Comments on: The Sensation of Standing Still While Moving https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/28/the-sensation-of-standing-still-while-moving/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Tue, 29 Aug 2006 18:29:02 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 By: Timothy Burke https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/28/the-sensation-of-standing-still-while-moving/comment-page-1/#comment-1857 Tue, 29 Aug 2006 18:29:02 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=262#comment-1857 Yes, I think that’s a lot of it, especially since I know that ephemera are often my favorite materials to work with as a historian. Since as a historian, I know that I often value documents and materials that contemporaries thought were irrelevant or unimportant, I’m conscious that I might be wrong about what I want to look at myself in my own paper trail. I think most of my colleagues are like this–we absolutely HATE it when the library calls us and wants to de-accession books, because it’s just when things get old and seemingly irrelevant that we know a new project for a historian has come into being. Everyone else wants to throw out old textbooks, or old technical materials, for example, but all I can think is, “Oh my god, all that precious archival material for some future intellectual or institutional history! You can’t!!!”

]]> By: cjlee https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/28/the-sensation-of-standing-still-while-moving/comment-page-1/#comment-1856 Tue, 29 Aug 2006 16:56:22 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=262#comment-1856 t involved in and didn’t attend. The pink cards we get from the Registrar when students withdraw from classes. (Yes, I should have kept them for that semester, but seriously, was I imagining that I was going to need to find old pink cards from courses in 1997 ten years later in order to cross-check an enrollment issue?)" It's the historian's self-interested impulse, I think, to archive these sorts of things. To collect ephemera that may shed light at some future date about what your day-to-day life was like at some point in the past. I say this as a historian myself, and I unconsciously (and, admittedly, sometimes consciously) do this all the time. ]]> “What, did I think I was going to be ordering out of them in 2006? I kept routine circulars. Notices of events that I wasn’t involved in and didn’t attend. The pink cards we get from the Registrar when students withdraw from classes. (Yes, I should have kept them for that semester, but seriously, was I imagining that I was going to need to find old pink cards from courses in 1997 ten years later in order to cross-check an enrollment issue?)”

It’s the historian’s self-interested impulse, I think, to archive these sorts of things. To collect ephemera that may shed light at some future date about what your day-to-day life was like at some point in the past. I say this as a historian myself, and I unconsciously (and, admittedly, sometimes consciously) do this all the time.

]]> By: bbenzon https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/28/the-sensation-of-standing-still-while-moving/comment-page-1/#comment-1855 Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:15:00 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=262#comment-1855 Hypercard! I still keep it around on my Mac, because I’ve got stuff in there that isn’t anywhere else.

]]> By: Timothy Burke https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/28/the-sensation-of-standing-still-while-moving/comment-page-1/#comment-1852 Tue, 29 Aug 2006 01:59:50 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=262#comment-1852 That’s another painful layer I’m digging into now. I kept my dissertation notes in a HyperCard database that I made myself, which naturally turned out to be quite difficult to export into any usable form. So I printed the whole thing and glued the entries onto index cards as well.

]]> By: bbenzon https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/28/the-sensation-of-standing-still-while-moving/comment-page-1/#comment-1851 Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:57:19 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=262#comment-1851 I kept craploads of book and film catalogs from 1995. What, did I think I was going to be ordering out of them in 2006? . . .

I understand. I tossed out a lot of stuff the last time I moved, but I suspect I’d still be rather horrified at what’s sticking around in my file cabinets. OTOH I’ve still got hardcopy notes dating from the era before I owned a PC. And, since my first PC was a Z80 machine, I’ve either got hardcopy printouts of notes from that era, or zilch, depending.

]]> By: Jonathan Dresner https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2006/08/28/the-sensation-of-standing-still-while-moving/comment-page-1/#comment-1850 Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:43:51 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=262#comment-1850 There were print-outs from administrative computer records that still had the guidestrips with holes in them and were made by really crude looking dot-matrix printers.

We still get those, at least for our student evaluation results. God help us when the ribbon runs out….

“A pile for everything and everything in its pile” my father always said. “When the piles run together, it’s time to clean”

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