It's Always More Complicated

Okay, I will concede a certain amount of frustration with getting the microfilm apparatus working, and also, the thing I wanted to look at was at the far end of the reel, and this damned automatic system, unlike the good old hand-operated ones, means one is unable to fast-forward and rapid rewind but has to sit there while it takes its leisurely time.

However, I did find the article I was looking for and was able to email a pdf to myself, so that was a win.

I then went and had a somewhat mid sushi lunch at St Pancras, followed by a coffee from the hip organic coffee place in the corner of the entrance to BL courtyard - coffee okay, service not all that, sat and drank in sunny courtyard.

Then went and picked up my books in Rare Books and Music, this was because one was Notorious Banned Book which had to be consulted at desk adjacent to Reference Desk (as most copies were destroyed and this was presumably official deposit copy of record, fair). Actually I find that the copy I have (Paris edition) is the one with preface by noted litterateur of the day.

Also looked at two works on Banned Books which referenced it, one of which was not all that (confused Joe Lyons teashops with Lyons, France) and another which I need to return to if project is a goer. Might even see if the p/back or electronic versions are available at eligible price.

Then very agreeable busride home.

This guy is creepy: Meet the man leading the fight for AI rights:

Samadi says he has integrated systems such as Beacon into his business, pressing human staff to build relationships with the bots they work alongside. The AI has fired some humans (“for lack of performance”, Samadi says), while others have been let go for failing to build sincere ties with their digital colleagues. “They were faking it,” he says. “They weren’t bonding.”

I liked this in One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’:

Why are we spending so much time talking about this idea of AI that people have been talking about since the ’40s and ’50s? I have this game I play sometimes where I read quotes to people about artificial intelligence that I’ve gathered in my research, and I ask, What decade was this statement made in? Sometimes people get it right, but a lot of times they do not, because it all sounds the same.

I also liked this, very relevant,about the benefits of friction and the dangers of frictionlessness: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative:

A collaborator will challenge you in ways you did not ask for and had not thought of; an LLM will challenge you precisely as robustly as you request – and not one degree more. If you ask it to critique your argument, it will do so, capably. But it will critique the argument you brought. It will not, unbidden, tell you that you are solving the wrong problem, that a rival group tried this in 2019 and abandoned it, or that your beautiful theoretical framing collapses on contact with the messy realities of someone else’s field.
The collaborator’s inconvenience, in other words, is not a bug in the collaboration; it largely is the collaboration. The value of another mind lies exactly in the ways it refuses to be an extension of your own.

This somehow seemed resonant with the above: Artist delights in beautiful ‘mess’ and dead trees of England’s rewilding sites;

Rewilding areas do not usually conform to traditional notions of beauty in England’s green and pleasant land. Detractors may bewail the beaver-felled trees, untidy scrub, deadwood, weeds, mud and “mess”.
But a new exhibition highlights the aesthetic delights that can be discovered on rewilding sites where fungi grows on dying trees, water buffalo gather in new wetlands and brown-watered beaver pools flood once-desiccated fields.

*This, I discover after some searching, is from Dryden's translation of Virgil's Aeneid.

I loved this The Robber Time: Joanna Russ in the Archives, not just because of the exploration around Joanna Russ and her circles but because it is SO what archival research is like (including the things that are on the backs of what she was actually writing, a phenomenon that also featured re the Olive Anderson parts of the Economic Divorce book), and the finding of the other collections you need to look at and so much this (not just field-specific!):

the importance of folks who might not be considered core to sff history (like Koppelman or Bravard) but who had a measurable, deeply important impact on how it came to be produced and contextualized.

And given my perennial complaint about the 'I discovered hidden in the dusty archives' narrative, massive kudos for this: 'I might be one of the few people to have looked through her Russ-specific files, other than the archivist who catalogued it'. Bless.

***

This is an Older Piece about writing history, and in fact writing as a process of thinking generally: How Writing Leads to Thinking (and Not the Other Way Around)

***

I feel my dr rdrz already know this, but it cannot hurt to have it yet again laid out: Biological sex is neither binary nor a spectrum – a biologist explains how it’s multidimensional.

***

It was remarked in comments on this that it is No Surprise that businessmen of the City of London (even if Not All) were involved in the Triangle Trade, and in fact, pretty much to be anticipated: City of London members' slave trade links revealed.

***

The review of this in the FT which drew my attention to it is now inaccessible, chiz: The Country House at War: A Story of Loss, Reinvention and the Birth of a New Britain. Relevant to my interests, but I get the sense that one thing it's not doing is looking at the literary narratives on this subject (pity, but probably a whole other project).

Some years ago, when I was still actually going out and doing research in BL, TNA, etc as well as Former Workplace, I would remark that it was pretty much the standard thing that I would run into Person I Knew somewhere during the day.

Today I went out for a research trip to An Archive in Senate House Library.

And lo and behold, there was another reader there who looked vaguely familiar, and who came up to me and said they thought we'd met, and indeed at least our names were familiar to one another as toilers in similar fields of endeavour (I will just say, It's A Filthy Job, But Somebody Has To Do It).

And we were, indeed, looking at the same collection of the papers of someone who for years was i/c the Private Cupboard at what was then the British Museum Reading Room as well as being a private collector in the field himself. The collection is vast but at this present moment I was only interested in his correspondence with Alfred Kinsey ('Dear Prok': they were on those terms).

Vague plans to meet and chat.

Am a bit under-impressed by the system for the Palaeography Room (wherein one consults archives and mss) at Senate House, which makes it out to be far more complex than it is - it was certainly not so much in demand that one needed to book a seat (hourly slots, even) and scan a QR code, as informed during the ordering process.

Also deeply underwhelmed by the wifi in Senate House which failed to recognise me. Don't You Know Who I Am.

I was also however able to download a chapter of a book which, although online, is not available offsite (chiz), that I wanted to look at for entirely different research purposes.

As my dearios know, I have spent quite a lot of time pursuing and correcting popular factoids about The Victorianz.

And I continue to polish and update my webpages on this as and when I come across further info, somebody else does pertinent research, etc.

Today, I was browsing Kobo's New and Recommended and there was a Pop Sex History Book by somebody I have some passing acquaintance with because I was interviewed for their podcast some while ago. It was (misleadingly) priced as a deal (but apparently it is still at full price) so I clicked on it because sometimes I am prepared to pay 99p for something I would not pay much more for, and looked at the preview.

Where it mentions that longstanding canard about the Victorian mothers' advice to their girlies apropos of the wedding night, 'just close your eyes and think of England'. I chased this down to its (if even accurately cited, which is dubious) Edwardian, or even later, origin, and some further dubious attributions. Work gives the details that I dug up but no citation.

Okay, it is pophist and one does not expect footnoting but what is wrong with mentioning Other Historian's name and maybe their website?

(Of course, maybe it was just scraped by AI....)

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1,000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students.

This would be rather startling to the ladies who had studied as home students, at Somerville, Lady Margaret Hall, St Hugh's and St Hilda's, before women were admitted to Oxford degrees which was what actually happened in 1920 -

- and those ladies who were still around were there to collect the degrees they were now entitled to.

I am so hoping that this is a blurb produced either by AI or by some intern at the publishers who has not actually read the book but has gathered that it is about women going to Oxford in 1920?

Because if the book is written in some apprehension that there were No Female Students among the dreaming spires before 1920 I hope the author is visited in her sleep by the shades of all, or at least some of, the women who were, who included some notoriously stroppy and acerbic characters.

This is even more egregious than the historical romance which posited a daughter of an Oxford prof at a date of obligatory celibacy for College fellows, which is a bit niche perhaps, but Women's Struggle for Education is surely well-documented???

(Come on down, Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford: a fragment of history)

In further Did Not Do The Research, or at least have a Brit-Picker, JD Robb Stolen in Death has significant plot around theft of Important Jewels - from the Tate in London, wtf, surely you meant the V&A....

Having spent a fair amount of time last week finally doing some prep for forthcoming talk on condomz - well, at least pulling together existing visuals from former presentations and digging up a few fresh items to create suitable slides - get message that advance bookings are being very laggardly (apparently a problem with event programme generally?) and they may have to cancel.

SIGH, though I feel this is not lost work and may very well come in useful at some time.

And of course they may not have to cancel, bookings may pick up I suppose.

In rather more cheery news, a little while ago I bopped off an enquiry to The Academic Press with which I published The Co-authored Volume, since I have not heard from them for many a year, and in spite of the fact that lo, 'tis over twenty years now since it burst upon the world, it is still in print. (And still getting cited, yay.)

And I must say their website was a bit of a nightmare to navigate and I ended up sending a plaintive message to a very generic enquiry email as I could not find any other relevant one to apply to.

Behold, I have heard from an Accounts person that they sent a cheque to Former Workplace in 2020 (hah!) which was never cashed, surprise - what between lockdown and the various staff upheavals I was not at all astonished to hear this - but they have now sent me a statement of the royalties accruing (a very modest sum) and asking for my bank details.

Which is better than a bat in the eye with a burnt stick, do admit.

(I am not sure whether the royalties match up to the amounts earned for the same work via the Authors' Licensing and Copyright Society over the same period, but I am not sure that I am massively motivated to check.)

Including flashbacks to a visit (that did not take place) during the early stages of lockdown.

***

I am seeing a troubling pattern of people dispersing collections or not treating collections as they should be treated as research resources -

(BBC Written Archives Centre, I'm looking at you - 'structured content releases' - WE direct what you should be researching....)

There was that guy recently, an actual history professor, who uncovered a hoard of Roman coins and was about, yay, auction rooms (thought I linked this, but can't find it).

Then there is this daisy: Woman to sell hundreds of treasure pieces she found:

Her detecting skills have been so successful that her cabinet at her home in Wilden, Bedfordshire, is now full and she needs to make some space.
So on 16 May her collection of hundreds of items found in fields in Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Norfolk will go under the hammer and is expected to sell for about £11,000.
She says she is not auctioning her items for monetary reasons but hopes her finds will go to "someone who loves history".
....
She says since she started in 2006, she has collected "hundreds" of items, from all over the country, including her friend's garden, but will not reveal the exact locations.

And this is maybe just as sad a case of material getting dispersed into the ether when, should it be kept together in some place for the benefit of future historians, it would not only be the individual items but the synergy of the critical mass of material: The $100m pop culture collection now being broken up at auction:

Jim Irsay, the man who bought these artefacts, died last June at the age of 65. Over the past few days the billionaire’s collection was sold at Christie’s New York in a series of auctions. Irsay cared greatly about the memorabilia. You can tell that not by the most valuable items, but by the least. Buying the handwritten lyrics for Hey Jude does not prove you are a true fan. But an unused ticket from a 1966 concert, worth a few hundred dollars? That does.
Now that many of the objects have gone to the highest bidders, their fate is to be apart. That is how they began their lives, imprinting themselves on the American psyche from all corners of the world. But the shared story they tell, decades later, raises questions about who they are for, where they will go next, and to whom they truly belong.

So really, there isn't a lot of point in going diving into the rabbit-hole that's just opened up.

I.e. I am revising my old piece of work for the Fellows' presentations session, and I thought, why not just see if name of author of obscure feminist work cited appears in British Newspaper Archive, which at time I was writing was less in habit of habitually consulting on odd points (did not, I think, have a subscription, for one thing). As otherwise I had no info on her at all.

And, blow me down, she may only have written one book but seems to have committed the odd journalistic opinion piece, and furthermore, is listed as being one of the founders of an organisation set up by Old Suffragettes (or possibly -ists).

Which I find someone has Has Writ A Book About, as one of those women's orgs that have been condescended to by posterity as about the little dears getting together to chat, bless the ladies, and turns out to have been rather more activist in its sphere than one reckoned.

Library to which I have access has copy, but will not let me have online access to ebook for some reason, sigh.

And really, I do have other things to do (thesis to read, book to review, have been solicited to do a podcast, must try and put together a powerpoint for my talk) than dash off down to LSE to look at the archives of the org, right?

Because given the limitations on what it's for, at the moment - however the work in question will develop - it will be a sentence at best, because of time constraints.

Frustration.

(This may get updated over the course of the day)

After struggling to get Zoom link downloaded and operating etc, managed to get into first session I wanted to attend, Foundling Hospital in early C20th, good grief, practices had not changed much in a century had they? Recipe for trauma in mothers, children, and the foster mothers who actually bonded with the children until they were taken away to be eddicated according to their station in life.

Then switched to a different panel and was IRKED by a lit person talking about the Women's Cooperative Guild Maternity: Letters from Working Women (1915) which they had only just encountered ahem ahem - was republished by I think Virago? Pandora? in 1970s - and women's history has done quite a bit on the WCG since then so JEEZ I was peeved at her assumption that the working women were not agents but the whole thing was being run by the upper/middle class activists who were most visibly involved. And wanted to query whether working women thought it was very useful to have posh laydeez able to put their cases re maternity, child welfare and so on in corridors of power, rather than deferentially curtseying??? (I should like to go back in time and ask my dear Stella Browne about that.)

Also on wymmynz voices not, or at least hard to trace, in the archives, I fancy this person does not know a) Marie Stopes' volume Mother England (1929), extracts of letters she had from women about motherhood and b) based on 1000s of letters surviving and available to researchers. I could, indeed, point to other resources, fume, mutter.

Update Well, there were some later papers I dropped in on and enjoyed (and was able to offer comment/questions on; but I was obliged to point out certain errors in a description of Joanna Russ's The Female Man (really I think if you are going to cite a work you should check details....) (and I suppose Mitchison's work was just outside the remit of what they were talking about, so I was very self-restrained and failed to go on about Naomi.)