Jana Remy
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Jana Remy

  • Writing
    • Disability
    • Making History
    • Digital Humanities
      • dayofDH
    • Canoeing
    • Creative Nonfiction & Essays
    • Feminism
    • Bibliographies
      • Pacific Worlds Bibliography
    • Social Media
      • Mentions/Links
  • Scholarship
    • Awards/Fellowships
    • Conferences & Invited Talks
    • Collaboration
    • Workshops
    • Conference Planning
    • Technical Skills
  • Teaching
    • Blogposts About Teaching
Category:

making history

An update from the Archive
making history

An update from the Archive

For those of you who followed along on the FBLive videos that we created in the Archive last summer, you will know that we left you hanging as to the outcome of the developing relationship between Florence and Wally. Specifically, you knew that they had plans to marry soon but also that Wally would “ship out” soon too, and we didn’t tell you which would happen first.

Therefore, today I’m here to tease you with a bit more information.  It can be found in this snippet from one of Florence’s letters:

letter from Florence Keeler
My transcription of the relevant parts:

It’s been so dreadfully long since you left darling — since you kissed me Goodbye on the street corner in Las Vegas. Just think we will soon be married for four months, a third of a year, and we haven’t had one week together. It’s hard to take and I don’t want to go on this way. I want to be where you are. I wish something would happen so I could make some kind of plans. I don’t know how I can get out of LA on a plane or train at Christmas. There is just no space and I don’t even know whether I’m going so I can’t make a reservation. I do hope you call tomorrow. I’ve received nothing later than your last Sunday’s letter. That’s why my spirits are so very low right now…

Poor Florence, she hasn’t heard anything from Wally lately, she had to say goodbye to her brand new husband on a street corner as he shipped out for parts unknown-to-her, and she is struggling to make her holiday plans. I felt so awful for her as I read this letter, perhaps even more so because it’s that same time of year that I’m also scheming about all of my own Christmas plans!

So I’ll let you in on a secret to break a bit of the suspense. She gets her wish and Wally does come home for Christmas. And this time it’s not a furlough or a weekend break. He’s home for good.

December 1, 2017
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What I learned from launching a social media campaign about the War Letters Archive
digital humanitiesmaking history

What I learned from launching a social media campaign about the War Letters Archive

An earlier version of this post appeared HERE.

At the beginning of last summer I began a social media experiment, to bring people into the Center for American War Letters Archive with me (and my collaborator Doug) virtually, via FB Live, to share some of our findings from WWII letters. I had no idea what to expect from this experiment, whether it would flounder or fly. Doug and I committed to trying this experiment for 12 weeks, but it ended up running for nineteen.  Here are some reasons why:

  1. For the fun of it. Hands down, this was my favorite part of my work week, to have a conversation about the War Letters. That it was a regularly scheduled commitment, with viewers, means that it happened no matter what other chaos is occurring in my/our work week.
  2. For the reach of it. Facebook tells me that our social media engagement with these sessions is in the hundreds. It would be very difficult for us to bring even a dozen people into the archive physically, so having this kind of reach is deeply satisfying. It has been surprising to see that many of the people in my FB circles who have engaged with these sessions are not scholars or historians, but they find the War Letters meaningful for other reasons.
  3. For the productive conversations. Often it wasn’t until Doug and I started talking about some letters that the insights about the letters start happening. Between the two of us we were able to make connections that we wouldn’t be able to alone. Those times that we’ve been able to add visitors to the sessions have added even deeper insights for us.
  4. For the scholarship. Diving into these Letters has aided so many other War Letters projects that we’ve been engaged with. It has helped us to author grants, to attract donors, and to garner the attention of students who want to join in the effort. (And on a related note, here is an article about our work with some fun “behind the scenes” images)

You can watch each of the episodes we created last summer on our Facebook Page, Voices from the Archive.

So now, we’re in the midst of planning several writing projects related to our work in the archive.  If you’d like to keep updated on how that’s going, please “Like” us on Facebook and follow along.

November 30, 2017
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Solving Mysteries in the Archive
making history

Solving Mysteries in the Archive

A few months ago while reading letters held in the CAWL Archive, my colleague Doug came across this shorthand notation written at the end of a letter:

three lines of shorthand writing

written in the postscript of a letter from Florence Mesner to Walter Keeler

I was sure there ought to be a way to decipher the message, and I figured that the “crowd” would be my best bet, specifically finding women who had done office work during the 20th century, and as a result had learned to write shorthand. I first sent it to my Mom, who could only make out the second line. She wrote:

I can only read a little bit of it. The second line says “and I love you ______. I could only guess what the first line might mean. It’s been a long time since I had to read it. Also, it is easier to read one’s own than someone else’s.

I then shared it with the members of a listerv that I’m on, which includes some women of an older generation than mine. That worked! From my friend Loralie I learned that it says:

Pops
You are the very nicest man I’ve ever known

and I love you so much.

That’s hardly newsworthy stuff. Florence floridly expressed her love to Walter in her letters, in longhand. However I believe this moment written in shorthand is something a bit special because she admits to him that he’s the “nicest man” she has ever known. And because we know that Florence has been married and has had several previous serious romantic relationships, this shorthand moment seems to be the moment that tipped the scale in Walter’s favor–where he became the “very nicest” out of all of the others.

And if nothing else, it was a mystery that begged an answer–what did that mysterious bit of text mean? And now we know!

November 26, 2017
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What I’m Reading
bookshow to charm memaking history

What I’m Reading


Started Richard Bausch’s Hello to the Cannibals last week and have had a hard time putting it down. I’m about halfway through and thus far it reminds me so much (in the very best ways) of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. In both, the protagonist becomes obsessed with a historical character. It goes without saying that I identify pretty strongly with that impulse.

November 25, 2017
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what I really want…
deep thoughtsmaking history

what I really want…

From my handwritten journal (written in green ink, no less) on July 17, 2000

***

I’ve been thinking about what I really want (Though, as I’ve said to John, I am destined to follow on his coattails rather than forging my own destiny):

  • live in the Isle of Man for a period of time; a season, a year, a few years
  • write sometime important
  • study yoga, nutrition and natural healing
  • grow a huge, beautiful flower garden
  • return to school and study literature, women’s studies, and literary history (made that last one up, but surely it exists somewhere)
  • take more trips (holidays) and just wander and meditate in beautiful places
  • try to do things in old fashioned ways i.e. spin wool, weave, quilt, sew, do needlepoint etc
  • get a housekeeper
  • have a “library:” a room in the home totally devoted to the love of and perusal of books

***

How strange it is to think that I’ve tried my hand at all of those now–except for the Isle of Man part, but I suspect that living in Belgium is close enough  :)

November 18, 2017
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Voices from the Archive
making historypodcast

Voices from the Archive

making history podcast imageI started the Making History Podcast ten years ago when I realized that I wanted to talk to historians about the craft of history-making, and especially to hear about how they organized their research at each phase of their project–from the initial forays into the archives to the writing process.  I wanted to learn about their serendipities and frustrations, and to demystify the notion of the scholar working alone in the ivory tower.

The podcast has fallen by the wayside in the ensuing years, primarily being a victim to my working full-time in university administration.  Podcast episodes took about ten hours to produce and I simply haven’t allocated the time for that type of labor in the past few years.

However, I have a new endeavor that will launch this afternoon, that will be in the same vein as my Making History podcasting efforts, called Voices From the Archive, Letters During War.  I’ll be taking a virtual audience into the Archive with me, to spend some time working in correspondence held in the Chapman University’s Center for American War Letters Archive. Rather than using podcasting technology, I’ll be using Facebook Live to record the events, and supplementing that with links on FB and Twitter. And this will not be a solo effort, as I will have librarian and writer Doug Dechow as my partner in this venture.

war letters photoThe intention behind the FB Live programming stems from two primary motivations.  The first of which is to foster the kinds of discussions that I had in my podcasts–to have scholars engaging with primary source materials and to talk about how they will use those materials to support their research questions.  The second motivation is to explore the wealth of holdings of the CAWL Archive and to share with the public the rich source of materials that are available there.

Since I began having students work in the archive three years ago, I’ve been surprised at how engaging it is for them to work in these materials.  It is the case with nearly every student that works in the archive, that they write in their course evaluations that it was the most meaningful part of the course for them.  As one wrote:

Holding the correspondences of soldiers abroad in my hands was an incredibly moving experience. I now have the desire to do research and see if these authors ever made it back to Pier 17 in San Francisco, where they swore to meet after the war.

In this age of email and texts, which are often deleted after being read, we often forget the power that letters can have to preserve history…Even though it was time-consuming, I feel honored to have been entrusted with this small piece of World War II history…

In sharing a few bits and pieces from the treasures held in the CAWL Archive via social media over the past few months, I’ve seen that these materials are meaningful to a wide variety of people that extends far beyond the scholarly audience.  Nearly everyone has a family member whose life has been touched by war and the memory of that experience shapes their identity and worldview in a myriad of ways. Also, there is an element of innate human curiosity that stems from peering inside the personal correspondence of people who lived not so long ago.  How much are they like us?  How are they different? And what was it like for them to live through such an important moment in history?

If you’d like to follow along and join in this project, please follow our brand new Facebook page, where you can access the FB Live broadcasts as well as view other media that we’ll add to the research that we’re doing in the Archive.  We also have a Twitter feed    where we will regularly share small excerpts from the Archive.

 

June 2, 2017
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deep thoughtsfamilymaking history

she’s the best…

catgirlBest summer research intern ever.  :)

July 17, 2013
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Historians as Project Managers
digital humanitiesmaking historyproject managmentschool

Historians as Project Managers

“Students in history [must] learn techniques of project management” because of the growing need for collaboration on “Big History” projects, says James Herbert in the most recent issue of Perspectives (the magazine of the American Historical Society), in an article titled “Professions and Publics.”  Herbert is paraphrasing the words of author James Cortada, who writes about the ways that historian need to change their research practices in his recent book History Hunting: A Guide for Fellow Adventurers.

It would be nice to see those skills incorporated into graduate school, but I can hardly imagine such a sea-change occurring anywhere but at the most innovative of institutions, where staff support, in the form of technologists and project managers, is available to graduate students.  Off the top of my head, I can only think of two (well-heeled) programs that might have such resources allocated to their graduate students.  Few (too few) even have technical support for faculty, much less their students.

I haven’t yet read Cortada’s book, so perhaps it’s premature for me to offer my concerns about the practicality of his suggestions.  However, I’m looking forward to reading it to see what concrete ideas he offers about how this change in curriculum might fit into the training of students at non-elite universities.

 

May 17, 2013
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Teaching with Timelines
digital humanitiesmaking history

Teaching with Timelines

Back when I was teaching in front of a traditional classroom, in those days when we used chalk to outline the main points of our lecture, I’d often have my students draw timelines on big rolls of butcher paper that I would then hang on a wall of the classroom for reference.  The power of the visual timeline gave students a sense of perspective as we discussed historical happenings.

In that vein, I’ve played around with the SIMILE timeline tools for awhile now, one of my earlier efforts being the crowdsourced Mormon Women’s Timeline project for The Exponent blog and my most recent effort using a WordPress plugin for creating a timeline for my Environmental History class.  While the WordPress plugin is easier than creating a timeline from a Google spreadsheet, as I did with the Mormon Women’s timeline, I’m finding that the loading of the timeline widget has slowed down my class website considerably, and when I’ve tried to customize the category colors for the widget, it breaks the timeline and I have to uninstall it completely and then re-install it to make the timeline functional again.  Also, my students who bring mobile devices to class instead of laptops, can’t scroll the timeline so they’re feeling frustrated with my attempt to use it as a teaching tool.

So now I’m feeling somewhat tempted to bring back the butcher paper and crayola markers and have my students create something wall-sized and analog instead of digital.  Because, although they enjoyed the ‘wow’ moment when their blogposts first started populating the digital timeline, their frustrations with it seem to have eclipsed their initial enthusiasm.  And I’m not sure that they’re actually getting much from it, visually, because of the technical limitations of the WordPress plugin.

It brings to mind some of my recent feelings that it’s important to mix a wide variety of pedagogical approaches in my classroom.  Some students will learn better when they are hand-lettering a poster rather than typing up a blogpost assignment.  When we had our class at the train station a few weeks ago I bought a small chalkboard along for a lesson about maps.  I found it utterly painful to be drawing anything on that board–trying to hold it with my left hand and balance it on one knee while writing on it with my right hand.  It was cumbersome and slow.  But the feedback from my students was overwhelmingly positive, and I’ve noticed that they seem to have remembered that lesson better than others that I taught with the benefit of an overhead projector, a laptop, and an internet connection.

It reminds me of the THATCampSoCal conference that I organized at Chapman a few years ago where the favorite hangout during the event was the “Craft Cabin” where attendees could do hands-on project with historical flickr images.   Time flew by as we decoupaged and stamped and painted and glued stuff together.  What I produced there wasn’t so important as the place to play and create and to admire others’ artistic work.  After spending so much time at the keyboard it felt satisfying to pick up a pair of scissors and a paintbrush, instead.

September 28, 2012
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making historyschool

Open & Closed: some brief thoughts on participating in THATCampSF & OneWeek

It was hard for me to tweet this weekend for a variety of reasons, one of those being that I misplaced my phone charger cord (ack!), and another being that I was participating in an “unconference” called THATCamp Bay Area that required a great deal of attentiveness. But probably the most significant reason that I wasn’t tweeting was that I felt uncomfortable with being a part of a select group of attendees at this event, knowing that many qualified people weren’t able to attend. That took a great deal of the pleasure out of advertising my own presence. I know that’s a bit ridiculous, and if anything is counter-intuitive because I ought to be tweeting precisely because it would include non-attendees in the conversation. But I didn’t over-analyze my resistance–instead I immersed myself more wholly in being present. While at the conference I talked quite a bit about my work with One Week | One Tool, but I felt awkward about advertising the fact that I was part of this project too loudly, again knowing how many scholars vied for positions on the team and feeling somewhat self-conscious about my own good fortune in winning one of the golden tickets to participate.

Digital Humanities tends to be quite an inclusive community (as some have said, it is a “big tent”). At my core, I believe in open-source, freely-shared tools and content. I don’t like cliques and in-groups and members-only clubs. I feel everyone has a place at the table and I’ll undoubtedly continue to struggle with those moments when some are excluded because there aren’t enough chairs for everyone who wants to join the feast.

Perhaps I’m feeling overly self-conscious about my own good fortune in attending these events. Or perhaps I’m concerned that I’ll be labeled as a member of a particular inner-circle of DHers that I don’t really feel a part of. Or perhaps I’m simply insecure about my own place in the field. It’s probably a combination of all-of-the-above, as well as a recognition of how much I still have yet to learn from those around me.

And speaking of that….I’ll be in the Bay Area for the next few days meeting with scholars and friends. If you’d like to see if we can connect, drop me a note in a comment or via twitter.

October 11, 2010
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deep thoughtsLDSmaking history

What Has to be Done, redux

Many of you might remember my blogpost from two years ago, “What Has to Be Done.”  That post, and the talk I gave alongside famous blogger Heather Armstrong (of dooce.com) brought over 30,000 new readers to my blog.  What a hard time that was.  As I suffered through the pain of my surgery and the side-effects of the intensive antibiotic therapy, I wondered whether my plans to finish my PhD were evaporating.  I questioned whether my mobility might be forever impacted by the surgery and the persistence of the infection.  I marveled at the support of my family and my community even as I worried about John’s ability to hold together our lives while my health was so fragile.

About a year ago, I faced another moment of “what had to be done” when local LDS leaders chose to summon my spouse to an ecclesiastical court.  I attended that event to testify on his behalf, and also to observe the events closely.  It was a time when my own relationship with the church was tenuous, and seeing how this event proceeded was a significant step in my realization that I could no longer be an active adherent of the Mormon faith.  Lately many of those feelings have been bubbling up again–I drive past the temple and the local LDS meetinghouse almost daily, which serves as a constant reminder of the church’s impact on my life.  Even now I remain cosmically disappointed in the Mormon church and its leaders (on all levels–local, regional, and global), despite supporting my friends who are members.   I feel a rather irrational amount of anger at the group of men who conducted John’s church court proceedings, especially because they were people in whom I’d once placed a great deal of trust.  Distancing myself from the church wasn’t because I was “offended” by these leaders, it was that I could no longer put my faith in an institution where leaders could wield so much power (such as the power to sever my sealing to my spouse) so irresponsibly.  Choosing to walk away from my LDS community was hugely difficult for me, given all that I had invested in the church through the years.

On July 25th this year (in sharp contrast to July 25th two years ago when I was being re-admitted to the hospital for my leg infection), I was in Fairfax, Virginia meeting with a group of twelve digital humanists to embark on a radical tool-building experiment.  My colleague Effie, described our process on her blog today as “doing what needs to be done” (see the last paragraph).  I loved that she said that, because I hadn’t thought of our fast-paced development process in that way until now.  That phrase helped me to see the connective threads in my life from a point two years ago when I was purely in ‘survival’ mode, to the point that I’m at now with an abundance of opportunities ahead.  I feel as though the lessons I’ve learned since then continue to serve me in my scholarly and creative work, as well as in my spiritual life.  For now, “what needs to be done” is to focus on my dissertation while juggling an exciting array of side projects and the needs of my family (as well as squeezing in plenty of time out paddling on the ocean and time for quiet contemplation–sometimes simultaneously).  I feel so fortunate to have the health and confidence to move forward with my dreams.  These past two years have taught me much.

August 18, 2010
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making historyschool

goal-setting

Recently I heard someone make a funny comment about blogs.  They said that every time they’d ever seen a blogger write a post saying that there were going to start posting more often, it never happened.  I suspect that I am guilty of that myself.  Not so much in this space, where I seem to have a compulsive need to spew my thoughts out over the keyboard, but much more so on my History blog. However, as much as it might not work that blogging about the need to blog more does not actually inspire one to blog more frequently, I believe that blogging about goals can introduce a level of accountability that really can work.  For example, an exercise blog that I participated in a few years ago is what got me into shape after my leg surgery.

So this afternoon I just made some calculations about the biggest looming-out-there goal that I need to accomplish.  I want to finish my dissertation.  Sooner rather than later.  By that, I mean that I want to finish it by my next birthday.  At the end of May.  I have all kinds of motivation to do so.  There’s that UCI tution that’s costing me $12,000 per year.  There’s the knowing that the longer it takes to finish, the less likely it is that I will finish.  There’s that wild crazy dream of have of putting those little letters by name to show that I finished.  And, there are these history stories that I’ve been wanting to tell for too many years now.

So….my rough calculations tell me that I have 45 weeks to knock this thing out.  I think I can do it.  I’ve just learned what I can accomplish in One Week, and now I have 45 of those!

But can you help me?  Can you offer advice and ask me how things are going?  I’m going to post many of my daily and weekly goals on Twitter.  If you hang out in that space, can you follow along and give me some support?

August 8, 2010
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About Me

About Me

Hi there friend, and welcome to my blog. I started writing on the internet two decades ago. Since then I've started and finished a PhD program, left the Mormon church and became a Quaker, got divorced, remarried, found full-time work in academia, took up rock climbing and outrigger canoeing, and traveled across the globe (China! Belgium! Italy! Chicago! Montana! Portland! Gettysburg! and oh-so-many points in-between). This blog is eclectic and random--it has poetry and cooking and books. And cats. And flowers. And the ocean (my ocean). But in that sense it's a good reflection of me and my wide-ranging, far-reaching, magpie curiosity.

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