I have recently been given to think about certain things which Twitter is not very useful for, one of which is asking research questions to which a simple answer cannot be given. Sometimes it's just not possible to give a snap 140 character response, or refer to an online resource or even a published work. There are questions which, however straightforward they may look, need unpacking in order to tease out the problems, and the suggestion of an array of possibilities for finding out the required information.
This sort of thing was much better served by the email-based listserv, but I'm not sure that younger scholars, used to Web 2.0 social media, engage with listservs any more? I was certainly quite surprised to come across a blog post by a younger scholar talking about the benefits of forms of social media I associate with the 2010s for engaging with the wider field of the discipline, making contacts, getting one's work known about; because I found that listservs also did this, back in the Upper Palaeolithic (in internet terms) of the 1990s.
They even had archives that were searchable: though the constant recurrence of certain questions which had already been addressed on-list led me to produce the first version of the Victorian Sex Factoids Page and to compile a bibliography of recent work on Victorian Psychiatry beyond the one work published nearly 30 years that everybody still keeps citing so that I could just link to these rather than reiterating the same message.
New technology and new media do not necessarily drive out the old, which may still have their uses. The major nexus for humanities listservs, H-Net is currently undergoing a massive upgrade to bring it more into line with modern web-use practices, but there remains a value in having the potential to respond to research queries in a more discursive and nuanced fashion than 140 characters permits.
Showing posts with label networks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label networks. Show all posts
Friday, 14 February 2014
Monday, 12 August 2013
The pre-history of virtual communities
I was thrilled to see this guest post on the Kinsey Institute blog by Samantha Allen, Plugged In: Sexual Fetish Communities 1970s to the present since it provides further evidence for something of which I have been aware, the existence of 'virtual communities' not necessarily mediated by face to face contact, going back well before the widespread use of the internet.
While as Allen makes clear it might take a certain amount of effort and know-how to obtain the niche publications she describes, they did exist and provided a point of contact between individuals with common interests.
Similar phenomena can be seen in a range of different areas, whether around limited circulation newsletters, somewhat more conventional periodical publications (the shortlived but influential radical feminist journal The Freewoman forms a prime example), or even correspondence clubs, such as the Cooperative Correspondence Club. The problem is, of course, that except in the case of journals such as The Freewoman, where copies survive in public repositories and the researcher can see the vibrant interchanges that took place via letters to the editor, archives of these kinds of material very seldom survive. Samantha Allen was fortunate that the Kinsey Institute had made a conscious effort to acquire the materials she worked with, while when I interviewed Rose Hacker on an entirely different matter and discovered that she still had the records of the CCC, I strongly advised her to contact a suitable repository (I think I may have mentioned what was then the Fawcett Library) to ensure that this valuable set of documents was preserved and accessible to future generations.
Although communications through these networks moved at a more leisurely pace, nonetheless, by these means, virtual communities were created.
While as Allen makes clear it might take a certain amount of effort and know-how to obtain the niche publications she describes, they did exist and provided a point of contact between individuals with common interests.
Similar phenomena can be seen in a range of different areas, whether around limited circulation newsletters, somewhat more conventional periodical publications (the shortlived but influential radical feminist journal The Freewoman forms a prime example), or even correspondence clubs, such as the Cooperative Correspondence Club. The problem is, of course, that except in the case of journals such as The Freewoman, where copies survive in public repositories and the researcher can see the vibrant interchanges that took place via letters to the editor, archives of these kinds of material very seldom survive. Samantha Allen was fortunate that the Kinsey Institute had made a conscious effort to acquire the materials she worked with, while when I interviewed Rose Hacker on an entirely different matter and discovered that she still had the records of the CCC, I strongly advised her to contact a suitable repository (I think I may have mentioned what was then the Fawcett Library) to ensure that this valuable set of documents was preserved and accessible to future generations.
Although communications through these networks moved at a more leisurely pace, nonetheless, by these means, virtual communities were created.
Plugged
In: Sexual Fetish Communities 1970s to the Present - See more at:
http://kinseyconfidential.org/sexual-fetish-communities-internet/#sthash.YqoqRrP9.dpuf
Plugged
In: Sexual Fetish Communities 1970s to the Present - See more at:
http://kinseyconfidential.org/sexual-fetish-communities-internet/#sthash.YqoqRrP9.dpuf
Plugged
In: Sexual Fetish Communities 1970s to the Present - See more at:
http://kinseyconfidential.org/sexual-fetish-communities-internet/#sthash.YqoqRrP9.dpuf
Plugged
In: Sexual Fetish Communities 1970s to the Present - See more at:
http://kinseyconfidential.org/sexual-fetish-communities-internet/#sthash.YqoqRrP9.dpuf
Monday, 16 April 2012
European Social Science History Conference 2012, Glasgow
As always, this was an intense four days of conference activity: 2-hour sessions, four a day, starting at 8.30 am and finishing at 6.30 pm. It's a huge conference, but the breakdown into thematic strands makes it relatively manageable, and the two hour panels do allow for (preferably) 3-4 presentations and adequate discussion time (though some sessions had more than that, which either cuts down on the time allotted to present, or for discussion, neither of which seems ideal).
At least this year I didn't feel obliged to go to every session, which I did a couple of years, when I was History of Sexuality strand chair and we had panels in all available slots. (Don't know how I'd have managed if there had been parallel sessions in the strand.)
My own paper went well, and the panel I chaired was particularly good in terms of the papers all having a good deal of resonance: 'Sexual transgression, transnational travel, and abortion'. This raised a number of intriguing and in the present situation highly relevant issues: that technical legality of abortion doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy to access; that the role of often quite local sexual/social cultures can be quite critical; that it's noticeable the way that certain nations or regions or authorities keep their hands clean by not doing or allowing abortions themselves but with the knowledge that the women they turn down will seek facilities elsewhere beyond their boundaries.
The 'Bodies and Biology' panel (on historical intersex/trans* cases) raised a thought in my mind about the criteria medics were using to establish 'real' sex (preference for sports or needlework, as it might be) - not only deeply gender essentialist but also anachronistic - failing to register temporal changes in ideas of the gender appropriate, e.g. the rise of female athletics - and I wondered if this fits in to a wider generational phenomenon of the older generation thinking that the younger are not doing gender properly, i.e. as they used to.
Papers I was particularly engaged by included Gayle Davies's look at medical attitudes to women seeking conception via artificial insemination in Scotland in the 1950s - they were pathologised as being overly yearning for motherhood and seeking this icky mode of achieving - this seemed to me to fit with the 1950s pathologisation of unmarried mothers and a wider sense of the need for control and to avoid excessiveness at the period (needs more thinking out).
I really enjoyed Julie Gammon's very lively paper on the prosecution and conviction (and rapid subsequent pardoning) of Colonel Charteris for raping his maidservant (at a time when upper class men could usually get away with this with impunity) and the highly specific reasons why this could even happen when it did.
David Johnson's fascinating piece on gay book clubs in the 1950s and 60s made me think that there is still a lot of work to be done on pre-internet 'virtual communities' around magazines, mailing lists, etc.
Glasgow - at least the area around the University, where the conference was taking place, was far more beautiful than I had expected (the very fine clear weather probably helped) and there were several excellent fish restaurants in Argyle Street.
At least this year I didn't feel obliged to go to every session, which I did a couple of years, when I was History of Sexuality strand chair and we had panels in all available slots. (Don't know how I'd have managed if there had been parallel sessions in the strand.)
My own paper went well, and the panel I chaired was particularly good in terms of the papers all having a good deal of resonance: 'Sexual transgression, transnational travel, and abortion'. This raised a number of intriguing and in the present situation highly relevant issues: that technical legality of abortion doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy to access; that the role of often quite local sexual/social cultures can be quite critical; that it's noticeable the way that certain nations or regions or authorities keep their hands clean by not doing or allowing abortions themselves but with the knowledge that the women they turn down will seek facilities elsewhere beyond their boundaries.
The 'Bodies and Biology' panel (on historical intersex/trans* cases) raised a thought in my mind about the criteria medics were using to establish 'real' sex (preference for sports or needlework, as it might be) - not only deeply gender essentialist but also anachronistic - failing to register temporal changes in ideas of the gender appropriate, e.g. the rise of female athletics - and I wondered if this fits in to a wider generational phenomenon of the older generation thinking that the younger are not doing gender properly, i.e. as they used to.
Papers I was particularly engaged by included Gayle Davies's look at medical attitudes to women seeking conception via artificial insemination in Scotland in the 1950s - they were pathologised as being overly yearning for motherhood and seeking this icky mode of achieving - this seemed to me to fit with the 1950s pathologisation of unmarried mothers and a wider sense of the need for control and to avoid excessiveness at the period (needs more thinking out).
I really enjoyed Julie Gammon's very lively paper on the prosecution and conviction (and rapid subsequent pardoning) of Colonel Charteris for raping his maidservant (at a time when upper class men could usually get away with this with impunity) and the highly specific reasons why this could even happen when it did.
David Johnson's fascinating piece on gay book clubs in the 1950s and 60s made me think that there is still a lot of work to be done on pre-internet 'virtual communities' around magazines, mailing lists, etc.
Glasgow - at least the area around the University, where the conference was taking place, was far more beautiful than I had expected (the very fine clear weather probably helped) and there were several excellent fish restaurants in Argyle Street.
Sunday, 10 April 2011
Reproduction and the Sciences, Cambridge, 8 April, conference notes
This was an excellent and remarkably wide-ranging conference given the apparently delimited conference theme. For example, the trade in bodies and body parts around the turn of the C19th/C20th both as to how anatomists obtained them and the intraprofessional trade system. Or the importance of marsupial reproductive biology and its cryptic nature (at least from a mammalian perspective) in the development of anthropology in the earlier part of the C20th and the pre-eminent theme of kinship therein.
One thing that segued from paper to paper was the significance of networks, and the importance of women (often without any formal academic/official position, and not infrequently occluded in the later narratives) within those networks. And on women, one thing that came out of the paper on anthropology was the impact of late C20th reproductive technology (IVF etc) on reviving Kinship Studies (previously, while fatherhood had been conceived as a social construction, maternity was still pretty much essentialised and seen as 'natural').
Life-cycle narrative themes: why did Sir Alan Parkes return to Cambridge very late in life. What were the facts. ma'am, about Robert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe and the development of IVF as opposed to Edwards' several versions about how and when they met and their mutual influence.
The full programme is here.
One thing that segued from paper to paper was the significance of networks, and the importance of women (often without any formal academic/official position, and not infrequently occluded in the later narratives) within those networks. And on women, one thing that came out of the paper on anthropology was the impact of late C20th reproductive technology (IVF etc) on reviving Kinship Studies (previously, while fatherhood had been conceived as a social construction, maternity was still pretty much essentialised and seen as 'natural').
Life-cycle narrative themes: why did Sir Alan Parkes return to Cambridge very late in life. What were the facts. ma'am, about Robert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe and the development of IVF as opposed to Edwards' several versions about how and when they met and their mutual influence.
The full programme is here.
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