As those of you who frequent my site know, I occasionally pull together free Internet resources. Previously I compiled a mega list of 100 Free Resources for Personal Historians. This was followed by 20 More Free Resources for Personal Historians and More Free Stuff! Well I’m back with more free resources to help you with your personal history work. Please note I don’t personally endorse any of these sites because I haven’t tested or used all of them. If you are familiar with some of these services or products and would like to leave a comment about your experience with them, I’d welcome such a review…Read more.
Too busy for a vacation this summer? Then you may want to read The Importance of Vacations in this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup. If you’re not familiar with Cowbird, check out this latest web-based means of collecting stories. And as someone who relies on my copyeditor to save me from embarrassing gaffes, I highly recommend 6 Ways Copyeditors Make Your Book Better.
- The Self Illusion: An Interview With Bruce Hood. “Bruce Hood, a psychologist at the University of Bristo…In his excellent new book, The Self Illusion, he seeks to understand how the singularity of the self emerges from the cacophony of mind and the mess of social life. Dr. Hood was kind enough to answer a few of my questions below.”
- Narrative Concepts. “…narrative medicine means an understanding of health and disease for humans, that is grounded in the stories humans live out in their lives and the stories that we understand about our lives which give our lives meaning and purpose…it means that illness is embedded in the stories we are performing and that are performing us. There is a biological story about how we are organisms who are born, live, wear out, and die. Our lives are finite. Within that finitude, however, are multiple social stories which interact with the “how long do I have to live story”.
- 6 Ways Copyeditors Make Your Book Better. “Linda Jay is a very experienced book editor…I asked [her]…if she would give readers some advice on one of the most important decisions a self-publisher makes: hiring a copyeditor. Here’s her reply.”
- The Importance Of Vacations. “As an entrepreneur who has launched three businesses, I have on several occasions in the past found myself working long hours, seven days a week and forgoing vacations owing to lack of time and reduced income. As I have grown older, I realize that was a mistake.”
- Cowbird. “…is a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web. Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of lives and shape the human story.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged Allianz, archival photos, Baby boomer, Baby Boomers, books, Bruce Hood, Copy editing, copyediting, copyeditors, Cowbird, design, interview, legacy, link roundup, mind, Monday, narrative medicine, publishing, Self Illusion, storytelling, survey, Tips, treasure, trunk, vacations, web
Marc Pachter founded Living Self-Portraits at the Smithsonian and was its master interviewer. In his TED talk below he shares the challenges of getting a good interview.
…if all you’re going to get from the interviewee is their public self, there’s no point in it. It’s pre-programmed. It’s infomercial, and we all have infomercials about our lives. We know the great lines, we know the great moments, we know what we’re not going to share, …
Marc recounts several interviews and how he cut below the surface conversation to have his subjects reveal the truth of their lives…Read more.
Posted in How to, Interviewing, Life stories, Personal historian, Questions, Tips
Tagged courageous questions, difficult questions, End of life, How to, interview, Interviewing, Life stories, Living Self-Portraits, Marc Pachter, People, Personal historian, Questions, questions to ask, Smithsonian, terminally ill, Tips
For Ken Burns fans, this Monday’s Link Roundup includes a terrific 5 minute video, Ken Burns on the Art of Storytelling. In Skepticism About Stories: The “Narrababble” Critique, you’ll find a challenge to the popular view that people’s lives are a collection of stories. And find out if you live in one of America’s well- read cities by checking out What Are The Most Well-Read Cities In America?
- Alzheimer’s Patients Turn To Stories Instead Of Memories.[NPR] “Storytelling is one of the most ancient forms of communication — it’s how we learn about the world. It turns out that for people with dementia, storytelling can be therapeutic. It gives people who don’t communicate well a chance to communicate. And you don’t need any training to run a session.”
- Life Writing. [pdf] “This special virtual edition of Life Writing presents eight articles that have a clear connection with the themes of the upcoming conference of the International Auto/Biography Association, to be held in Canberra, Australia, in July 2012. The conference is called ‘Framing Lives’, and its title signals an emphasis on the visual aspects of life narrative: ‘graphics and animations, photographs and portraits, installations and performances, avatars and characters that come alive on screens, stages, pages, and canvas, through digital and analogue technologies’ (www.iaba2012.com).”
- The Colossal Camera that will capture Vanishing Cultures. “One photograph, no retakes, no retouching, just a pure honest photograph and a giant camera that will travel 20,000 miles across the US to photograph American Cultures. Vanishing Cultures is an astounding and completely unique concept…This one of a kind monumental camera will be transported by a huge truck trailer, due to it’s extremely large size. His [Dennis Manarchy] aim is to capture cultures that are rapidly fading from society and to feature their portraits on 2-story sized prints displayed in stadium-sized traveling outdoor exhibitions along with the amazing negatives and the stories behind the people and cultures.”
- Skepticism About Stories: The “Narrababble” Critique. “…it is a very popular idea in psychology, philosophy and various social sciences that people experience their lives as a story or collection of stories. For example, the philosopher Dan Dennett explains the mind as a master novelist: “We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography,” he has written. Moreover, says the philosopher Galen Strawson, there’s a parallel claim in the air that this is A Good Thing: that each person should be able to understand his/her life as a meaningful story, with an arc and a recognizable end. Strawson, though, is having none of it. He thinks these ideas, which he’s called “narrababble,” are a fad.”
- What Are The Most Well-Read Cities In America? “Amazon has released their second annual list of the most well-read cities in the country, based on their book, magazine and newspaper sales data in both print and digital, since June 1, 2011. The statistics are per capita, and only include towns with more than 100,000 residents.”
- What’s so special about biography? “It is my contention that biography has a unique way of helping us to understand what we are like as people. There have been true Golden Ages and Reigns of Terror in the fabric of human history; but, by examining the lives of real, flesh-and-blood human beings who inhabited those places and times, we can see the similarities and the constancy of human nature throughout that history. So, how does biography accomplish this in ways that other genres cannot?”
- Ken Burns on the Art of Storytelling.[Video] “In explaining his own view on filmmaking, Burns rolls out that old quote from Jean Luc-Godard, “Cinema is truth at twenty-four frames a second.” But he has his own response to the famous proclamation: “Maybe. It’s lying twenty-four times a second, too. All the time. All story is manipulation.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged Alzheimer's patients, America, Arts, biography, Canberra, colossal camera, critique, Dan Dennett, documentaries, Galen Strawson, Jean Luc-Godard, Ken Burns, life writing, link roundup, memories, Monday, personal histories, Philosopher, stories, storytelling, therapeutic, United States, Vanashing Cultures, well-read cities, wisdom, Writing
How many of you could use some further training to enhance your personal history skills? I know I can!
Whether you’re starting out or well established, here’s a select list of sites that can help. I’ve combed the Internet to bring you some of the best…Read more.
Posted in Business, How to, Personal historian, Resources, Tips
Tagged blogging, e-mail newsletters, Editing, How to, Interviewing, Marketing, Personal historian, personal history, photo scanning, Resources, social media, Tips, videography, Writing
If you’re looking for some good summer reading, this Monday’s Link Roundup has several suggestions. Be sure to check out ‘When Women Were Birds’ by Terry Tempest Williams and 10 of the Best Memoirs About Mothers. If you’re a Mad Men fan, and who isn’t, you’ll want to read Mad Men and Wonder Years: history, nostalgia, and life in The Sixties.
- Carl Sagan on Books. “The love of books and the advocacy of reading are running themes around here, as is the love of Carl Sagan. Naturally, this excerpt from the 11th episode of his legendary 1980s Cosmos series, titled “The Persistence of Memory,” is making my heart sing in more ways than the universe can hold:”
- Black history ‘undertaker’ loses treasures. “Nathaniel Montague spent more than 50 of his 84 years chasing history, meticulously collecting rare and one-of-a-kind fragments of America’s past. Slave documents. Photographs. Signatures. Recordings.”
- Arnaud Maggs: One of the most remarkable careers in Canadian art. “It was when Maggs started fishing around in French flea markets in the 1990s, however, that his obsessive collecting and arithmetic ordering found their richest raw material in the shape of domestic and industrial ephemera from the 19th century. In this show, curator Josée Drouin-Brisebois includes the lovely Les factures de Lupé, photographs of the pastel-coloured household invoices of an aristocratic French couple from Lyons. Who were the Comte and Comtesse de Lupé and why did they keep all their bills for furniture, jewellery, perfumes and linen? We don’t know, but these pristine photographic enlargements of their mundane household papers read as an emotionally gripping act of historic retrieval.”
- ‘When Women Were Birds’ by Terry Tempest Williams. “After her mother’s death, Terry Tempest Williams opens her mother’s journals – and finds that they are all blank. This book is a meditation on what information they could have contained, as well as a fragmented memoir of Williams’ own life, mixed in with reflections on womanhood, her Mormon upbringing, and environmentalism. It contains 54 short pieces, labeled as “variations on voice” – her mother was 54 when she died, and Williams is 54 years old now.”
- Oral history’s quiet heroes. “Over the past few weeks I have been eavesdropping on private conversations. I heard a homeless South African tell a charity worker how moved he was to be offered a sandwich and a cup of tea after walking 20 miles through Lincolnshire; and an elderly Hull woman, reminded by her daughter how much of her life she had spent pregnant with her 10 children, concluding she “must have been bonkers”. The Listening Project has been harvesting these intimate gobbets and broadcasting them before the Radio 4 news. The launch of the Listening Project by the BBC and the British Library coincides with the return next month of another pioneering work of oral history: 56 Up, the latest in Michael Apted’s now eight-part series stretching over almost half a century, following a group of ordinary Britons from the age of seven into what is now deep middle age.
- Mad Men and Wonder Years: history, nostalgia, and life in The Sixties. “Mad Men and The Wonder Years share many of the same overarching historical themes of political, social, and cultural change during 1960s America. Specifically, both shows illustrate how the everyday lives of people at the time intersected with the events and trends that have become engrained in popular memory of the decade. The civil rights movement, feminism, the Vietnam War, and the emerging counterculture – to name a few of the major forces of the era – serve as subtext for both series.”
- 10 of the Best Memoirs About Mothers. “This week saw the release of cult cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s second work of non-fiction, Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama, a graphic memoir that investigates her relationship with her mother in all its fraught, tender weirdness…After we zipped through the book, we felt a hankering for more memoirs about mothers, so in case you feel the same way…we’ve collected a few of the best examples in recent memory here.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged Arnaud Maggs, BBC, best, black history, Carl Sagan, Mad Men, memoir, Michael Apted, mothers, nostalgia, oral history, Persistence of Memory, photography, Terry Tempest Williams, the 60s, The Listening Project, Wonder Years
Imagine yourself in this situation. You’ve just completed videotaping an hour-long interview. It was nicely lit and framed. And the interview itself was fantastic! Excitedly you rush back to your editing suite, put up your interview to screen, and then the shock. The picture looks great but the audio is terrible.There’s nothing you can do to fix it. The interview is ruined!
I know that getting flawless sound all the time is nearly impossible. But you can improve the odds if you avoid making these 5 common audio mistakes…Read more.
Posted in Audio recording, How to, Interviewing, Personal historian, Tips
Tagged Audio recording, common mistakes, How to, interview, Interview Advice, Interviewing, Life stories, Personal historian, Tips
Over the past year Monday’s Link Roundup has brought you 336 links to articles of particular interest to personal historians, genealogists, storytellers, and memoir writers. In case you missed some of these articles, here are 7 of the best.
- The art of bookplates – in pictures. “A bookplate, or ex libris, is a small print for pasting inside the cover of a book, to express ownership. By the late 19th century, bookplates had developed into a highly imaginative form of miniature art. The British Museum’s new book showcases some of the many plates in their extensive collection. Browse through some of the best here.”
- The power of place: Robert Caro. “Show, don’t tell” is a mantra of narrative writers everywhere, but even the most useful adage can lose meaning with repetition. Before a lunchtime audience of writers at the Second Annual Compleat Biographer Conference on Saturday, legendary biographer Robert Caro reinvigorated the concept.”
- Belongings. “There are three million immigrants in New York City. When they left home, knowing it could be forever, they packed what they could not bear to leave behind: necessities, luxuries, memories. Here is a look at what some of them brought.” [Thanks to Lettice Stuart of Portrait in Words for alerting me to this item.]
- Dear Photograph: A website with a window into the past. “In the past month, a summery, slightly sad website has made the trip from non-existence to international exposure. It’s called Dear Photograph, and its premise is simple: Take a picture of an old photo being carefully held up in front of the place it was originally taken, so it appears to be a window into the past.”
- miniBiography and the 99%. “David Lynch’s Interview Project,[is] an online series of short video documentaries centering on the lives of “normal” people across America. In Interview Project’s 121 mini-biographies, the filmmakers (including Lynch’s son Austin) ask complete strangers piercing, existential questions. It is a source of ever-renewed wonder that each stranger has an answer, and that the answers are so often so rich and brimming with hard-luck stories and lived experience.”
- Objects and Memory. “The documentary film Objects and Memory depicts experiences in the aftermath of 9/11 and other major historic events to reveal how, in times of stress, we join together in community and see otherwise ordinary things as symbols of identity, memory and aspiration. In its exploration of people preserving the past and speaking to the future, Objects and Memory invites us to think about the fundamental nature of human interaction.” [Thanks to cj madigan of Shoebox Stories for alerting me to this item.]
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged "Objects and Memory", belongings, biography, book design, Bookplate, British Museum, David Lynch, Dear Photograph, documentary, historical, How to, immigrants, Interview Project, Life stories, memories, memory, miniature art, New York city, old photographs, photo, Robert Caro, stories, Tips, United States, video, Writing
If I were able to go back to when I began as a personal historian, what’s the best advice I could give myself? Here’s what I’d say…Read more.
Posted in Business, How to, Marketing, Personal historian, Resources, Self-employed, Tips
Tagged advice, best, best advice, Business, Business plan, How to, humor, key, Marketing plan, Personal historian, personal history, self employed, small business, Tips
As those of you who frequent my site know, I occasionally pull together free Internet resources. Previously I compiled a mega list of 100 Free Resources for Personal Historians. This was followed by 20 More Free Resources for Personal Historians and More Free Stuff! Well I’m back with more free resources to help you with your personal history work. Please note I don’t personally endorse any of these sites because I haven’t tested or used all of them. If you are familiar with some of these services or products and would like to leave a comment about your experience with them, I’d welcome such a review…Read more.
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