Well, Me. My name is Shawn Day and I am a PhD student in the History Department at 
I was entering some dummy citations into a social networked text sharing project on the weekend.
Serendipitously I chose the genre of historical fiction and ended up reflecting on some of the more memorable books I have enjoyed. At the top of that list is the memoirs of Bartholomew Wolfe Bandy by Donald Jack. This multi-volume series was very deservedly awarded the Stephen Leacock Award for humour on three occasions. This is all the more appropriate given the very Leacockian style of the Bandy papers themselves.
If you have not ever been exposed to Bandy, I can not recommend these books enough. They are superb examples of the comedic novelist’s art down the line of P.G Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and George Macdonald Fraser. Set in early twentieth century Ontario, B.W. Bandy, the hero is an Ottawa valley farm boy who heads off to fight in the First World War. He meets real life notables along the way, enjoys some of the most brilliantly told adventures and despite the comedic delivery actually teaches much about Canadian history. These novels demonstrate the close connection between literature and history - the enduring importance and beauty of a tale well told.
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As I read through my RSS feeds in Google Reader today, 
I was once again struck by the increasing number of familiar headlines. By this I don’t mean similar themes continue to be explored (although true - Hilary is clearly a bad, bad, bad woman and John McCain throws kittens into wells), but rather that I had already read the articles that were popping as new posts. My immediate thought was that Reader wasn’t catching my ‘mark as read’ flags, or that I had inadvertently created duplicate feeds. Alas, neither the case. These are the same posts…simply with different authorship claimed. Note that I am not even getting into the automated blog post piracy that is designed only to attract search engine attention.
When you try to stay on top of all your news feeds with a reader and attempt to strategically manage the multitude of feeds, the collapsing of feeds into headlines makes this phenomenon rather obvious. As I considered this, I realized that there is a certain tiering in the bloggosphere. Digg, Redit and other aggregators are at the lowest level and explicitly point to other’s posts. At the ‘highest’ level you have blogs that create absolutely original, thoughtful and unique posts. Between these there are all manners of variants. Review sites are somewhere in this milieu and they account for a substantial amount of this overlap. Some new gadget is released and the sites all tend to either hear about it or get their hands on it around the same time. Yet, it is interesting to note (when you have far too many RSS feeds coming in) post gravity and proliferation.
Bruges at Christmas time. A lovely medieval preserved town with a festive spirit and now blessed with two hit men laying low at a quaint hotel. How can one react to this movie? In Bruges is a treat!!
Characterization and the characters are superb. Dialogue is witty and fast paced. The scenery of Bruges is shot magnificently. There are little 10 second vignette shots that work very well. The movie follows the two hit men taking refuse following a botched job. The hunker down to await a call. As Vladimir and Estragon, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleason) adopt entertainly different approaches to their enforced tourism. Maybe its just the Irish way, but I feel some Beckett here.
Dr. Kathy Garay of the McMaster Library gave a lively and fast-paced talk exploring the nature of majesty to the Medieval and Early Modern Research Group. Her paper,”Manufacturing Majesty: Elizabeth of Hungary, Diana of England and the Construction of Royal Saints, 1207-2007,” reflected on the rather striking similarities between St. Elizabeth of Hungary and Lady Diana Spencer. 
Particularly:
- Lineage
- Texts
- Marital Love
- In-Laws
- Beauty
- Motherhood
- The Third Person
- Charity
- Agency
- Funeral Rites
- Legacy
Yes, iSync has been with us for few years now. It should be rock solid. It’s not - yet. I recently wrote about my impressions of data detectors. Not rocket science, 
but a small and powerful addition to useful workflow on a Mac. That they also remind me of the promise that was the Newton makes them all the more welcome. But what can I say about iSync? One of the things that makes OSX such a compelling choice for day to day computing is the consistency of interface between applications and their ability to share information…not just data, but contexts and preferences and thus recognition and adaptability to user peculiarities that anthropomophise the laptop. The computer becomes somehow just something a little more. A trusted companion - not merely a clone of millions of other identical collections of aluminum, silicon and other substances.
Reuters released the API for their Calais web service last week. I dabbled with it quickly 
last week, and then was reminded about it earlier today. I took a closer look and come away very impressed and thoughtful about the application of this technology. Calais accepts text and quickly extracts a variety of meta data about your content or as they phrase it : “automatically annotates your content with rich semantic metadata.” Currently it attempts to determine references to:
- Entities: city, company, continent, country, industryTerm, MoneyAmount, Organization, Person, ProvinceOrState, Region and URL;
- Events/Facts: acquisition, alliance, bankruptcy, businessRelation, buybacks, companyEarningsAnnoucement, companyEarningsGuidance, companyInvestments, compantLegalIssues, jointVenture, ManagementChange, merger, personPolitical, personPoliticalPast, PersonProfession, PersonProfessionalPast, stockSplit
This is a rather rich collection of metadata - and they target expanding from here.
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Susan Nance, professor of US history at the University of Guelph, presented a fascinating paper
“A Star is Born to Buck: On the Development of Rodeo Bulls in the 1990s” at the Rural History Roundtable today. Although Nance’s past work has touched on topics such as tourism under the Ottoman Empire and religious parades in interwar Chicago, her more recent work has focussed on accounting for the absence of animal’s stories in historical scholarship. The subject of her talk today is a transnational study of rodeo’s and performance with an emphasis on the contribution of the animal - most specifically ‘Bodacious’, the ‘World’s Most Dangerous Bull.
A good friend of mine has arranged access to the digitised records of the New York Emigrant Savings Bank for 1850-1883. 
What a wondrous treasure trove of information! These records contain the deposit details for thousands of newly-arrived immigrants to New York from 1850. The bank was established by the Irish Emigrants Society and served a largely Irish population. Amazingly, the Emigrant Savings Bank is still around, holding about $15 billion in assets.
These older records are an immediate resource for genealogists. In addition to transaction details, the records include a ‘test book’ which contains information on place of residence, spouse and children, occupation, and additional other nuggets of information1. This information was compiled when a depositor wished to send money back home to Ireland. I am particularly fascinated by the ledgers which record deposits and withdrawals for a large groups of people over a substantial period of time. There is a huge further digitisation project here to continue to enter data from these records into formats allowing for further study.
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- Check out the finding aid from the NYPL referenced above for more details [↩]
In my continuing effort to direct you away from my blog, I am compelled to note Bill Turkel’s follow-up to a post I referenced last week.
In this one he ponders our conscious creation of “islands of stasis” and why an anachronistic mode of research practise persists. More importantly his ‘punchline’ refers briefly to how to make use of tools, such as Zotero, efficiently to comprehend our private research processes. He muses “that measurements of your Zotero bibliography will be most useful to the extent that they are fed back into your research in a useful way.” This is very powerful observation and activity, but also dangerous.
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