Jargon Translator

The US National Archives (and this may certainly apply to other countries but this post is about this specific institution) has a lot of material. And that may seem like an obvious statement, but what I mean to say here is that it has a lot of unprocessed material.

“Processing”, in the archive world, is the word we use to mean “organizing the collection materials in a way that makes sense and describing the collection so people know what’s there”. Essentially, processing a collection or material is what makes it accessible to researchers. Think about how you organize yourself or your space. Most of the time when we acquire material we get it exactly how the creator kept it, which is ranges from neat as a pin to literal garbage dump, but mostly falls into the middle area of somewhat organized but also not really. Processing gives the archivist “intellectual control” (we go through everything so we now know exactly what’s in the collection) and gives researchers something to look at that’s a lot more manageable.

But, like I said, the National Archives has a lot of material. Which at this point includes a massive backlog. So what they have done, with the advent of the internet, is turned to crowdsourcing. (Using a large group of volunteers over the internet to accomplish more than the few people who work for the archive can do, and/or using group knowledge and skills that they don’t have to their advantage. Wikipedia or any fandom wiki is an example of crowdsourcing.) This is a long process, because anything they put up has to be digitized first, and that is not as easy as it sounds. I won’t rant here, but it’s time consuming, labor intensive, and in some cases not even feasible with the material.

Anyway, the National Archives crowdsources through a program that they call “citizen archivists”. It’s something that’s free and obligationless, it’s totally voluntary and you do things like add tags to pictures, transcribe documents that are handwritten or otherwise not word-searchable, and add comments about things that are missing information or context.

The reason I bring this up is because they have divided the work into what they call “missions”, basically just categories of material to work on. They have a new one that’s just been made public (likely because they finally got the digitization completed) that is a large collection of pictures consisting of Native subjects, and they need help tagging them.

the Library of Congress has something similar- I’ve been transcribing Spanish legal documents for them

* I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

*The King in Yellow

* The Lottery

* The Masque of the Red Death

* The Monkey’s Paw

* The Most Dangerous Game

* The Nameless City

* The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

* There Will Come Soft Rains

*The Yellow Wallpaper

* The Veldt

* “you think those were fucked up? What about [X]!”

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers*

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson**

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs

The Most Dangerous Game by Richard O'Connell

The Nameless City by HP Lovecraft

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K LeGuin

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

Honorable Mention from the comments/reblogs:

All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury

*note: this is actually a collection of short stories and clocks in at about 72k words

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

https://www.re3data.org

There are over 3500 respectable data repositories on one respectable global registry; to a researcher there’s no point in data existing if not findable; if you’re trying to find a new home for your dataset, start there

Resign from office on the grounds that I only ran for the bants, triggering a further by-election

You've probably seen these around they're pretty common in the US. It's an automated emergency defibrillator. They detect arrythmia and if necessary deliver electric shock.

They are very easy to use and are meant to be used by bystanders

Inside are patches that look like this:

Note that on a woman the placement is on the breast and below the breast

You need to take off the bra. YOU NEED TO TAKE OFF THE BRA

Even the manufacturer says to take off the bra so it doesn't CATCH ON FIRE or BURN the poor woman.

she is the maid's BOSS

they are not FRIENDS

the maid probably does not DESIRE her friendship

the servants are not your confidants in this scenario. IRL, the notion of the Loyal Family Retainer was most common in sentimental literature for the employing class (which btw was like upper-working-class on up, although the lower you go, the more work the family would be doing alongside them) and sometimes weaponized by them to try and get extra emotional or physical labor out of domestic workers

did emotional intimacy develop sometimes? absolutely- and it was often encouraged for upper-class 19th-century children in the US and UK, who could spend a lot of time with their nanny and in the servants' sphere in general. was classism a factor? 100%.

-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)

-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt

-ayran: yogurt, water, salt, mint

-sees the reports of the heatwave in Europe-