Monthly Archives: December 2007

Writing with Numbers: a Faculty Workshop

By IRIS Posted on by

Today was the last day of the annual faculty workshop sponsored by our writing program. This year we’re reprising a topic from two years ago: Writing with Numbers. The idea being that students often have minimal expertise in integrating numerical evidence into their papers regardless of whether the paper is primarily about numerical evidence or is a non-numerical paper that could nevertheless benefit from a few well-placed numbers. This is Numbers As Rhetorical Tools rather than a workshop on statistics.

On the first day John Bean (from Seattle University) walked us through the fine art of creating assignments that both encourage students to learn by grappling with problems and also learn to match their writing to various audiences. The next day, my co-worker introduced strategies and sources for find everything from census numbers to large datasets. (And by the way, she deserves a lot of credit for structuring a talk intended for an audience made up of professors from all sorts of disciplines, some of which routinely analyze huge datasets and some of which only occasionally need a population number from the census.) That day was fun because so many people had their imaginations tickled with possibilities for integrating numerical information into their course assignments.

Today the professors teamed up to revise assignments for their upcoming classes. And of course, we had our annual Sock Contest! For this contest, the Dean of the College appears and judges all of our socks to see which are the worst. There are two categories: Holiday and GodAwful. (Though many people spanned the two.) I won last year in the Holiday division for some truly ghastly Santa socks, but this year I dug through my drawers only to find that I’d already thrown away the shocking-green-and-orange shaggy socks that I wore constantly as a kid. Ah well… the world is probably a better place without having to see those socks.

Search is Search

By IRIS Posted on by

Yesterday, an Academic Technologist, another librarian, and I joined forces to lead a workshop called “Finding Your Stuff in Zimbra.” The technologists thought there should be a session on email searching, and they figured librarians must know a thing or two about search, and so this session was spawned.

The session itself was fairly uneventful. I put together a guide to Zimbra’s rather impressive search capabilities (probably Zimbra’s best quality). For example, did you know that it’s possible to keyword search inside your attachments using this system? I didn’t either until preparing for this session, but it’s pretty darn cool. Anyway, we walked attendees through these capabilities, and then we discussed what to do if people knew they’d want to gather messages that were related but had no common metadata: create tags and/or folders. For example, I have tags or folders for things like gathering messages from students, since no message metadata exists to indicate whether or not the message sender is a student.

Two things surprised me about leading this session. First, people came! About 2/3 of the room was full, and they would have stayed past our alloted hour if people hadn’t been congregating outside the classroom door in anticipation of the next workshop. Second, people want us to offer it again. I would never have guessed. Never.

The Night Oscar Crooned

By IRIS Posted on by

Last night I went to a hangar dance — one of those dances held in airport hangars where lots of people dress in WWII era clothes and dance to WWII era music… or just show up and swing dance. The evening could have been a disaster. The music was too slow (even when we requested upbeat music, they played it at half speed), and even though most of my favorite dancers were there the bitter cold seems to have kept most people away.

And yet we managed to have a really good time anyway. For one thing, the trombone player looked and acted exactly like Oscar Madison from the Odd Couple. He sat slouched in his chair with his legs crossed in that lazy middle-aged-man way and improvised his way through an entire evening of music. Once he even took the microphone and crooned to us in a most Oscar-like way. As we sat on the sidelines and waited for dance-able music, we’d do Oscar imitations and send ourselves into stitches. “I want you out of here, Felix! Out!”

Another highlight was having somebody who’d been there for the dinner portion of the night come up to me and ask the name of our dance troupe. We all danced so well, she said, that she thought we were affiliated with a reenactment group. Cool! I’ve been mistaken for a professional dancer!!

But what really saved the evening from being a $10/3-hour-round-trip/bad-music disaster was the group of people I got to hang out with. If you have to sit out 8 out of every 10 dances, it sure helps if you’re sitting out with a bunch of really fun people.

The Esternay Project

By IRIS Posted on by

Back when only a few people in each town were literate (and therefore conducted most of the written business of the town and wrote any letters that townspeople had to send), the French devised a system whereby these appointed literate folks would also keep their town’s records.

A professor here acquired a over 100 years of these records from Esternay, spanning from the French Revolution to 1895, and has been digitizing and transcribing the letters from that collection for the last many years (with the help of students in the French department). Now, the collection is online (though still under construction). The Esternay Project includes scans of over 800 letters, their transcriptions, and then their translations.

From the page describing the project:

The core of the collection is the familial, business, political and patronage correspondence of three generations of notaries and landowners Jean François Poirrier, Louis François Poirrier and Louis Alfred Poirrier who consecutively held office at the municipal, cantonal, departmental and national level from the time of the French Revolution down to 1895 when Alfred Poirrier, while sitting in the Senate of the National Assembly, died. Apart from the letters of their wives and daughters (Louise Eulalie Poirrier, Sophie Guillemain Poirrier and Denise Poirrier) and Alfred’s two brothers (Charles and Paul Poirrier) and assorted friends and kin, the archive contains a selection from a much larger mass of notarial documents including the correspondence of various clients of the notarial office of Alfred, his father and his grand-father . We have also included a small sample of items from the documentary remains of Alfred’s political and administrative career which provide insights into the everyday workings of electoral politics in the first three decades of the III Republic. Aside from the personal correspondence of the family, our site now offers only a sample of what could be included in a much expanded version of the Esternay Project but even so we believe the site can serve as a window into the lives of French men and women as they lived through what was certainly one of the most tumultuous periods in their nation’s history.

I’ve always been intrigued by family letters. I covet a copy of the family letters my maternal grandfather’s family kept, and my favorite book is 84 Charing Cross Road. Unfortunately, I am terrible at writing letters, myself. I don’t now if that lack of talent feeds my obsession with reading other people’s letters, or if it’s just natural curiosity, but a project like this calls out to that deep part of me that loves letter writing above all other genres.