April 10th Update

The past week has been obnoxiously busy, so I haven’t gotten much more work done on the timeline. But on the bright side, I successfully presented my English capstone project,… Read More

The past week has been obnoxiously busy, so I haven’t gotten much more work done on the timeline. But on the bright side, I successfully presented my English capstone project, so now I don’t have to worry about that anymore! It’s only one thing that I can cross off of my intimidating to-do list, but I’ll take what I can get right now. This week I want to (fingers crossed) finish the timeline so that Savannah and I can start focusing on the pages for the yearbooks after we finish our individual aspects of the project. We have all of the information we want to share, and now we’re just working on putting it all together!

The Final Countdown #3 – Reasons Why We Should Forget the 90’s

Here is a list of all things wrong with the 1990s: Glue sticks – I know we were all infatuated with the purple Elmer’s glue stick, thinking it was the best thing to hit us since jelly bracelets, but gee were we wrong. Those suckers don’t hold a thing. Sure they might have for the […]

Here is a list of all things wrong with the 1990s:

  • Glue sticks – I know we were all infatuated with the purple Elmer’s glue stick, thinking it was the best thing to hit us since jelly bracelets, but gee were we wrong. Those suckers don’t hold a thing. Sure they might have for the first year or so these Production Books were put into the archives, but 12 years later? Everything was falling out of these books.
  • Plastic screws – Have you ever had to deal with these? They are little plastic screws that you put into another tubular screw in order to hold something together. If you haven’t, then learn about them now before you have to face them because they are the WORST (If you don’t know what they are, which we did not). It took Mary Haynes and me so long to figure out how these things worked, let alone how to get them unscrewed. I almost broke one because I could not for the life of me figure out how to keep one end from moving while twisting the other. It was awful.
  • Random objects? – There is something about 1994 and gluing random objects into the books for decoration. We saw ribbons, bows, monopoly pieces, cloth dolls, some of the oddest things you could think of. I blame the Gold Side’s circus theme.
  • Plywood covers- You read right folks, plywood. For the covers. Yepp, Purple’s 1994 Production Book was made out of three plywood pieces hinged together to create a book. Believe it or not, that’s one of the most reasonable things these books have been made from before they were regulated.
  • Glitter – All I’m going to say is that Mary Haynes sat down one of the books and glitter shot out. We still don’t know from where.

So in conclusion, knowing that 1994 is one of the more docile years when it comes to the Production Books makes me cringe. There is a reason the College Night committee added a Legacy Product aspect to the Production book scoring in 2003, because these books were not made for preservation. At all.

 

On the plus side, we did get our IRB approval and knocked out one of our interviews! So not all was lost to the 90s woes.

 

Final Project Update: Week Three

The worst part about not having a partner for this project, with an immune system like mine, is that when you get very sick (for the second time this semester), you’ve got no one to pick up the slack. Fortunately, what I have been able to accomplish since my last post is a clearer focus […]

The worst part about not having a partner for this project, with an immune system like mine, is that when you get very sick (for the second time this semester), you’ve got no one to pick up the slack.

Fortunately, what I have been able to accomplish since my last post is a clearer focus on and direction for the tools that I am going to work with to present on my project site. After our last class on Thursday, the professors suggested that I utilize a tool that another group is having tremendous success with: StoryMap JS. This tool would allow me to take each of the three books that I’m discussing and give the visitor a closer look at certain aspects and details of them with a heavily guided narrative. I’ve already played around with it a bit, and am very excited about its potential! However, I need to take the time to form a better understanding of how this tool works, as I’ve been hitting a few annoying roadblocks that are really slowing down my progress. Luckily for me, and the rest of the class, we have two great professors who go above and beyond to help us succeed, and I’ll have had some assistance with this issue by the end of tomorrow!

The plan for this week is to either make successful contact with Dr. Poste’s daughter or put that potential addition to the site to rest, as well as to finish my first StoryMap JS, get some back-lit pictures of the books, and finish writing my introduction page. I will be a hot-tea-chugging, tissue-stuffed computer gremlin for the entire first warm, sunny week that western New York has seen all semester… but I’m not bitter about that. 🙂

Week 3: Pre-Finals Week

It’s like I’m back in the first week, feeling the pressures of classes ending – except they are literally ending in four days. EVERYTHING is fine. Finals week is next… Read More

It’s like I’m back in the first week, feeling the pressures of classes ending – except they are literally ending in four days. EVERYTHING is fine. Finals week is next week. EVERYTHING is still fine.

This week has not been overly productive as I haven’t been able to meet up with my librarian to talk to her about the book. She knows the history of the book and how it came to our campus. With Kelly being the only librarian, apart from her assistant, even at a small campus there is not enough of her to go around. Our schedules have clashed as the end of the semester comes to a close, but I will be setting up a time to talk with her this week.

I managed to borrow the copy of the “Notes on the State of Virginia” we have in our library – the copy I can actually take out of the library. I snapped some photos of the few differences I found between the new, 1955 edition, and the 1801 archive book we have. I can only keep the newer edition out until the end of the semester (due in 10 days), so I may have to talk to Kelly in order to keep it a few days longer if needed. USAO’s semester ends earlier than this COPLAC class does, so I’ll be battling with timing.

Update on last week’s promise: I do not have my completed list of books, but it’s still in the works.

Peanut Butter and Preservation

One of the desserts that kept cropping up in the cookbooks Kinsey and I looked through was peanut butter cookies. For some reason, this surprised me. I don’t immediately think of the South when I think of peanut butter cookies, or anything to do with peanuts for that matter. It does make sense, given that …

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One of the desserts that kept cropping up in the cookbooks Kinsey and I looked through was peanut butter cookies. For some reason, this surprised me. I don’t immediately think of the South when I think of peanut butter cookies, or anything to do with peanuts for that matter. It does make sense, given that peanuts were one of the crops promoted to present an alternative to cotton. But sense and association apparently do not always mix.

On a completely different note, preserving food is one of the pillars of southern cooking. You’re probably tired of hearing me talk about it, but it is the truth. I have to wonder whether it is this tradition of preserving food that has led to the South’s ability to preserve so much through food-tradition, culture, and family.

Tennessee Tomatoes

I think it’s fascinating that even though we can now eat many foods out of season, we still associate certain foods with their original seasons. Certain foods just “taste like”. Cinnamon and apples are distinctly fall, winter is most definitely a bowl of good chili, and tomatoes, tomatoes taste like summer. Not canned tomatoes, not cooked …

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I think it’s fascinating that even though we can now eat many foods out of season, we still associate certain foods with their original seasons. Certain foods just “taste like”. Cinnamon and apples are distinctly fall, winter is most definitely a bowl of good chili, and tomatoes, tomatoes taste like summer. Not canned tomatoes, not cooked tomatoes, fresh-ripe-straight-off-the-vine-and-sliced tomatoes. Big, red, juicy, warm, and delicious. It’s like biting into the sun. No matter how much food I eat, no matter what other delicious things remind me of summer, there will never be anything quite like the tomatoes from my halmoni’s garden.

~Dakota White

All Around the World: Turnips

While reading through Foodways, I discovered that turnips were one of the main Southern vegetables. What tickled me about this is that while I grew up partially in the South (bounced between Baltimore, MD and Chattanooga, TN) and I ate turnips, I never thought of turnips as Southern. Here’s why: my father’s mom, my grandmother, my …

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While reading through Foodways, I discovered that turnips were one of the main Southern vegetables. What tickled me about this is that while I grew up partially in the South (bounced between Baltimore, MD and Chattanooga, TN) and I ate turnips, I never thought of turnips as Southern.

Here’s why: my father’s mom, my grandmother, my halmoni, is Korean. When my grandfather, my hal-abeoji, was stationed near the DMZ in South Korea in the early 1960s as a classified courier, he met my halmoni and brought her back. My halmoni learned everything she knows about American culture from soap-operas and everything she knows about American cooking from my hal-abeoji’s mother who was a true Southern woman. I grew up on a fantastic blend of kimchi, rice and seaweed, buttermilk biscuits, and fried fish. So, when my halmoni cooked turnips, she made kimchi out of them. For those unfamiliar with the dish, kimchi is a traditional Korean side dish made out of various pickled vegetables. The vegetables of choice are stuffed in jars with fish, garlic, vinegar, and more red pepper than anyone ever needs and then let to ferment. It’s glorious, and it means that turnips were always a Korean dish for me rather than a Southern one. Although, I do associate my halmoni’s cooking with Chattanooga, TN, so maybe it’s a little bit of both.

~Dakota White

Update: April 5th

Two updates in as many days?! What is this?! In all seriousness, Kinsey and I are finally getting a little bit of traction concerning our project data which is nice. Nothing new since yesterday on the interviews, but there is finally data to work with! This morning I finished manually copying in the eighty-eight books that …

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Two updates in as many days?! What is this?!

In all seriousness, Kinsey and I are finally getting a little bit of traction concerning our project data which is nice. Nothing new since yesterday on the interviews, but there is finally data to work with!

This morning I finished manually copying in the eighty-eight books that make up the Southern Appalachian Community cookbook section. Of those, seventy-seven are specifically from North Carolina with the others ranging from West Virginia to Tennessee and Georgia. A full page on the website will be going up soon as to why we think that this sub-caegory of books is important and the best data for our project, but the bullet-list below should cover the major points:

  • The books in this part of the collection are primarily WNC community cookbooks which will allow us to focus on the recipes generated by communities in and around our area. This might just be a by-product of how Pam Allison collected the books, but we will not know until we can talk to Pam Allison.
  • All of the cookbooks have very common features: a local history of the area/group of people collecting the recipes, why they think this book is important, each recipe acknowledges who it was contributed by, and space in the back of the book for notes on recipes.
  • Most of the cookbooks were created with the dual purpose of sharing the community’s food with the community but also as a fundraiser project for some local group. (Quite possibly the group that put the book together in the first place).
  • The provenance contained includes notes from the person giving the book, inscriptions from the owner, or stains/general grubbiness from being used.
  • There is a surprising amount of overlap in which presses published the books.
  • A “by the community for the community” feel.

All of the above will be fully discussed and typed up soon, but for now Kinsey and I are going to focus on manipulating this data. One of the things that we definitely want to do is create a few maps comparing where the books were published and what community they were published for!

Update: April 4th

Hello all! Kinsey and I apologize for not being at class today, but we had finally managed to get together with the archivists and grill them about the books! Today was extremely productive and it’s nice to see our project taking a more tangible shape. So, as far as data does, we found out some …

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Hello all!

Kinsey and I apologize for not being at class today, but we had finally managed to get together with the archivists and grill them about the books! Today was extremely productive and it’s nice to see our project taking a more tangible shape.

So, as far as data does, we found out some good information and some bad information. The good information is that all of the books that are unpacked and available for use are organized physically on the shelves in the archives. The categories include Southern Appalachian Community, North Carolina, Southern Appalachian General, and General Southern. On the other hand, this organization is not duplicated in any form in the digital records. In order to use the data, I could either pick a subset of books and search for all of them in the catalogue and organize the downloaded data, or I could just manually enter the relevant information from the subset of books into a spreadsheet. Option one is a lot less typing for me but involves a lot of searching and double checking while option two requires more typing, but less data configuring seeing as I would have entered everything myself. I went with option two. At the end of today I managed to go through about half the books in the Southern Appalachian Community section which seemed to me the most applicable sub-category of the cookbooks for us to use.

Kinsey and I together worked out a final recipes list for things that we would like to try and make based on their relevance and occurrence within the different cookbooks. Additionally, Kinsey did a lot of work concerning the site. She started putting together the page that connects us and our personal stories about food/recipes as well as writing up the justification pages for why we chose the cookbooks that we did from the larger collection.

As for the interviews, we are still waiting to here back from both Pam Allison and the local restaurants. Measures are being taken to follow up and we are doing our best to get this information as we think the personal input is part of the backbone of this larger-scale project.

Hopefully by this weekend we will have actual information up on our website for you to peruse!

the (late) update

Last week was spring break. On the car ride to Tennessee, Savannah and I discussed the questions we are going to ask in our interviews, and how we want to document the interviews. We have chosen about five questions for each person we are interviewing, and have a vague idea … Continue reading

Last week was spring break. On the car ride to Tennessee, Savannah and I discussed the questions we are going to ask in our interviews, and how we want to document the interviews. We have chosen about five questions for each person we are interviewing, and have a vague idea of what we want to do for documenting.