Month: March 2017

Hey all, Kinsey here. As we wait with bated breath to hear back from our prospective interviewees—Pam Allison as well as the local restaurant owners of Asheville—I figure we should share a bit of what we’re hoping to learn from these people. Only a bit, though, because what fun is it to know the script before you see the finished product?

Stories drive so much in the world, especially within communities, so it only seems right that we let Pam Allison take the reins with her own story. We’re looking to learn about her collection right from the beginning, from the days spent cooking with her family to the day she decided to make her generous donation to UNC Asheville’s special collections. What was her collection process? What does she think about making food herself rather than going out and getting it? A home kitchen can be a very private and comfortable place compared to a restaurant, and we’re looking forward to learning what role food and cooking has played in her life—and, of course, what it means to use a cookbook.

Dakota and I are also very interested in learning about the difference between the impact food and cooking have on individuals as opposed to groups of people—say, restaurants. We plan to learn about their menus, picking out which items are the most popular and speculating why, but we primarily want to know about the restaurants’ roles in the community. Do they host/participate in events? Does their design and layout foster community development and a friendly environment? What are their thoughts on our own cookbook collection? Since Asheville is a very community-driven area, we very much look forward to hearing these different viewpoints on the importance of cooking in the local scene.

Of course, we’re prepared; we have a plethora of questions sitting at the ready for everyone with whom we plan to speak, but we’re hoping that they’ll be interested enough in our project for the words to flow more organically. Whenever they do, we’ll be sure to stay true to our community values and share it with everyone.

Hey all,

Kinsey and I spent the morning in Special Collections and we are very excited about the progress we made this morning. First of all, thanks to Dr. Pauley and the archivists, I was able to move the cookbook data into Zotero. Unfortunately, there are only 551 cookbooks that I am able to work with because the rest have not been processed and made available to the public. Secondly, there is no filter on the cookbooks, so a little manual editing on which cookbooks are part of our relevant geographical region will need to happen.

Secondly, Kinsey and I began going through the available cookbooks looking for ones that we feel would give us a good representation of the set. We picked out a few books that deal with very personal food journeys, a few that are more for special occasions, one that is meant to be widespread and commercial, one that is an excellent balance between special and everyday food, and one that explains the historical and cultural context of food in the South. As we are able to work with these books more we will write up posts analyzing the information in the source and it’s purpose for our research.

In addition, we have added a few categories to our blog posts. There are these, the status updates, the source analysis posts, and a third category which will include our own stories about food and our personal thoughts/ideas about the food we are encountering.

Till next time!

Well. This is going to take longer than expected.

I fondly look back on a time where we were guessing the Production Books were only about 50 pages each, that 50 pages would not take long to scan and that this part of the project would be a breeze.  Gee were we wrong.

Our trip to the library this past Thursday night was actually our second day of scanning (yes, we were a little behind schedule and only had the first book done). Determined to keep up with our set goals, we convened at 7:00 PM and decided we would not leave until we got through both 1958 and 1969.  Needless to say, we had our work cut out for us. By the time Mary Haynes and I crawled out of the recesses of the archives around 12:30 AM, the only things we knew were “Preview” “Scan” “Add Page”. What took us so long was the nightmarish discovery that the Production Books actually average around 75-80 pages a piece; I can only thank the heavens we narrowed down to 9 books total instead of getting ambitious.

I will say that the actual books, as opposed to the early years of regulatory folders like 1958 had, went a lot faster. While it seemed like there was more content in them, they were missing all of the miscellaneous receipts and scrap pieces that made up the folders. That being said, I am glad that we were able to deal with a couple of years of the folders so that we could show why the Production Books became the big deal that they are now. Seeing the disorganization and missing pieces of years without the books, it gives us more insight into how the Books became actual books.

Hopefully now that we know what it takes to scan the books, we can plan our course of action from here on much more efficiently. We still have a lot of archive hours ahead of us, but this gave us the solid start that we needed to get our heads in the game.

This is about the time in the semester when I realize I have three weeks of classes left. With that being said, I will not allow stress, anxiety, fear, or any form of those three come together and rule my life. No sir. I actually welcome this time of the semester because that is when I realize just how much I can do in very little time.

With our final projects underway, I’m remarkably calm. I’ve managed to write my “About” page with information about the Social Life of Books class, as well as the “History” page with information about the history of Notes on the State of Virginia.

I’ve also started my research on different editions of the book, but I’ve run into the same problem of only being able to pull a couple of editions from the English Short Title Catalogue. Therefore, I am still searching for ways to find and document different editions.

I will prevail.

Hello all, this is Dakota. Things are progressing well over here at UNCA, and this post will serve to give you a bit of a look where we are at.

The site itself will probably remain static for a few more days until we have some more concrete information to actually put up on the site. So no new pages will probably appear until the end of the week.

We have appointments set up with our archivists so that we can really get into specific books and pick out a subset to work more in detail with. Granted, a subset may only mean a handful that we do close readings of given the time constraints, but there will be a mix of looking at large data sets and smaller ones.

On the note of larger data sets, I am working on transferring the cookbook data into Zotero to be manipulated. This is taking longer than I anticipated as the online catalogue section that contains just the cookbooks is down. I am having to search for the cookbooks in the larger collection and then add them, which, while it is working, leaves a larger margin for error in terms of what is included in the data set. It is hoped that our meeting with the archivists will clear this up.

As far as interviews go, Kinsey and I are still waiting to hear back from Pam Allison. Initial introductions were made, but she has not responded to our request for a meeting. Requests for meetings with local restaurants go out tomorrow. However, despite the lack of current interviewees, Kinsey and I did draft a basic list of questions for both the restaurants and Ms. Allison. Kinsey will post those later in a blog update, and yes there is editing that needs to be done.

Finally, I wish to update everyone on my correspondence with Dr. Locklear concerning food history.  There were a few things she mentioned that were already on our list such as looking at the differences between large press cookbooks and small press cookbooks. Some of the things she mentioned that are new and we might want to consider are:

1.  The difference between “special occasion” foods and everyday foods. What types of foods make it into the cookbooks we are looking at? Are these cookbooks a viable representation of everyday food? If not, what can we deduce from the recipes that are there?

2. Janet Theophano: Eat my Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks they Wrote (https://www.amazon.com/Eat-My-Words-Reading-Cookbooks/dp/1403962936/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1489623872&sr=8-1&keywords=Janet+Theophano)

3. Elizabeth Engelhardt et al, The Larder (https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Larder)

Until next time!

Who has two thumbs and is in panic-mode? This guy!

No, but, seriously; things are stressful at the moment. Between preparing for senior seminar, getting everything turned in for graduate school, and the bulk of the rest of my course work this semester, I wouldn’t describe my life as “fun” right now. However, I did manage to get the map for the “Travels” section of our COPLAC course project site up and running! The page still requires some informative text, but, that can wait for a later day. Bailey has good news on the performance art piece! She’s found someone that would is ready and willing to belt a folksong! In other news, however, it looks as if we might not get the opportunity to perhaps interview a relative or friend that knew Mr. Adams. Angie Harvey instead suggested that we should perhaps just talk with a local historian about what they might now about Mr. Adams. At the moment, this is all I have to report on the status of our project!

It is Monday of another new week, and the countdown is ticking. This week I began working on my Timeline JS project as part of the biography of James Taylor Adams portion of the final project. I have the page posted on the website, however the content is not posted yet. I have the running excel file saved to my drive. I do not plan to post it until I have all of the information I would like to include on the file. I found a wonderful article in the Appalachian Journal on JSTOR about James Taylor Adams that I have constantly been referencing. It is a review of James’ work, Grandpap Told Me Tales: Memories of an Appalachian Childhood, by Charles L. Perdue Jr..

I have also identified a theater major that is willing to perform a piece by James Taylor Adams. “God willing and the creek don’t rise.” The piece that the student will perform has not been identified as of today. Along with other news, I contacted the Dean Harris (our onsite advisor) and the Chair of the Institutional Review Board to find out whether our project would require an application. I received wonderful news in that it will NOT!!! However, it will require a press release form which I have secured with our Media Relations advisor. That’s it for now folks! Check in next week to see what the Final Project Progress Report has to report next!

Bailey Helbert

We forgot to mention in the previous post that we have done some digging on what the requirements  for the IRB are concerning Oral History. In planning this project, we discovered that there is a lot of Oral History that we want to include from Pam Allison to local restaurant owners. The ability to go straight to the source and ask questions is one we decided we did not want to take for granted. However, there are regulations surrounding Oral History that we need to be aware of.

Thankfully, it is not going to be as hard to include our interviews as first thought. The UNC Asheville IRB has not included Oral History in the list of things they need to review for a few years now. We will need to ask our interviewees to sign a release form allowing us to use their statements, but will not need to go through a more formal process than that.