{"id":45,"date":"2017-10-13T11:15:05","date_gmt":"2017-10-13T15:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/?p=45"},"modified":"2018-02-15T13:53:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-15T17:53:00","slug":"week-six","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/13\/week-six\/","title":{"rendered":"Week Six"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m still describing documents, printing them out, and integrating the digital and paper collections. When I first started describing documents, I asked my supervisor if I could name a document something like “racist slander.” He laughed and said that didn’t meet professional standards of objectivity, but that I could “dance around that” as best as I could. I want to be objective, but I’m realizing there is an inevitable level of subjectivity in whatever I do.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe what jumps out at me as the subject of a document isn’t what would jump out at the next person who reads it. I’ve disagreed with my predecessor on several subject categorizations. Maybe they thought a certain letter was praising segregation and complaining about African Americans, but I thought the praise of segregation was minimal. Things with a single subject will be easier to categorize, so putting the subject as “Complaining About African Americans” is an attractive option.\u00a0 I’m supposed to give things a short title, not write a novel, but on the other hand, I’m not the only researcher who will be using this collection.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Another example is using people’s titles. My predecessor was not consistent in using titles in the finding aid, and while I made a resolve to be consistent in my use of titles, I often forgot and only used titles when it seemed significant.\u00a0 Example: Some people claimed that God supported their racist views, but many Christian pastors drew up petitions in opposition to segregation. I included the title Rev. in the finding aids for these petitions because I wanted to highlight this contrast.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wanted to highlight this contrast. Ugh.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I step back,\u00a0though,\u00a0I can see that the issues are negligible, that I am really doing a good job, and that my finding aid will be professional and useful.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m still describing documents, printing them out, and integrating the digital and paper collections. When I first started describing documents, I asked my supervisor if I could name a document something like “racist slander.” He laughed and said that didn’t meet professional standards of objectivity, but that I could “dance around that” as best as … Continue reading “Week Six”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/81"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interns.presidentwilson.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}