Brandymore Castle

A vital interest of mine is access to archives. I've been interested in the possibilities inherent in the web and network for increasing access to archives and enabling a greater number of non-academics to browse, organize and surface archive holdings. One of the most significant ways of exposing the holdings of an archives is blogging the contents. We really haven't got there yet, but I've noticed a small trend, which I hope signifies the beginning of exponential growth, of people blogging artifacts. I do not remember the first site I came across where a blogger was posting pictures of artifacts, usually photographs from an online catalog of a museum, but here are some recent finds. Illustration Art All Edges Gilt If we could just get every artifact in the world's museums and archives photographed or scanned and online, give the tools to blog the contents to millions of ordinary people interested in telling the stories of these cultural objects, think of how rich that ...

In recent years tomato sauce was in the nutrition news. It turns out that cooking tomatoes makes Lycopene more available than in fresh tomatoes. This went against the prevailing grain of nutritional thinking, which said that fresh was always better. Nutritionists argued that cooking reduced the amount of vitamins in food. They backed this up with scientific studies showing that cooking vegetables (or fruits like tomatoes) does reduce the amount of vitamins. An obsession developed over "keeping as much of the vitamins" in your food as possible. Steaming was touted as a way to avoid "losing" the vitamins into the cooking water. The typical English way of preparing vegetables was dammed as washing away nutrition. New technologies were advanced in an attempt to retain as much of the nutrients (known ones) as possible. Some radical eaters adopted entirely raw diets hoping to not lose a single molecule of nutrition. The trouble with this view, was that it overlooks the r...

With publication of Pollan's In Defense of Food, I think we are seeing the emergence of folklore into the mainstream. Most people think folklore is something they have very little in common with. It is old fashioned music or people dancing around in costumes they wore hundreds of years ago. People feel it has very little relation to their lives. They also believe that we live in a scientific, rational world and somehow folklore does not belong. There is also an association between myth, legend and folklore as meaning fraudulent, fantasy, lies. This is a problem of perception and mis-perception, which is not new. Shortly after becoming literate, the Greeks abandoned and ridiculed their own folklore, the "myths" we read about today. For a new perspective on what I call "folk knowledge" or what might be categorized as "folk culture" instead of folklore, since it is more correct and encompassing, we need only look to authors like Adrienne Mayor . Through l...

I've been reading Elaine Lawless's book, God's Peculiar People , which arrived here in good condition today. She explains how Pentecostals are in daily contact with the paranormal. They keep one foot in the spirit world, to place it in context with the notions of pre-literate cultures. The "willfulness principle" was observed by Lawless operating in these communities that held strong beliefs in the power of "witches" to influence events. The willfulness principle was coined by Barber and Barber to explain the notion that in pre-literate cultures, natural effects have supernatural causes, principally the actions of willful spirits. It is worth noting that in Miyazaki's films (Spirited Away and My Friend Totoro notably) there exists the same close association between the natural world and the spirit world Lawless discovered in her observations of Pentecostals. His films express this notion of a spirit world parallel to and mirroring the natural world, ...

"Most people don't understand Americans because they don't know how frightening it had been to leave home completely and to pull up your roots and face the wilderness." -- Alan Lomax I was startled by how Alan Lomax in the film Appalachian Journeys anticipates David Hackett Fischer's findings in Albion's Seed, discovering evidence of British folkways transplanted to America. Speaking of the poetry and song of the Scots-Irish, Lomax observes "This 70,000 square miles of beautiful tangled green hills allowed this British tradition time to reshape itself ... when it was being cut to pieces by the industrialization of Great Britain, it was finding a new home here ... taking on a new life ... a life out of the corn fields, the feuds and the whisky stills..." Americans were shaped by the unique environment of a new land, but they were were also shaped by the persistence of old world culture. Although, the unique flora and fauna of America, such as the poi...

I've been reading the Citizendium's approach to governing what goes into their content. This new attempt at a wiki encyclopedia favors an approach with less rules, greater oversight and tries to accommodate a multiplicity of views on truth. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Neutrality_Policy I wish they would not call it a neutrality policy. I strongly dislike the oxymoronic "neutral point of view." I don't know how far the Citizendium will go, but I do believe multiple truths should be represented transparently. There is no reason not to accommodate multiple truths and no reason not to build information systems capable of accommodating multiple truths. Contrary to popular belief, there does exist more than more than one truth. In genealogy, for example, the idea of multiple truths is necessary, since the same individual is frequently claimed by more than one family. Information about the past is sketchy and subject to interpretation. When the first online geneal...

Last year I read Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, David Hackett Fischer for the first time, after seeing him on CSPAN BookTV several times and hearing a lot about the book. I was a rewarding experience and opened my eyes to many things and answered many questions. I can't say more right now, but this is an important book, perhaps one of the most important books you will ever read. It can change you mind about a lot of things. He will open your eyes to the folk culture that informs our supposedly rational opinions and decisions, which amounts to a kind of folk knowledge that everyone absorbs by osmosis from their parents, neighbors, community and surrounding culture growing up. What is very striking, and counter intuitive for many rationalists, is how the behavior of people is shown to be determined more by a persistence of culture than by a framework of social or ideological forces acting on them in their own time. Or at least the culture frames the debates and ...