that distribution tends to HELP my creative process rather than hinder it. I've tried to line them all up neatly in one place, and that is a useful exercise during part of the process. But it's also incredibly wonderful that I'll be doing something else completely unrelated, stumble over one of my bits from a new point of view, and that yields very rich insights that I've learned I can't get merely by trying harder. Fortunately the 'search' function on Windows seems to be getting more powerful. I try not to keep paper copies of research unless it's part of a bound book, because my paper filing performance is not as powerful as the 'search' function. Someday I will have a Fujitsu ScanSnap and it will make me very happy.
I hear that Microsoft has a program called EndNote that will organize your bib stuff for you, and republish in whatever format you need it to be, for whatever picky journal editor you need to please. I don't have it, because I don't have to do that for my job. Mom does, and does. I wonder if it has all the fields I would want - my master's thesis used dance films, books, articles, maps, DOT charts, building construction drawings...I do use Microsoft's OneNote, but not as well as I would like.
And all of this, by the way, is what one goes to a thesis-writing graduate school program to learn. Which they don't actively teach, really, but by the time you write the book and defend it (read: reconstruct it) umpteen times in real life, and then once in nerve-wracking ceremony, you figure it out.
Posted at 12:26 PM in Documentation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
(excerpted from a worry thread on my LJ in 2008, before presenting my first A&S entry at Midwinter A&S)
I like to produce a 'works I actually used for this project' list and a 'other sources you may find useful to follow me' list, because people who are new to the field may need to read more widely to catch up to the context I'm in. The latter is what I mean by 'extended bibliography'.
Funny thing happened at Menhir - somebody asked me to repeat the two-hour class that Gwen, Maudey, Una and I had just presented on the development arc of early period costuming. I'm afraid I let my cold speak a bit too loudly - "See that bibliography list over there? Get all those and read them." Of course that isn't right, one could read that impressive list of books and by not having any sewing construction experience, or not having read general histories, or not understanding weaving physics or dyeing chemistry, and one wouldn't be able to 'come to conclusions'. Which of course is why you take a class from someone who HAS done all that. Something I find in my general experience of humanity - people want fast answers, and you don't get the good stuff out of studying anything without putting serious time in. In 'learning about learning' channels, I've seen estimates of 10,000 hours to become an 'expert' on any topic, and that's after figuring out what the topic is!
Keep in mind, this is my first piece of documentation for A&S, and in order to decide what goes in I'm leaning heavily on my teaching experience from graduate school crossed with the 'populace education' market demand I've encountered in the SCA. People are already asking me for bits of this documentation, and I'm trying to construct a document that will be the most useful to the most people. Since of course I'm going to keep it published ('information wants to be free!').
That said, however, I'm frustrated that the whole paper is not as good (clear, helpful, enabling) as I would like it to be. Oh well, something to improve. I'll see what sort of questions this thing generates and the next version will be better.
Posted at 12:25 PM in Documentation | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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