Happy Victoria Day to my Canadian compatriots. For those of you who have the day off, what better way to idle a few hours away than immerse yourself in my Monday’s Link Roundup. 
- Oral history and hearing loss. “I rarely consider the basics of oral history collection and production, the act of sharing someone’s story with a wider audience. That is one of several reasons I so enjoyed Brad Rakerd’s contribution to Oral History Review issue on Oral History in the Digital Age, “On Making Oral Histories More Accessible to Persons with Hearing Loss.” In his piece, Rakerd discusses the obstacles people with hearing loss or other limitations on speech understanding face when engaging with oral history, and offers several recommendations to allow scholars to make their material more accessible. Mad with the power of the OUPblog post, I contacted Rakerd to prod him for more information.”
- How to Write a Simple Business Plan. “Simple is always best. So with this in mind, here’s our guide to writing a business plan that won’t make potential investors want to tear their hair out in confusion.”
- The Stories That Only Artists Can Tell. “…it seems to me that artists talk about different things when describing themselves than do their biographers and commentators. Biographers focus almost exclusively on the artwork, who taught and influenced the artist, changes in the artist’s work, an estimation of the artist’s work. Who the artist knew and spent time with, as well as notable events in the artist’s life, are detailed to the degree that they explain the evolution of the artwork.”
- Walking Across America: Advice for a Young Man. “It’s rare we take the time to listen to hour-long radio stories anymore, but I hope you’ll listen to this one, maybe twice. It’s an epic journey, a coming of age story, and a portrait of this country–big-hearted, wild, innocent, and wise…Andrew Forsthoefel, a first-time radio producer, who set out at age 23 to walk across America, East to West, 4000 miles, with a sign on him that said, “Walking to Listen.” Eventually, he showed up here in Woods Hole.Andrew didn’t intend to make a radio story–he just wanted to listen to people. You’ll hear in Andrew’s interviews his quality of attention. He is a magnet for stories and for the desire to connect.”
- The Einstein Principle: Accomplish More By Doing Less. “Einstein’s push for general relativity highlights an important reality about accomplishment. We are most productive when we focus on a very small number of projects on which we can devote a large amount of attention.”
- Why You Should Give A $*%! About Words That Offend. [NPR Interview] “If you said the “s” word in the ninth century, you probably wouldn’t have shocked or offended anyone. Back then, the “s” word was just the everyday word that was used to refer to excrement. That’s one of many surprising, foul-mouthed facts Melissa Mohr reveals in her new book, Holy S- – -: A Brief History of Swearing. Though the curse words themselves change over time, the category remains constant — we always have a set of words that are off-limits. “We need some category of swear words,” Mohr says. “[These] words really fulfill a function that people have found necessary for thousands of years.”
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Tagged Albert Einstein, Andrew Forsthoefel, artists, biography, Brad Rakerd, Business plan, Deafness, digital age, English language, hearing loss, history, How to, Information Age, interview, link roundup, literature, Marketing, Melissa Mohr, NPR, oral history, productivity, Rakerd, simple business plan, stories, storytelling, swearing, Tips
In today’s Monday’s Link Roundup, if you look at nothing else, I highly recommend Noah St. John’s ‘The Last Mile’ [Video]. It’s tour-de-force storytelling by a 15-year-old boy. And for some excellent scanning advice from the Library of Congress make sure to read Scanning: DIY or Outsource.
- Protecting Your Digital Assets in the Afterlife. “Many consumers have gone down the virtual path, accumulating online store credits and using PayPal to buy goods and services. But digital assets, which include anything from social networking profiles to email accounts to websites, can have value far beyond money. So the question remains: What happens when you pass away?”
- Rare color photos of World War I. “Photographer Anton Orlov recently discovered over 600 color images from World War I on “Magic Lantern” slides in a house in Northern California. The images depict snow-covered villages, train tracks, bullet-riddled buildings, and soldiers in trenches, by houses and on trains. The slides were hand-colored and are still in good condition.”
- Scanning: DIY or Outsource. “At our personal digital archiving events, we get various questions about scanning family photos, slides, negatives and film. Questions like: What type of scanner should I use? What resolution should I use? How can I scan negatives? While we’ve focused on developing tips and resources for saving personal digital materials created with software and hardware, we recognize that individuals have the both analog and digital materials and are looking for guidance on how to deal with both.”
- Virginia Woolf on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary. “A fairly late journaling bloomer, she began writing in 1915, at the age of 33, and continued until her last entry in 1941, four days before her death, leaving behind 26 volumes written in her own hand. More than a mere tool of self-exploration, however, Woolf approached the diary as a kind of R&D lab for her craft.”
- My sons and I were linked in by Lincoln. “I was disappointed not long ago when my 21-year-old son, John, turned down my invitation to see the movie Lincoln. “I am not into politics, Dad,” he said over the phone. “Forget politics – think history,” I responded.”
- Noah St. John’s ‘The Last Mile’ [Video] “This is the first of series of stories from a new partnership between The Huffington Post and NPR’s new hit storytelling program, “Snap Judgment,” hosted by Glynn Washington. And it’s a good one.” [Thanks to Sally Goldin of Tell Me A Story for alerting me to this item.]
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Tagged 'The Last Mile', death, diary, digital preservation, Do it yourself, father and son, How to, Huffington Post, Library of Congress, Lincoln, link roundup, Magic Lantern, Noah St. John, NPR, outsource, Photos, Preservation, rare, scanning, Snap Judgment, stories, storytelling, Tips, video, Virginia Woolf, World War I Photos
This Monday’s Link Roundup article Grammar Freaks Really Are Strange bears out what I’ve always suspected. For those of you who blog professionally, be sure to check out 9 Keys to Blogging Success from A-List Bloggers. And for some really useful marketing advice from Seth Godin’s blog, don’t miss The circles of marketing.
- Immigration, The Gold Mountain And A Wedding Photo. [NPR] “Deep inside the National Archives in Washington, D.C., old case files tell the stories of hundreds of thousands of hopeful immigrants to the U.S. between 1880 and the end of World War II. Between 1910 and 1940, thousands of immigrants came to the U.S. through California’s Angel Island. For University of Minnesota history professor Erika Lee, one of these attachments turned out to be very special.”
- The circles of marketing. “Most amateurs and citizens believe that marketing is the outer circle.Marketing = advertising, it seems. The job of marketing in this circle is to take what the factory/system/boss gives you and hype it, promote it and yell about it. This is what so many charities, politicians, insurance companies, financial advisors, computer makers and well, just about everyone does.”
- 9 Keys to Blogging Success from A-List Bloggers. “In the years I’ve been blogging, I’ve built my site into a trusted resource for thousands of writers, designers, publishers, and authors. The following are some of the basic lessons that have guided me on my journey. I hope some of them will inspire you, too.”
- Simplify. “Simplify everything. That might sound hard, but with practice it’s actually fairly easy, and leads to a quiet, content, lovely life full of space, with only the things in it that matter to me: my family, my writing, with some reading and workouts thrown in. So how do you simplify? As simply as possible.Here are a few ways:”
- Do our lives need a narrative? “It may seem obvious that the story of our life to date is just what it is, and that we can only change it in flights of fancy. But the idea that the Lego bricks of our daily lives may be arranged into different buildings is not fanciful. If you re-examine how you make sense of past events, it will almost certainly turn out that your dominant narrative can be challenged by alternative stories.”
- Grammar Freaks Really Are Strange. “It used to be we thought that people who went around correcting other people’s grammar were just plain annoying. Now there’s evidence they are actually ill, suffering from a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder/oppositional defiant disorder (OCD/ODD). Researchers are calling it Grammatical Pedantry Syndrome, or GPS.” [Thanks to APH member Francie King of History Keep for alerting me to this item.]
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Tagged Angel Island, best, Blog, family history apps, grammar, grammatical, How to, humor, immigrants, iPad, Life stories, narrative, National Archives, NPR, Seth Godin, simplify, successful blogging, Tips, World War II
In today’s Monday’s Link Roundup I have the perfect gift for the hard to buy for bibliophile. Check out A Perfume That Smells Of An Obscure Pleasure: The Printed Word. On a more serious note don’t miss the NPR interview with Arnold Weinstein, author of Morning, Noon, And Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books. This is definitely on my list of books to read.
- A Matter of Fashion. “Linguists insist that it’s wrong to designate any kind of English “proper” because language always changes and always has. A common objection is that even so, all people must know which forms of language are acceptable in the public sphere, at the peril of unemployability or, at least, social handicap. Fair enough – but there’s a middle ground.”
- Your Life As A Mini-Movie. “Ptch picks up where your static photo feeds on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Viddy, Facebook, and Google+ leave off. Dreamworks, the animation studio behind Shrek, is backing the iOS app, which… lets users create, edit, and share 60-second mini-movies from their own photos and video clips. Then comes the movie magic. Ptch helps users add title cards, offers soundtrack help with one of more than 80 preloaded songs, and even integrates comments from your social networks. Like other outfits that do Instagram-like treatments for video, Ptch lets mini-movie makers wrap their creations in one of eight styles. You can share new creations on Ptch, as well as on your desired social channels.”
- Life Stages In Literature.[NPR Interview] “Guest: Arnold Weinstein, distinguished professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and author of Morning, Noon, And Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books. What Twain, Woolf, Roth, Morrison and more tell us about growing up and growing old.The stories and insights to place us, ground us, in our own lives. Literature can get at the heart of what we’re doing and the experience we share can be illuminated.”
- Best Online Language Tools for Word Nerds. “Beside the standard-issue dictionary and spellchecker offered by most word processors and operating systems, there are several web-based language tools at your disposal that can get you just the information you need. Let’s take a look at some of the best online language tools for word nerds and regular people who just want to say that word correctly in conversation.”
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Tagged Arnold Weinstein, checklist, Comparative Literature, Dreamworks, email, English language, Life Stages, life story, literature, material possessions, NPR, online language tools, perfume, Ptch, The Burning House, The Printed Word, Tips, video
This Monday’s Link Roundup will tickle the fancy of typography geeks. If you’re one who loves fonts, check out A Periodic Table Of Typefaces and 6 Variations on Drop-Cap Typography.
One of my favorite articles is Memories of Mom’s cooking. For those who are working with or caring for someone with dementia this is a must read.
- What It’s Like To Write A Woman’s Life. “Women’s History Month starts on Thursday. All through March, Tell Me More will dig into inspiring, bold and sometimes disturbing stories of notable women — from Cleopatra to Coco Channel. To launch the biography series, host Michel Martin talks with two essayists about why it’s important to tell women’s stories, and how that storytelling has evolved.”
- Why Memoir Matters. “… memoir can also be looked at as the most literary form of something most of us engage in, actively or passively, most of our lives and even after our deaths. I refer here to what academics call “life writing”…[it] refers to all the forms in which human lives get inscribed or represented, whether public or private, written or graphic, print or electronic, static or interactive. And the forms are constantly evolving and proliferating.”
- Character Witness. “A far cry from staid desk jockeys, biographers regularly court ecstasy, terror and obsession in illuminating their subjects.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
- Memories of Mom’s cooking. “It’s a cold, blustery day and I’m planning to cook a hearty beef stew with the help of my elderly mother. This may not sound remarkable, but it is when you consider she lives several hundred kilometres away in a complex care facility. With advanced vascular dementia, she spends much of her time roaming the halls in her wheelchair, asking the care aides if they’ve seen my father. He passed away two years ago.”
- For Typography Geeks, A Periodic Table Of Typefaces. “USA-based designer Cam Wilde of Squidspot created a Periodic Table for typeface junkies.The ‘Periodic Table of Typefaces’ is “the style of all the thousands of over-sized Period Table of Elements posters hanging in schools and homes around the world,” according to Wilde. The Periodic Table features 100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces of today.”
- How Not To Hurry. “…often we compete by trying to show how busy we are. “I have a thousand projects to do!”, “Oh yeah? I have 10,000!”. The winner is the person who has the most insane schedule, who rushes from one thing to the next with the energy of a hummingbird, because obviously that means he’s the most successful and important. Right? Maybe not.Maybe we’re playing the wrong game—we’ve been conditioned to believe that busier is better, but actually the speed of doing is not as important as what we focus on doing.”
- Book Design: 6 Variations on Drop-Cap Typography. “The tradition in book design of making the first letter in a paragraph larger than the rest of the type goes back pretty far. In fact, it predates printing entirely. This practice started with scribes…Today, this practice survives in the drop capitals we see at the beginning of chapters. But like everything else in book design, it’s best to be guided by the long traditions of bookmaking when deciding how to use them.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged biography, book design, cooking, dementia, family stories, Geeks, How to, memoir, memories, Michel Martin, not rushing, NPR, Periodic Table, recipes, slowing down, storytelling, Tips, typography, Women's History Month, women's stories
Warmest wishes to all my Jewish friends and viewers. This is a wonderful time to reminisce about past holidays. A tradition of National Public Radio for nearly two decades, Hanukkah Lights presents brand new fiction to celebrate and illuminate the holiday season — moving tales of discovery and reconciliation, the persistence of hope and the promise of undimmed light — read by Susan Stamberg and Murray Horwitz. You can treat yourself to some wonderful stories by clicking here.
Photo by Nancy
