A good personal history interview is like a symphony – complex, engaging, and harmonious. Over the past three years I’ve written extensively about the art of the interview and assembled these articles here in one convenient list. Enjoy!…Read more.
Posted in Personal historian, Tips, Life stories, How to, Interviewing
Tagged Tips, Life stories, Personal historian, How to, interview, Interviewing skills, Question
My favorite article in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup is Reading Cookbooks as Life Stories. One of my prized possessions is Mom’s 1945 Purity Cookbook. Thumbing through the grease-stained pages and reading her handwritten notes is like stepping back into Mom’s kitchen. Also, be sure to take a look at Boring Is Productive. I can now feel justly proud of my “boring” morning routines! 
- An Illustrated Homage to Grandparents and the Art of Looking Twice. “As a lover of vintage and vintage-inspired children’s books, I was instantly enamored with The Frank Show (public library) by British illustrator and designer David Mackintosh — a charming homage to grandparents and the art of seeing beneath the grumpy exterior.”
- The simple power of one a day. “There are at least 200 working days a year. If you commit to doing a simple marketing item just once each day, at the end of the year you’ve built a mountain. Here are some things you might try (don’t do them all, just one of these once a day would change things for you):”
- The Top 10 Social Networks for Creative People. “I begin by looking at WHY networking is critical to your success as a creative professional. Then it’s onto the networks themselves, with quotations from the founders of some networks and success stories from users, explaining the networks’ individual cultures, how to use them, and how they can help your creativity and your career.”
- Reading Cookbooks as Life Stories. “…cookbooks tell us something much more personal about their readers,..The problem is, we often only come about this information by inference – particularly when we know nothing about the original owner. Still, many cookbooks do offer at least a few tantalizing clues who owned them and how they were used.”
- Data Lives Forever in Quartz Glass. “Hitachi has discovered a way to store digital information on slivers of quartz glass. This data can seemingly exist forever, enduring extreme temperatures and hostile conditions without degrading… at least until the sun begins to die and expend to consume the earth, that is.”
- Using WorldCat to Find Genealogy Books. “WorldCat is the world’s largest network of library content and services. It is an online library catalog that lets you look up items in libraries around the world. The items available include books, electronic documents, journals, microform, and audio and video recordings. Best of all, WorldCat is available to everyone free of charge.”
- Boring Is Productive. “Making too many decisions about mundane details is a waste of a limited resource: your mental energy. In the late 1990s, Roy Baumeister (a professor at Florida State University) and colleagues performed several experiments showing that certain types of conscious mental actions appeared to draw from the same “energy source” — gradually diminishing our ability to make smart decisions throughout the day.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged boring, Cookbook, cookbooks, creatives, data, Florida State University, Frank Show, Fused quartz, genealogy, grandparents, Hitachi, homage, How to, Life stories, life story, link roundup, Marketing, productivity, Quartz Glass, reading, Roy Baumeister, simple, social networks, Tips, top, WorldCat
Did you know that genealogy ranks second only to porn as the most searched topic online ? I didn’t! In this Monday’s Link Roundup you can read more about this and other fascinating topics. A favorite of mine is Negative Space in Logo Designs. You’ll find some dazzling designs here that will make you want to create your own unique logo. And just for a lark, be sure to check out 25 (more) words that are fun to say.
- Why We Procrastinate, and How to Stop It. [Video} “We all procrastinate from time to time, but beating it isn’t as easy as recognizing that we do it. This video from the folks at ASAP Science does a great job of explaining the mental processes behind why we procrastinate (you may be procrastinating right now by reading about procrastination) and how you can use them to your advantage to get things done.”
- Telling Stories About the Stories We Tell. “On July 25, Philip Gourevitch gave the keynote address to the Human Rights Lecture Series at Stanford University…We met over drinks before his lecture to discuss the challenges of writing about the history that we are in the midst of making, the burdens of memory and the appeal of forgetting, the dangers of narrative simplification, the limits of humanitarianism, and the messiness of politics.”
- The War of the Words: How to Update a Dictionary. “David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t is not the history of that word, but an exploration of the scandal over the publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. Like the crowdsourced Collins, Webster’s Third was premised on a new direction; one that struck many as giving in to new forces “blowing in the wind.” Its editor, Philip Gove, operated under a seemingly reasonable impression: that a dictionary for post-World War II America could dispense with lists of English kings, quotations from Tennyson, and the breezy disparagement of colloquial speech.”
- QR Codes Make Memories Come Alive. “The cool thing about QR codes on headstones is that you can scan the code and immediately learn more about the person than simply their date of birth and death. You can see a video of the person while they were alive, maybe dispensing words of wisdom. You can see photos, read or hear stories, and list the family tree. Just about anything you can put on a website can be incorporated into a site associated with a unique QR code. This is storytelling from beyond the grave.”
- Negative Space In Logo Design. “Great logos do more than just say the name of the company—they capture the personality, tone of voice and style of the brand…But some of the best logos of all are remarkable because of the hidden details they contain through the clever use of negative space…We’ve brought together a collection of beautifully designed, ingeniously crafted logos that all use negative space to help fill out the image and add an extra level of depth, style and cleverness.”
- Ancestry.com’s Genealogical Juggernaut. “Today, genealogy ranks second only to porn as the most searched topic online. According to a January 2012 report by market research firm Global Industry Analysts, an estimated 84 million people around the world spend anywhere from $1,000 to $18,000 a year in search of their ancestors. Visitors to online genealogy sites are mostly white women, 55 and older, who browse the Internet from home—or, says Pate, “your Aunt Betsy, who’s got a real rabid appetite for digging into family roots.” It’s a demographic projected to grow 36 percent by 2020, three times as fast as any other group.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged Tips, Life stories, How to, memories, storytelling, Ancestry.com, link roundup, genealogy, words, online, Monday, Procrastination, QR code, Logo, David Skinner, Webster's, update, dictionary, headstones, pronunciation, logo design, negative space, genealogical, Philip Gourevitch
In this Monday’s Link Roundup, if you swoon over typography, you’ll want to take a look at Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili. It’s a feast for the eyes. And for a more mindful approach to living, be sure to read A Primer on Full-Screen Living.
- What is Narrative Therapy? ” Narrative therapy starts with the understanding that everybody’s life is multi-storied to an almost infinite degree. If I were to sit down with you, and you were to talk non-stop 24 hours a day for 30 days about different things that have happened to you in your life, you would only have just begun to scratch the surface of all the stories associated with your life. That’s because stories are much more than events themselves. They are perspectives, ways of making meaning about the situations we encounter.”
- Book Review: Patrick Nathan on Boarded Windows. “The act of remembering — on a literal level it’s an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it… What you’re remembering is that memory reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now. […] The more you remember something, in a sense, the less accurate it becomes. The more it becomes about you and the less about what actually happened.”
- Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili. “For more than three decades, graphic designer Louise Fili* has been producing some of the most consistently exquisite typography, frequently hand-drawn and building upon thoughtfully curated vintage sources. In her decade as art director for Pantheon Books, she created nearly two thousand book jackets, each with remarkable attention to detail.”
- Boost Your Freelance Brand 100 Percent with Your Expert Status. “To build a lucrative freelancing career, it isn’t enough to have the best skills out there, despite what these reality television shows may indicate. But you do absolutely have to be an expert: you need to be the person that advises your client so that they get the result they want, not the project they asked for.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
- This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It). “When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”
- Book Review: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price. “When is a book a book, and when is it something more? What is it that matters about books, and where is that meaning made? Why, and how, do we value books? And how has the meaning of books changed: what did books mean in an era experiencing the rapid rise of print, and what do they mean to us now as we shift into the digital age? These are all questions raised by Leah Price’s engaging and incisive How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.”
- A Primer on Full-Screen Living. “What’s full-screen living? It’s a life where we allow one thing to take up the entirety of our attention — going into full-screen mode, like a video on your computer — while allowing everything else to fade into the background. Let’s take a look.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged benefits, Boarded Windoes, book review, books, branding, Elegantissma, expert, freelance, graphic design, How to, Leah Price, Leo Babauta, Life stories, link roundup, Louise Fili, memoir, memories, mindfullness, narrative therapy, Pantheon Books, personal branding, personal history, Tips, typography, Victorian Britain, Victorian era, Zen Habits
These are some of my favorite articles from last year. If you missed them the first time around, now’s your chance to catch up.
- A Brief History of Film Title Sequence Design in 2 Minutes. “In his graduation project, an absolutely brilliant motion graphics gem, Dutch designer and animator Jurjen Versteeg examines the history of the title sequence through an imagined documentary about the designers who revolutionized this creative medium.”
- A Crash Course in Marketing With Stories. “If you want your marketing to really sizzle, if you want people to remember it, you need to turn your marketing messages into stories. I’ve broken down the classical elements of story below so you can begin to think like a storyteller, and make your marketing messages stick.”
- 10 Essential Books on Typography. “Whether you’re a professional designer, recreational type-nerd, or casual lover of the fine letterform, typography is one of design’s most delightful frontiers, an odd medley of timeless traditions and timely evolution in the face of technological progress. Today, we turn to 10 essential books on typography, ranging from the practical to the philosophical to the plain pretty.”
- When Data Disappears. “…if we’re going to save even a fraction of the trillions of bits of data churned out every year, we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. We have to stop thinking about how to save data only after it’s no longer needed, as when an author donates her papers to an archive. Instead, we must look for ways to continuously maintain and improve it. In other words, we must stop preserving digital material and start curating it.”
- Selling My Mother’s Dresses. “Some of my favorite things — including the sundress I’m wearing today and the Winnie the Pooh car that Jay is pushing our daughter in — are from someone else’s life. I find no joy in shopping at regular stores anymore…I love trying to sniff out a memory from a bud vase or a favorite song from a case of L.P.’s. The stains and broken switches, the bend in the knee of an old pair of jeans. Sometimes I just want to look at how many Mason jars one person can collect and imagine what they might’ve held. It’s comforting to know that someone has breathed and laughed inside a sweater before me. That I am part of a continuum.” [Thanks to Mary M. Harrison of Morning Glory Memoirs for alerting me to this item.]
- Tracking Personal Histories Across Time. “Sander Koot’s series Back from the Future is a pairing of new portraits of the individual with an older picture of that person from years past.. he only photographs individuals after interviewing them. “In this project, I ask people to find old portraits of themselves, of which they have good memories,” says Koot. “When talking to them about the picture, you see them reliving the happy moment. Only after I know all the details about the past of that picture, (do) we start the shoot.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged 1960s, Arts, Back from the Future, digital, Digital curation, future, graphic design, Life stories, Marketing, memories, objects, portraits, predictions, Preservation, stories, storytelling, Tips, Title sequence, typography, video
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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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
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
The recent issue of the Journal of Marketing Research examined the correlation between relaxation and consumer spending. It turns out that all things being equal consumers are more willing to pay higher prices if they feel relaxed…Read more.
Posted in How to, Life stories, Marketing, Tips
Tagged Business, client relaxtion, clients, How to, Life stories, Marketing, marketing research, relaxation, Tips
How many personal historians have found themselves in this situation? You have an enthusiastic client, an adult child who really wants her mom or dad’s life story told, but the parent is reluctant…Read more.
Posted in How to, Interviewing, Life stories, Personal historian, Tips
Tagged Family, family story teller, fears, How to, interview, Interviewing, Life stories, Personal historian, reluctant, solutions, Tips
Every time we meet potential clients, we have to prove ourselves. They’re sizing us up and assessing whether we’re the right fit for them. Here’s a cheeky question. Would you hire yourself?…Read more.
Posted in How to, Marketing, Personal historian, Self-employed, Tips
Tagged clients, hire, How to, Life stories, Marketing, Personal historian, personal histories, self-assessment, small business, strengths, Tips, weaknesses
Not long ago I was asked to audio record some final words from a young mother who was dying from cancer. I’ll call her Sonia to protect the family’s privacy. She was in her early thirties and she wanted to leave something for her only child, a five-year-old boy…Read more.
Posted in End of life, Inspiration, Interviewing, Life stories
Tagged audio legacy, child, End of life, interview, legacy, Life stories, mother's dying words, wisdom
Not long ago I was asked to audio record some final words from a young mother who was dying from cancer. I’ll call her Sonia to protect the family’s privacy. She was in her early thirties and she wanted to leave something for her only child, a five-year-old boy…Read more.
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