Homework for 26 October, 2010

First things first, the homework for tonight:
~Latin 1--Work on your second draft and make sure your notes are ready to present tomorrow
~Latin 2--Have a tentative title in mind
~Latin 3--

And now to two questions from the afternoon Latin 2s.  First, Dante's question about 'How can we really know what the chicken-fried-steak is really going on in history if half the stuff doesn't exist anymore and the other half is potentially miss-copied.  To wit, I present a blog entry dated 10 November, 2007 when I was still in Scotland.
"Last night I was talking to the Gypsy [my then soon-to-be fiancee] and I was complaining about how hard it is to find the sources I want. She asked a simple, innocuous question and it got me thinking; roughly it was "what is it, exactly, that you do when you are working?"

And NPR came to my rescue. Couple days back, there was an interesting story on Morning Edition where David Greene went back to a two people who had encounters with Democratic candidates in Iowa. One was a waitress and met Hillary Clinton while on shift; she mentioned that Clinton's campaign people had not left a tip that day. Fast forward through the hyper-inflated importance of the blogosphere and other pundits and you've the brewings of a fairly acrimonious story. Bear with me, this background is important. Yesterday, after watching the story take on a life of it's own, Morning Edition brought David Greene back on to try and iron out the kinks in the story. Bottom line is that the Clinton campaign said they had left a tip, $100.00 via credit card, and produced the receipts to prove it.

Now, let us say you are looking to write a chapter or article on this and it's some hundred plus years from now. But through negligence at NPR, the original story has been deleted; you've only the second story. You may or may not have access to some of the internet chatter but what you really want are the statements made by the Clinton campaign and those receipts as well as, if possible, corresponding receipts from the restaurant. What you have to do is, first, read as much of the secondary lit you can find on the Democratic primary elections of 2007/08 and see if anyone has identified these documents or other documents you've not thought of. If they have, great! You can go to that library, archive, whatever and look at them yourself. If not... Well, if it wasn't hairy enough we're about to move into Mammoth territory.

Let's just take the receipts produced by the Clinton campaign. They produced photocopies for NPR. Right there, you've two possible and identical documents. You also know that, receipts in this period, being what they are and how they are made, were not designed to be archived and will fade over time so you can be pretty confident you're not going to be looking for the originals. The photocopies then. Were they faxed? If so, there will be a copy with NPR and with the Clinton campaign. NPR’s archive was destroyed in the great Zombie Uprising of 2082 and there is little chance that document survived. Now, where are the Clinton records?

It is irrelevant whether or not Clinton actually won her bid here, it does not really change how you’re looking. If she did, it’ll probably be in her presidential library, if not, it’ll be lodged with the rest of her campaign documents. Right? No.

Library of Congress, Bill Clinton Presidential Library, some of her documents are held by her alma mater Wellesley College which, I might add, is notorious for its hard to access archives. Could they be in Iowa’s state archives, some archive of American elections established later.

You have to rely on your own body of knowledge, the knowledge of colleagues, advisers and maybe even someone you don't actually know but met at a conference and have been corresponding with professionally. Maybe, if you're very lucky, some of these archives have been indexed well, or not, and there is a list of what is there. More often than not, however, these lists will contain entries like "Documents; Clinton primary campaign; March 2007-November 2007." Are they in there? Who knows, no one has touched it in thirty years and you've got to go and find out unless you've built a rapport with that library, or a single archivist within it, who will go and check for you.

(gasp, pant wheeze) And that's just for one, single, blessedly damned piece of paper! And the above also assumes the document is A) Intact, B) Undamaged and C) Legible.

So, the long and the short of it is that I spend quite a bit of time in the library very, very frustrated. ;)"

Ok, so that was Dante's question and to answer Ian's question on 'Why six minutes and forty seconds?'  An article on pecha-kucha.