Not posting links anymore ...

 For years, since 2007 in fact. I used to post links of things I found interesting to a certain microblogging site now known as X.

Well, as we know, there's been some changes with X, so on the back of them I took the opportunity not only to quit twitter, but also to abandon all the socials except for Mastodon, and even though I could have started using Mastodon in the same way as I did twitter, I decided to dial it down and post rarely.

That left me with a little problem - my loyal ex followers.

Amazingly, well to me anyway, some people actively followed my feed and used it as an information source, so to provide a bridge I started accumulating links and posting them to a wiki.

This wasn't terribly arduous - it probably took about an extra fifteen minutes out of my day to save the copied URL's to a text document, add required markup and copy and paste them into my wiki's edit window.

But it did demand that I had time every day to do this.

Well in the old days, when the internet was a plaything of academia, and before everything was always on 24/7 you could leave a .vacation message along the lines of 

I am gone from my desk and may be away for a few weeks

and then disappear to the wilds of Anatolia or the rain forests of Laos and no one would care that much.

Well, we're going travelling again for the first time in ages - nowhere terribly exotic - and as I might not have time to post regularly, I decided to can the wiki posting experiment.

How much use it was to people I don't know, as I deliberately didn't turn on many metrics.

Personally, I found it a useful exercise to revisit my  wiki editing skills, and certainly I'll be adding pages to my wiki site in the future.

It also helped me in the process of disengaging from social media by giving me a mechanism to withdraw from compulsively posting anything I found interesting rather than reading it analytically, something I think everyone is guilty of sometimes.

So it's been valuable - hopefully some other people have also got some value from it.

I'm not going totally silent - being a bit of an internet chatterbox I will be posting the odd thing to Mastodon but I'm going to try and keep it dialed down ...

Field Notes

 A few days ago I posted a link about field notes from Christchurch archaeology to my links page for this week.

Personally I find field notes and how people use them fascinating, ever since I first managed botanists.

 Full of scribbles, marginal notes and the rest they record the progress of a survey, or an archaeological dig in the raw, with all the gritty details, mistakes, corrections and the rest.

And there is still a role for the field notebook/workbook/lab notebook in research, even if the final version ends up written up a little more formally and these days electronically.

And it’s the immediacy aspect that governs the use of notebooks.

For example, even when putting together a set of notes for family history research, I find there’s an intermediate stage when one writes down some rough notes and then writes them up in a more coherent manner – probably I ought to maintain a genealogy workbook, but I’m afraid I tend to use scrap paper and photograph any of my scrawls that are potentially useful.

So while the lightweight research machine is excellent for writing things up and putting things together systematically as one goes, I find I need a rough book.

And it is the immediacy factor – it doesn’t matter too much about the weather, one can simply pull out the rough book to write something down.

I’ve tried using an iPad, and while they’re great for a lot of desk based work – recording references and the like – they do need an internet connection for a lot of applications to work.

Paper is immediate.

So, when I was documenting Dow’s, a rough book formed part of the process.

As the various bottles and boxes contained god knows what, and possibly in a dubious condition the use of nitrile gloves to protect one’s hands was a given. Personally, I find it almost impossible to type even on a full size keyboard wearing nitrile gloves, and on a smaller size keyboard well, it just doesn’t work.

So, when examining the artefact I would write a basic description in my rough book

My workbook was more than usually illegible, but as I was the only one reading it that didn’t really matter. Sometimes there were crossings out and correction, but as the object descriptions were fairly well structured, pages tended to follow the same layout: object: separator: object and with aspects listed line by line.

After I’d examined and photographed the object I would upload, review, and edit the object photographs, and then add the image names to my rough book, before adding the object to the cataloguing spreadsheet.

This method is fairly generic, and having a rough book like this allows you to check back on your work to make sure you havn’t miskeyed something or missed something….

House and garden archaeology

 We live in an old wooden house, the core of which probably dates to the 1880's.

Exactly when I'm not sure, but like all wooden houses it has been extended and changed over the years, and while the front of the house looks authentic (but isn't, for example our front door and the Victorian etched glass in the door case dates to 1860 and came from a completely different house) the rear of the house most definitely is not, with multiple extensions over the years, most recently by ourselves in 2016.

I could, I suppose, research the date the house was originally built, but certainly, in 1856, while the block had been surveyed when the town was laid out, the town plan does not show a house on the block,

I've been told that at one time our block formed part of an orchard, and that the brewery sometimes stabled dray horses on it.

Certainly I've found an old horseshoe and a broken set of nineteenth century farriers' pliers, so perhaps there's some truth in the story.

In the course of gardening I've turned up old ceramic electrical fittings, the neck of a nineteenth century bottle, an old flat iron, a couple of 1920's medicine bottles, and a lot of broken glass, mostly from nineteenth and early twentieth century beer bottles.

So turning up bits and pieces isn't that unusual.

Today's finds consisted of a little glass object that looked a little like a glass chocolate button, and what at first sight  looked like the base of a nineteenth century medicine bottle, except that

the glass is very clear and transparent and lacks the thickness and also the little bubbles and inclusions typically found in nineteenth century glass. My guess is that it's a bit of a relatively modern, say post war, bottle that was made in the style of an earlier bottle.

The other find is a little more interesting, a little glass object around 15mm in diameter and shaped a little like a chocolate button

The glass is almost certainly nineteenth century with a greenish hue and little air bubbles trapped in it

My guess is that it is a skirt weight from the hem of a woman's dress in the nineteenth century.

Skirt weights were sewn into the hems of skirts and dresses to stop them blowing about and to help them hang properly.

Unfortunately, while the internet provides plenty of examples of metal nineteenth century hem weights, I've been unable to turn up any images of glass hem weights.

The end of wordpad

 

I recently tooted an article from The Register that Microsoft was killing off WordPad.

To be honest I'd forgotten that WordPad existed, but its demise is symptomatic of the move to cloud centric computing.

Now sometimes you need to produce some minimally formatted text.

Focuswriter, while great as a distraction free editor, doesn't let you structure text. You could, of course, use Markdown and do the whole Pandoc thing, but realistically you wouldn't - we're visual beings, and  sometimes you need something simple to organise your thoughts with.

Solutions that hark back to the days of green on black VT100's and LaTeX really don't fly.

On the lightweight research machine, I must admit to using AbiWord simply because it's not particularly CPU intensive, and despite a few idiosyncrasies it works well enough for making a document with headers, bullet points and a bit of text with inline formatting, and you can save the document in a format something else can read, such as .odt .

This of course doesn't help you if you're on Windows.

Usually I use GoogleDocs, but that, of course, assumes an internet connection, which is not always the case - V/line trains for example, which don't have wifi, making offline working the default. (It's of course possible to use Google Docs offline, but you first need to be online to make the document available offline - not ideal.)

To do most of what you need you probably only need an rtf capable editor that doesn't need an internet connection. Googling suggests a number of  alternative, but I'm hesitant about recommending one until I've tried them ...