Archive Adventures
Over the last several months I have, rather joyfully, been back in the archives. A two-week stint at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York, as well as at Columbia University archives, was followed by an extended trip to the Wellcome Library in London. This complements another extensive trip to the Countway Library of Medicine in Boston. All of it pertains to my current project (details here), which is now gathering pace.
I now find myself with another book to write, but for the first time in my career I'm working from photographs of archival records, instead of from notes taken directly. Navigation will likely be problematic, but I think it can be solved via a giant monitor. I was deeply aware, as I chugged away in New York with an actual camera - remember them? - that everyone else (all younger, of course) was using a cellphone with some miraculous application that turned photographs into instantly searchable pdfs. I am reassuring myself that I will still have to read and qualitatively analyse everything that I snapped. Will they, I wonder? Data mining be damned.
Meanwhile, this year so far I've been presenting preliminary findings in Saskatoon, Belfast, and Liverpool, with Brighton to come. There have also been some tub-thumping rallying cries for the history of emotions, in Fairfax, VA, Montreal, and Geneva. There will be more of this, with two talks at Columbia next March.
By then, my next book will be out. It is both an application and exemplification of the theories and methods set out in 2018's The History of Emotions and a sort of epic appeal for a transition toward the history of experience. It's called A History of Feelings, and will be published by Reaktion in January.
I now find myself with another book to write, but for the first time in my career I'm working from photographs of archival records, instead of from notes taken directly. Navigation will likely be problematic, but I think it can be solved via a giant monitor. I was deeply aware, as I chugged away in New York with an actual camera - remember them? - that everyone else (all younger, of course) was using a cellphone with some miraculous application that turned photographs into instantly searchable pdfs. I am reassuring myself that I will still have to read and qualitatively analyse everything that I snapped. Will they, I wonder? Data mining be damned.
Meanwhile, this year so far I've been presenting preliminary findings in Saskatoon, Belfast, and Liverpool, with Brighton to come. There have also been some tub-thumping rallying cries for the history of emotions, in Fairfax, VA, Montreal, and Geneva. There will be more of this, with two talks at Columbia next March.
By then, my next book will be out. It is both an application and exemplification of the theories and methods set out in 2018's The History of Emotions and a sort of epic appeal for a transition toward the history of experience. It's called A History of Feelings, and will be published by Reaktion in January.
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