Sunday Links

A fascinating find.

Shelf Love

Welcome to our occasional feature in which we share bookish news and commentary that we’ve come across in recent weeks:

• How is blogging similar to boiling granite? Tom shares his thoughts at Wuthering Expectations (with help from Emerson).
• Kathleen Rooney at the New York Times Magazine talks about the way Jack Handey — yes, Jack Handey, of Deep Thoughts — has freed up genuine poetry, and the way she teaches it to undergraduates.
• Levi at I’ve Been Reading Lately shares some suggestions from Ford Maddox Ford on the uses of books (and bacon).
• Jenn at The Picky Girl mulls over Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man and what it means to be an American.
• Lisa Leff writes an excellent long-form piece for Tablet Magazine about Zosa Szajkowski’s “salvaged” archival Jewish documents, rescued from the Nazis during the Holocaust in France. Here, she discusses possession, rescue, and the delicate nature of archiving.

View original post 70 more words

 

An Abundance of Katherines

Colin Singleton, the hero of John Green‘s An Abundance of Katherines, is a dumpee. Time and again, 19 times in fact, he’s been dumped. Every time this prodigy, who’s just graduated high school, has been dumped by a girl named Katherine. He developed his penchant for Katherine’s when he was 8. Some “relationships” lasted minutes, some months. Losing Katherine XIX devastated him. Thus to shake off this bad feeling whiz kid Colin and his friend Hassan take to the road in Colin’s jalopy, which he calls Hearse

The story is clever and I enjoyed Colin, Hassan and Lindsay. Yet I was so keenly aware of Green’s cleverness that I never got lost in the book. I was always aware that Green was telling a story. It’s quite clever, though far from realistic. The boys drive to a small town in Tennessee where they meet Lindsay, who’s a beautiful woman, their age, who is a tour guide for the Archduke Ferdinand’s burial site. Before you know it, Colin and Hassan are working for Lindsay’s mother and living in their pink mansion. The boys must interview old folks for an oral history of Gunshot, Tennessee. While they’re in Gunshot, hanging out and working, Colin has time to figure out an equation that can predict how long a relationship will last and which party will dump the other.

There’s a lot of banter and interesting esoteric remarks. It’s a fast read, and I liked that the cover shown above was designed by a reader. In fact, it’s a lot better than the professionally designed earlier covers, if you ask me. The novel’s end is rather pat and predictable. Still it’s a decent book.

Related articles

• An Abundance of Katherines (beckypinners.wordpress.com)
• An Abundance of Praise for John Green (meganwoofwoof.wordpress.com)
• “An Abundance of Katherines” by John Green (inbetweenthepagesofbooks.wordpress.com)
• Vlogbrothers (Vlog) (nerdwhisperings.wordpress.com)
• Stand-out Author: John Green (sonderbooks.com)

 

Literature Review for Final Paper

For my class Social Media for Information Science Professionals, I had to work on a group project. This group consisted of bright, hard working professionals and we developed a strategy for a hypothetical technology museum dedicated to Steve Jobs and Innovation.

Here’s my bit:

Prior to the 1970s, museums focused on the collection, upkeep and recording of items in their collections. Barbara Franco, former director of The Historical Society of Washington, quipped that museums were in the “salvage and warehouse” business (Weil, 1999). During the 1970s a paradigm shift occurred and museums began to see their mission as directed towards people. While museums in the 19^th and early 20^th were satisfied with a relatively small number of visitors from an elite class, now they have a broader mission and strive to draw visitors from all ethnicities, and income levels (Weil, 1999). Consequently, museums are now in the business of education, conversation, collaboration and sharing as well as collecting, organizing and preserving (Proctor, 2010). Early attempts to better reach the public took the form of devising entertaining ways to showcase the collection (Watkins and Russo, 2007). Social media allow museum staff to communicate beyond the walls of the museum reaching people who may never visit, but who may want to engage with the museum staff, collection or people sharing an interest in the museum.

Social Media and the New Museum Paradigm

Whereas in the past museum staff worked behind closed doors with little interaction with visitors, social media allows for immediate communication that can build the democratic relationship museums now seek (Bailey, 2009). When used effectively, social media provide an ideal means of connecting with the public in a meaningful way as to promote and hold exhibits (Bailey, 2009) or solicit donations.

All museums must realize that even if they reject social media, their users haven’t (Proctor, 2010). Visitors record and discuss their museum experiences in blogs, on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. For example, the Flickr Group “At the Museum” has almost 3000 members and over 87,000 photos (Flickr, 2013). To balance a museum’s duties to its public with its duty to its collection, Nancy Proctor explains that “museums need to reconcile the apparently contradictory views of democratizing control and preserving and valuing expertise” (2010). In the era of Web 2.0 Lynda Kelly believes museums need to:

“share authority, take risks, give staff and communities permission to experiment and play . . . encourage connections and networks both internally and externally, provide scaffolding and support that others can work from . . . allowing third parties to access their material and see what eventuates, acknowledge that a healthy community will self-monitor and self-correct take their place as the subject matter experts, while also drawing on the power of their collective communities” (2010).

Data on Museums’ Use of Social Media

In a recent online survey of 315 American museums using social media, Adrienne Fletcher and J. Lee Moon learned that 94% of surveyed museums used Facebook, 70% use Twitter, 56% use YouTube and 49% use Flickr (2012). While 60% of the respondents use social media to list events and post reminders, many museums use social media for online promotions, to reach out to a larger audience, or for conversation with stakeholders (Fletcher and Moon, 2012). Chris Alexander’s team of researchers examined the YouTube use of five museums and found that all five museums reported that You Tube videos “have helped introduce new audiences to their museum, have helped [their] core audiences get a closer connection to programs and services, and have helped to explain a difficult topic/concept/artist in a way that other resources couldn’t” (2008).

Effective Use of Social Media

Since social media is analogous to a cocktail party, users don’t want to be ill-mannered guests who simple tries to sell, sell, sell (Bailey, 2009). Sophisticated social media users ask questions, amuse, educate and enlighten those they communicate with. (Bailey, 2009). As social media is casual and somewhat intimate, institutions that simply post press releases and event listings, “just don’t get it” (Kidd, 2011). Nina Simon illustrates the kinds of interaction in a hierarchy she developed for museums’ social media use.

Source: N. Simon, Museum 2.0

As the pyramid grows steeper, the interaction between the museum and its users gets more interactive, more democratic; control is shared In the best cases, a museum reaches “the holy grail of social discourse, where people interact directly with each other around content” (Simon, 2007). Effective social media use should ideally capitalize on the strengths of each platform. Examples of successful social media implementation include Tweetups, events for users who promise to document their visit (Preston, 2011), changing rules regarding photography, and allowing visitors to upload their videos on the museum’s YouTube channel and website (Kidd, 2011).

Ethics of Social Media in Museums

In using social media, a museum staff must consider ethical questions concerning accountability, censorship, and transparency. For example, how can museums, such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, reconcile the ideal of free speech with its mission to honor and memorialize a people? (Wong, 2011). The often casual tone characterizing much social media is at odds with the seriousness required of some exhibits. Some museums note the friendly nature of microblogs and their personnel use their own names on Twitter. Although Wong was assigned to tweet or the U.S. Holocaust Museum, she was not hired to be its spokesperson. Consequently, the museum decided not to allow her to tweet under her own name (2011). Each museum needs to consider their reputation, audience and responsibilities in creating and implementing a policy of social media ethics (Wong, 2011).

 

John Green on the Boston Marathon Bombing

John Green comments on Flags and Helpers in light of the bombing.

 

Poem of the Week

I lately lost a preposition:
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair.
And angrily I cried: “Perdition!
Up from out of in under there!”
Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor;
And yet I wondered: “What should he come
Up from out of in under for?”

Morris Bishop, whose birthday is today

 

From the Writer’s Almanac

It’s the birthday of the man who said: “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” Paul Theroux, born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). After college he went in the Peace Corps and taught school in Malawi, Africa, and he wrote. Ten years after college graduation, he had written ten books, and it was the 10th that made his reputation: The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), a travelogue of his four-month trip across Asia. His advice for aspiring writers: “Leave home. Because if you stay home people will ask you questions that you can’t answer. They say, “What are you going to write? Where will you publish it? Who’s going to pay you? How will you make a living?” If you leave home, no one asks you questions like that.”

His advice for aspiring travel writers is the same: leave home. But without a companion, and never by plane. Theroux prefers trains. He said: “Ever since childhood, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.”

 

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

 “A lovely face is a gift from heaven, but tiny feet can improve social standing.”

Lisa See‘s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan tells the story of Lily and her “old same” or lao tang, Snow Flower. Because the two girls share so many similarities in birth and life experience a matchmaker pairs them as old sames. During the 19th century in parts of China old sames were vowed relationship between two girls, sort of like an official sworn sister.

Lily and Snow Flower both start the foot binding process, a special form of Chinese torture in which girls’ feet would be bound to attract men and show beauty. The book describes this long process and tells us that at the time a mother’s job was to induce pain in her daughters to prepare them for a hard life. The girls were fed special foods believed to support this process. Furthermore, the girls were forced to walk back and forth in their rooms in agony. Some girls’ did die of infected feet as a character here does.

All this was for status and the women did buy into it. Their actual feet became hideous so women wore silk sleeping shoes in bed for their husbands to fondle.

Fascinating and tragic as this practice is, the heart of Snow Flower and Secret Fan is the relationship between the two girls as they grow. In the beginning Lily is in awe of Snow Flower, her social superior. Snow Flower’s ancestry has greater status and she is far more educated and refined than Lily. Yet as they grow and marry, Lily gains status and security, while Snow Flower is victimized by her father’s decline and her husband’s low status. The book intrigued me as a portrait of a far off, exotic arena where women were taken for granted, yet had the the audacity to invent their own written language, nu shu, which they used to communicate with the people they left behind when they got married off.

Snow Flower and Secret Fan is a dramatic, satisfying book that focuses on the trust, conventions and loyalty in another era presenting a different culture with historical authenticity.

Related articles

• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan – Lisa See (wildmystique.wordpress.com)
• Community to read ‘Shanghai Girls’ (utsandiego.com)
• ## : Snow Flower and The Secret Fan (A Novel) [Unabridged, 9 CDs] (specialq2ldc.wordpress.com)
• WOMEN AND HOLLYWOOD WEEKLY UPDATE FILMS OPENING July 15, 2011 (binsidetv.net)
• Books about China (kimbofo.typepad.com)