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
Tag:

archive

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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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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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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