On January 18, 2012, from 11AM to 4PM, I’m hosting the Washington DC jellyweek 2012 event at TRYST in Adams Morgan.

Jellyweek is a self-organized global gathering, with hundreds of events happening all over the world. The idea is to get together, get some work done, and raise awareness about the global coworking movement. The event will be casual and informal. Just bring your laptop and work. I’m hoping local DC coworking and hackerspace folks will come represent and let us know about all of the options in the metro DC area. Adam Zuckerman already has a great list going, via Foster.ly.

Coworking, libraries, telecentres, hackerspaces, etc. — they’re all innovation grounds, and part of the ongoing movement to create spaces where folks can gather, make connections, create, and innovate. Even The Economist is taking notes.

Join me — or let your DC folks know. In a flurry of excitement, I made awesome jellyweek computer stickers so that we can recognize each other at — and after — the event.

Tweet about it… #jellyweek #jellydc

The map emerged from perceiving coworking spaces are next-generation telecentres; seeing connections between telecentres, coworking spaces, hackerspaces, and libraries; and being somewhat exasperated at how libraries are often overlooked as key actors in community development — despite the fact that they’ve always been places where people convene, learn, and create. (More on this note: Wayan Vota, Chris Coward, Meaghan O’Connor, Patrick Tanguay, and Christine… I’m sure you could send us more examples!).

The map is supposed to articulate how public-access venues (libraries, telecentres, cybercafes) and co-location/working/production spaces are connected. We were trying to go beyond access to technology while acknowledging its role and ubiquitousness, and to highlight the importance of access to people in innovation and development.

We’re hoping that this framework can help us think about both the theoretical and practical aspects of innovation grounds (design, support, research, policy, etc.).

Development agencies and practitioners should take a closer look at innovation grounds. Figure out how you can make them work for you — and how you can build on existing efforts. Similarly, national and local governments should seek out and leverage innovation grounds: libraries, coworking spaces, hackerspaces, community wireless groups. They’re out there. Start connecting. (And remember there are resources out there. One example is the US IMPACT Study — based on their research they prepared a wonderful toolkit to help libraries document successes and build understanding and support.)

Tell us what you think. Does this framework spark anything for you?

— Christine Prefontaine & Silvia Caicedo

(Shout outs: The term innovation grounds was inspired by Karen Fisher’s concept of “information grounds“. The term “commonspace” comes from Mark Surman. And writing this included a mental walkthrough of the facilities and approach of Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation, Montreal’s Station C and Foulab, various libraries we love, and all of the wonderful people and places that we came into contact with while working at IDRC on telecentre.org.)

I often meet resistance when I try to apply one of ET’s recommendations. (But why sidenotes, Christine? We always use footnotes. And why did you take the legend off of my chart?!) I want to do things better. I do. But how? ET complains about software, but at work most of us don’t get to choose the applications we use. What does ET use? What are the alternatives? And what do we tell our clients or colleagues when they demand more PowerPoint and chartjunk?

As I was reviewing my notes (posted below) I overheard two State Department employees discussing this issue. They were frustrated. They complained that they have no access to the tools to they need to produce the good visualizations. One of them looked at ET’s sparklines handout and said: “Great. I want to do this. But how? I only have Word and I can’t download anything else. I want a workshop showing me how to do this.”

Also it’s funny — and sad — to note that, with the exception of Development Seed Rockstar Eric Gundersen’s maps — most presenters’ visualizations had legends and lots and lots of administrative junk. Sigh…

The notes follow now. Live blogging. So messy. [Mixed in some of my comments.]

Sitting in front row, 10ft away from ET. Wow :)

[Intro really similar to the first ET talk I went to in 1999. Yes yes we know PPT sucks. Comparing sports page to average slide. Got it. But try telling your colleagues this. Can’t bitch every time: We need to pick our battles. They feel that they are expected to produce a PPT when they speak. Impossible to get them to give it up. It’s hard enough to convince them that they don’t need a frickin’ logo on each and every slide. A few here and there are switching to Prezi. But no one — no one — gets up and just speaks.]

ET: Go look at major scientific journals (Science, Nature). Go look at what really smart people who are well resourced and are given no space produce (as in space on the page). They are limited to one page when the time comes to show show off.

Technical reports. Big leagues: NYT, Google News. This should be the metaphor. People who do reporting. Use sentences, paragraphs. [Tufte HATES bullet points.]

We find design metaphors — and find out what we can get away with — by looking at successes. ESPN, NYT, etc. Not what folks learn about UI, which is driven by cognitive psychology experiments where they were testing information recall. (Major finding in most-cited paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” led to the mantra that you should show only seven things. Read Tufte post on this.) But task of user is not short-term memory — it’s finding something they want to read. The NYT puts out 400 stories and relies on the power of the human eye-brain system. And we are able to choose. It works. NYT is “successful in the wild.” No user testing or focus groups or anything like that. This is also Apple’s strategy of design: “We don’t do focus groups.” Consumer research? Jobs: “The job of the customer is not to design the product.” This promotes coherence of design. Focus Groups = Feature-itis.

[Agreed on this. I wonder, though, how this meets user-focused design? Do we throw participatory approaches out the window? I HATE design-by-committee more than anyone. That said, I want to be empathetic to people and their needs and better understand the ways they will use what I’ve been asked to create. That’s why I like Batya’s Envisioning Cards.]

Sparklines. They are part of the text. No separate box or figure or go-see-this-on-the-other-slide. They are an integrated word or number. Immediately contextualized with a vast amount of data. “Let’s see if we can measure up to the sports page.” Pure data: No legend, no manual about how to read it. Zero out the interface. Go straight to the data. Experience should be 100% content. iPhone is an example of this. Clear out the administrative debris (commands, etc.).

[ET now bitching about government websites and tech presentations. Again we get it. We know they often suck. But let’s focus on how to help make them better. Let’s start talking alternatives. Frustrating. There is a context. There is a system we work within. I fight against a series of expectations.]

Goal of Tufte’s work: Make people smarter. Assist reasoning and thinking about information and evidence. Focus on content and on the intellectual acts and activities that users perform on content. Trouble begins with the word “user”… Show comparisons. Show causality, mechanisms, analysis. This suggests a design process. Get content folks together and have them decide what they want to say. The process is always about the surface, not the tool. Supporting the intellectual processes of the users — this is where design starts and ends. About how you reason about content and how to make that quick and effective.

ET asked us to take a look at the Minard map. I didn’t. I have it memorized. Here you can look at it too. I’ve had it in my workspace for close to 15 years now.

• Fundamental intellectual act of thinking about numbers: Make smart comparisons.
• Understand causality. Intervention thinking at its core is causality thinking: mechanism, explanation.
• Show a muti-dimensional problem in 2D “flatland”
• Map shows six dimensions: size or army, location in latitude, location in longitude, direction, temperatures, dates attached to temperatures
• No administrative debris (legend)

When reasoning about causality we look at whatever it takes, our displays should do the same: completely integrate all modes of information. Be indifferent to the mode of production. It does not matter where you are showing what you’ve created. The cognitive/intellectual tasks are forever. UI segregates information by the mode of production. It forces you to go to special rooms (apps) to do different tasks: images, spreadsheet, text, etc. Bad. Users should have no knowledge about operating systems.

[So I’d really like to know which apps ET actually uses. Because seems to me he’s stuck, like the rest of us, switching back and forth between Illustrator and Photoshop and InDesign.]

Credibility. Reputation. Who did the work. Who printed it. Note data sources and difficulties. Idea here is to reduce quibbles over the data so that viewers focus on the message.

Threats to visualization and its credibility:

1. Distancing. On screen is representations of real things. Go to the field and see how the data are measured. So you need to be there. Show up. When you’re at the screen you’re not showing up.
2. One more excellent tool for cherry-picking information. This is the single biggest threat to learning the truth from any evidence. Is what they’re showing the product of information? Or is it the product of the selection of information? Warning signs: Too good to be true; real evidence always has issues. No access to underlying dataset (it’s proprietary, it’s secret, violates privacy, unpublished so we want to wait to release it, etc.). External review by unbiased external observer can fight this.

“Real” science versus social science. Real science can fall back on properties of the physical world. It has a gold standard. Social science much more difficult. Studying human behavior — often looking for associations in order to stop them. Focus on causing something appropriate to happen in the real world.

Best skill you can develop in face of enormous amount of data: Cultivating a sense of what is relevant. (See Washington Post video on this.) Be able to recognize excellence. Be able to look over a complicated problem and identify where you can/can’t intervene. Maintain focus. Identify leverage points worth pursuing. Causal links. Find people who have that. See what they do.

Once you have a point of view all history will back you up. [It’s even a game your mind will play on itself. Selective perception.] To fight against this try to come up with contrary interpretations, keep a list of all of the problems with your evidence. If you don’t you’re brain will just file data points that are consistent with your current point of view.

[This happens to in design. We’re reluctant to throw away a solution that we’ve invested time into. This is why rapid prototyping is important. Need to be able to throw things away the things we love in order to come up with good solutions.]

Wayan Vota (Moderator)
Joel Selanikio, Data Dyne
Oscar Salazar, Citivox
Matt Berg, Millennium Village
Prasanna Lal Das, World Bank.

No analysis here. Just stuff I wanted to remember.

Wayan: There is a huge cost to inputting data. Example of teacher overburdened by participating in research — having to document when students arrive, what they eat, how they performed, etc. — in addition to teaching. How do we get folks motivated and excited to input data on day two? Because it’s boring and there’s a huge incentive to fake the data.

Joel: In global health the data have is a subset of what we need. EpiSurveyor: Mobile data collection on a phone. When people want to collect data they will use whatever is easiest. We have motivated people who don’t have access to data-collection tools. We use the web to get it out as software. Now so many apps we use are online, no longer installed on our computer. But in international development we don’t use this approach as much. Why? EpiSurveyor is easy. People can download it and start using without our help.

Prasanna: At the World Bank we don’t have data gathering challenges. We work with data already collected. We want to get our data out there, we want people to use it (slice and dice!) and give us feedback.

Matt: Data is the incentive. Healthcare workers want to know. Data collection can’t be a burden. Can’t ask people to repeat data collection processes. Data must be actionable (people won’t report that the well is broken if they know it will never get fixed). Data has to be your own. Have to give the information back in a way that’s understandable and valuable to the community. This creates incentives to use systems.

Data input process has to be easier than paper — and should give something of value back.

Joel: Making something easier than paper is done. We can do it on mobile phones. Not difficult at all.

[Note: Not difficult with closed-ended questions with numerical responses. So depends on the research design.]

Multiple levels: I put in data. It gets analyzed. I review that analysis and add to it. I share my analysis with broader community, then they build on that, etc. Take, digest, bring to next level.

Joel: Affordable distance communications has revolutionized healthcare. Most stock outages are reported orally. We want to help engineer your process with structured information exchange.

Matt: Calling [voice] is great. But informatics comes into play when you’re talking about scale. Often just giving back information along with context of what is normal [so folks have something to compare their results to] improves outcomes.

Sadly, I can’t be there because I’m in Seattle (trying to work, but actually recovering…). But I’m really looking forward to hearing how it goes. Read more on the Artefatica website.

As usual, I have more to say on this. Especially in relation to publishing aid information in open formats. We waste a lot of time and money on publishing research and project findings using technologies and formats that make no sense. I’ve always opposed the way publications production works from a process/resource standpoint — but now I understand it also creates accessibility issues. More ammunition!

In the meantime, here’s a bit of a roundup mixed with some to-do notes for myself:

• Read the paper. (DONE!) It’s short and well-written. Just go do it so we’re all on the same page please.
• Pay attention to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATA)
• Pay attention to aidinfo
• Lurk on the Open Development mailing list
• Watch the Open Knowledge Foundation — and especially their Open Development Working Group (happy to see some familiar names there!)
• Figure out how the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network’s (CKAN) development information repository works
• AiDA (sad link) has now morphed into AidData — check it out
• Keep tabs on progress of the International Development Markup Language (IDML) — is it dead? — leads me to lots of dead Bellanet links from its IDRC days and idmlinitiative.org is down
• Tag opendevelopment resources more consistently

I realize from delving more into this that several of us have come to the same conclusion. I’m repeating myself but here goes: It’s not about building a big repository. Stop that. It’s about aggregating, not centralizing. Making it easy to find, bring together, and mash up. And this means, among other things:

• Open — not just accessible! — content and data
• Standard licensing frameworks (legal mechanisms to share and build on others’ work)
• Open, machine-readable file formats
• More thinking about how to integrate semantic tagging into our workflows
• Standard data schemas and metadata

(Oh oops, that’s pretty much the table of contents for the paper that got this whole post going…) Along with this goes something that I have not seen much writing about yet but that I think is really crucial:

Citation practices for open datasets and instruments.

To be clear: Academics should get credit for the data and instruments that they share. It should be right up there with publishing in a kick-ass, prestigious journal. (Make that an open journal! Love to ITID and First Monday). This HAS to count for them professionally. Toward professorship, toward tenure. This gets back to the way the game is played now. Want things to be different? Look at incentives. Re-think the rules of the game.

I’ve got more info on datasets and citations… later.

I spoke about our proposed approach to communications and knowledge sharing. You can read about that and download the presentation on the Global Impact Study website. It’s been tough to work out how to do open research — specifically how much to share about process and learning. (So yes my definition of open research includes working transparently, not just sharing findings, instruments, and datasets at the end.) Also it is anxiety-provoking to stop doing the work and write about doing the work. Like I’m doing now!

All of that by way of an excuse… I’m finally sharing this workshop report (download PDF, 4MB). It’s a personal account for those who were not able to attend. I’ve tried to give a sense of the flavor of the meeting and the range of topics and issues that came up. This is a large and complex project, presenting many challenges — from the methodological to the administrative. I did my best not to air dirty laundry, but also not to sanitize what I heard. I hope this document is useful for others as they work on similar projects or in similar domains.

IDRC is one of the funders of the Global Impact Study. When I worked there, I was lucky enough to get sent to training on Outcome Mapping. The training was led by Terry Smutylo. He pulled out his guitar and sang this song: the Output Outcome Downstream Impact Blues. (During a training at a GOVERNMENT development agency — think about that for a minute…) Listen and you’ll see why I think IDRC and Terry are the coolest coolest folks ever. See? They even put the song on their server! Ooops… looks like it’s been removed… good thing I took a screenshot so y’all believe me.

There’s also a powerpoint of the lyrics to Impact Blues.

Contribution, not attribution! After listening you’ll also understand why I find the naming of our study kinda ironic. Chalk one up to diverse opinions within organizations. Amen to that ;)

Okay this is very geeky. And I’m not really a geek. So I’m in territory that’s far beyond the edges of my understanding. I may have this wrong. But as of tonight I got WordPress to do what I wanted to. So there.

How do I get WordPress to display everything in my website tagged “publications” AND “employability”?

After looking for “WordPress multiple tags” allover the place I realized my novice self was not even searching for the right terms. What I should have been looking for is “WordPress taxonomy intersections unions” (e.e.: always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question). Sounds kinda kinky if you ask me. Here’s what I’ve found on this so far (see especially this, with a comment from Jeremy, nice!). The important part:

• INTERSECTION
  http://www.yoursite.org/?tag=publications,employability
  http://www.yoursite.org/tag/publications,employability/
  — either of these return posts with the tags publications OR employability
• UNION
  http://www.yoursite.org/?tag=publications+employability
  http://www.yoursite.org/tag/publications+employability/
  — either of these return posts with the tags publications AND employability

Annoying thing is, it won’t tell you so at the top of the page. It will appear as if it is just returning posts with the first tag. If I understand correctly there’s a way to fix this by messing around with the wp-includes/canonical.php. But that’s waaaaay beyond my PHP skillz (!).

So… in the interim I found this nice little plugin. It’s odd but works for now displaying the union of two tags, and you can specify that it shows just what is in a particular category. Example

• All content tagged publications and employability:
  http://yoursite.org/?tdo_tag=publications+employability/
• Just content in resources category tagged publications and employability:
  http://yoursite.org/category/resources/?tdo_tag=publications+employability/

accros within a category. It may not be scalable. But it will do for my dev site until I have everything figured out enough to hire a proper programmer.

PS. Please don’t add comments to this post asking for more details. A bunch of you did that last time I posted something I learned on WordPress. Truth is: I don’t know. I’m muddling through this stuff too!

1. The backend — Clean WordPress install, giving our researchers the ability for our folks to post their own content. They should not have to fight with the system.
2. The audience — Donors are our most important audience in this round. We have to be able to tell our story quickly — who we are, what we’re good at, and what we’ve done — to prove that we’re a good investment.
3. Show off our stuff — We have a lot of great research assets: reports, evidence narratives, briefs, datasets. Make it easy to connect those to people and to project. And make it easy for folks to access them.

Originally number three was me thinking about the best place to store our pubs. Adding them as separate WordPress posts did not feel right. Not robust enough. All sitting in folders by year and month. No no no. Then I thought I’d put them on the iSchool server in a folder called resources. Nope. Too rudimentary. Then I remembered: You are not the only person to have had this problem. Get on google and poke around. Do your homework. What I found is good, really good.

I started by looking for something that would play nice with WordPress, which led me to Joss Winn’s Displaying a dynamic publications list from a repository on a staff profile page.

This in turn tipped me off to the whole world of cloud repositories. Of course. Duh! There are people out there and all they do is manage collections: repositories. Increasingly digital ones. So… from here I found EPrints. Created by the School of Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton, it appears to be a wonderful open-source application to manage, specifically, open-access repositories. They  have a cloud version and a version you install on your own server. (Did I mention that open research is important to us? Yeah. Well it is. Remember that.) So they are cool three ways:

1. They’re a little consulting shop in an academic department. I’ve worked for two of those. We can be friends.
2. They’ve created an open-source app to manage information.
3. They’re promoting open access.

Plus they were super super well reviewed in this overview by Neil Godfrey and this survey by the Repositories Support Project, an initiative of the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to support the development and growth of a national repositories network. I called EPrints and they were super nice. (JISC, by way, also has a project called Dura, to embed institutional deposit into researchers’ academic workflow. Cooooool…)

MIT’s DSpace also looks pretty cool. IDRC uses it to manage their digital library. I’ll look into them before deciding. But my view with this sort of thing, increasingly, is this: Don’t spend months trying to find the perfect tool. Find a good-enough tool with an import/export feature and get to work!

In February 2010, JISC and Eduserv held Repositories and the Cloud, an event to discuss the policy and technical issues associated with cloud computing and the delivery of repository services in UK universitites. Adrian Stephenson took rocking-good videos. Watch a few to get an sense of what’s going on in this space. (Also note how they used TwapperKeeper to archive and summarize event-related tweets. More on social reporting.)

Okay, so what’s exciting about this and why should you care if you’re in development?

There are several massive repositories now, mostly stovepiped by donor (topic for another post). This has to stop. The model now should be aggregation. The open data model serves us well here: Standards are important. Build systems that can talk to each other and share with each other. Imagine if we could aggregate knowledge assets from a whole host of places.

So why should you care if you’re a development research group or consulting firm?

Or any organization that produces a lot of publications or digital assets? Ohhhh, here’s where it gets really exciting. Some ideas:

• People profiles that automatically update when you post new content to the repository. This is good good news for all you academics out there with beautiful long publications list. You’ll never have to update it again!
• Project descriptions that automatically display related research/project outputs, generated based on fields you’ve defined (see TASCHA’s draft of research project chunks).
• Track downloads of each asset (example).
• RSS feeds to display on various parts of your site.
• RSS feed to share with anyone else, so they can display your latest resources.

See where I’m going with this? Will keep you posted.

The music is annoying, but the possibilities are inspiring (and, apparently, profitable). Sometimes I feel like we can get it right.

From the abstract for his talk:

Microhistories often work with odd sources of uncertain voice, but they become far more complicated when many of the available texts aim to misrepresent and when the context is silence. When I was trying to determine why so many girls were dying in a Renaissance Florentine orphanage, it became necessary to juxtapose sources and read into the silences in order to piece together a plausible narrative. All historical narratives are hypothetical to greater or lesser degrees, but what makes them plausible?

Wow? Really? How does one read into silence? Dude, I want to see your methodology notes. Fascinating. Wikipedia says this:

First developed in the 1970s, microhistory is the study of the past on a very small scale. The most common type of microhistory is the study of a small town or village. Other common studies include looking at individuals of minor importance, or analysing a single painting. Microhistory is an important component of the “new history” that has emerged since the 1960s. It is usually done in close collaboration with the social sciences, such as anthropology and sociology.

I looked up more and found Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson’s, What Is Microhistory?, from 2006. A few juicy bits:

By reducing the scale of observation, microhistorians argued that they are more likely to reveal the complicated function of individual relationships within each and every social setting and they stressed its difference from larger norms. Micohistorians tend to focus on outliers rather than looking for the average individual as found by the application of quantitative research methods. Instead, they scrutinize those individuals who did not follow the paths of their average fellow countryman, thus making them their focal point. In microhistory the term “normal exception” is used to penetrate the importance of this perspective, meaning that each and every one of us do not show our full hand of cards..

… Nearly all cases which microhistorians deal with have one thing in common; they all caught the attention of the authorities, thus establishing their archival existence. They illustrate the function of the formal institutions in power and how they handle people’s affairs. In other words, each has much wider application, going well beyond the specific case under examination by the microhistorian. The Italian microhistorian Giovanni Levi put it this way in an article on the methods of microhistory: “[M]icrohistorians have concentrated on the contradictions of normative systems and therefore on the fragmentation, contradictions and plurality of viewpoints which make all systems fluid and open.” To be able to illustrate this point, microhistorians have turned to the narrative as an analytical tool or a research method where they get the opportunity to present their findings, show the process by which the conclusions are reached, and demonstrate the holes in our understanding and the subjective nature of the discourse.

What will microhistorians researching the 21st century do with blogs and twitter? There is so much interesting in here… The focus on the local. The personal is the political. Questions about how we create histories and how we do research. What did not get documented? How do we get to that? This also matters in terms of modern political communication: What gets defined as an issue? What are the range of potential solutions? And I’ve been thinking some about research methods — their limits, the use of storytelling, etc. — so this post is a little hint of more to come.

• Good policy and practice depend on good information. Policies are the “big bets” about how to structure things and what to support, generally made by “big” decision-makers: governments deciding about the rules of the game — laws and regulations — and how to allocate resources, and donors deciding what/who to support, and how. Practice is the way we work: nitty-gritty processes, how we design and implement projects, how we structure and manage organizations.
• Good information emerges from the sharing and analysis of processes, experiences, learning, and data. It emerges from getting things done and researching how things work. What matters here? They types of questions we ask, how we ask them, who asks, what we decide to count, the way results are communicated (making evidence edible by highlighting the “so what”, creating visualizations and infographics, layering, etc.). Understanding people/groups and the relationships between them matters here. As does power relations and connections, incentives, and our relationship to failure (see here and here.). Especially incentives — often they are mis-aligned, effectively killing access to good information.
• If development information is generated using public funds then the results should be publicly available in the right formats. (See Tracey’s post on DataLibre.ca for some ideas on what that formats might look like.) A big caveat here is respect for people’s privacy. But you get the idea.
• Communicating about development is an aid effectiveness issue. Communications in the broadest sense includes all of the above as well as stuff like knowledge sharing or knowledge mobilization or knowledge management for development or whatever you’re calling it this month. Seriously folks, we need to get beyond creating insipid lessons learned pieces with points like “take the local context into account” or “plan for sustainability from the outset” — Really? Ya think?

Okay, so here are a few — very few! — things I’ve read or am reading or following lately. Yes I know there’s way way more. Please make suggestions — or even better read it for us, post the 500-word summary, and send on the link!

• IDRC’s work on Open ICT4D (Google IDRC and “open development” or “open ICT4D” and you’ll get lots of good stuff. They rock.)
• The Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Unlocking the Potential of Aid Information (PDF)
• The EU’s Communicating Research for Policymaking
• The Civic Access mailing list
• The Guardian‘s database of development data (From a newspaper? Apparently they’ve partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and created a whole new development section on their website. Interesting…)
• The Institute for Development Studies‘s work on knowledge and information intermediaries
• A bunch of stuff on open access and the rationale behind it
• Anything related to open data, especially questions of licensing, accessibility (formats, archiving)

I’ll add more links for the last two later. But now I have to stop blogging.

• Jasmine
• The Middleman and other Stories
• Wife
• The Oxford book of Irish short stories (Ha! See that?! They’re selling it for $55!)
• Chechnya: A small victorious war
• Crisis, Absolutism, Revolution: Europe 1648–1789

Why? I’ve always meant to read some Bharati Mukherjee, the Irish are cool and short stories are my favorite, 1650 is about the time my ancestors decided, all at once and en masse it seems, to get the hell out of Europe, and I’m especially interested in reading history these days. So I’m loving Orlando Figues’s A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. This summer, I read it to Liam at night before bed. How do I get my teenager to listen, you ask? Trust me: plenty of blood and guts in here to keep any 13-year-old happy.

Then, one day, while I’m reading this…

…I see these bits:

As students of Karl Marx and of history, China’s party leaders will know that labour movements can begin with economic grievances and end in political revolt. By concentrating people in one place, Marx argued, factories turn a crowd of strangers into a “class”: conscious of its interests, united with each other and against the boss. But workers in China’s coastal factories have hitherto shown little class-consciousness. They migrated from all over the country, jumped from one plant to another and retreated to their villages when times were bad.

Their new assertiveness may reflect a labour law introduced in January 2008, which gave workers more contractual rights. The strikers at Honda were better educated than the average rural migrant and also trained together, which may have given them the social glue to organise their protest. The malcontents may also represent a generational shift among migrant workers. According to John Knight and Ramani Gunatilaka of Oxford University, they no longer compare their lot with the rural folk they left behind, but aspire to urban standards of living. (The rising power of the Chinese worker, The Economist, July 29, 2010)

…as well as this:

And although their wages are increasing, their aspirations are rising even faster. They seem less willing to “eat bitterness”, as the Chinese put it, without complaint….In truth, Chinese workers were never as docile as the popular caricature suggested. But the recent strikes have been unusual in their frequency (Guangdong province on China’s south coast suffered at least 36 strikes in the space of 48 days), their longevity and their targets: foreign multinationals. (The next China, The Economist, July 29, 2010)

Wow. I’ve read this before — different country, different century. But so familiar. See for yourself. The following bits are from A People’s Tragedy, from the section where Figues is describing the rapidly shifting personal and class identity and aspirations of peasants going to work in urban factories in during the industrial boom in the 1890s.

The desire for social betterment was very often synonymous with the desire to leave the village and find a job outside agriculture. Becoming a clerk or a shop assistant was seen by the younger peasants as a move up in the world. (p.109)

[T]he experience of the city transformed the way most peasants thought — of the world, of themselves, and of the village they left behind. (p.110)

Most of them supplemented their factory incomes by holding on to their land allotment in the commune and returning to their village in the summer to help their families with the harvest. … In this way they were able to keep one foot in the village, whilst their economic position in the city was still insecure. (p.110)

As they developed their own sense of self-worth, these workers demanded more respectful treatment by their employers. (p.114)

[S]trikes became the principal form of industrial protest and they required the sort of disciplined organization that only the most urbanized workers, with their higher levels of sills and literacy, could provide. (p.115)

Self-improvement was a natural enough aspiration among skilled workers, like Kanatchikov, who were anxious to rise above their peasant origins and attain the status in society which their growing sense of dignity made them feel they deserved. (p.116)

You see? Pretty cool, eh? I showed it to Liam. He, sadly, was somewhat teenagerish and blasé about the whole thing. Meanwhile I was going on about it like a wierdo.

Ughghghhgh. So many books and so little time.

I used to love the mortician’s daughter

We drew our hearts on the dusty coffin lids
I grieve tonight over this letter
My tears dissolve an image in the careful ink

Her father stands in the open door
He’s waiting for her
There’s a storm blowing across the lake
It’s late summer
On the broken step is a cardboard box full of wilted flowers
She whispers in my burning ear
It doesn’t matter

I used to love the mortician’s daughter
We rolled in the warm grass by the boneyard fence
Her skin so white
The first leaves falling
This long forgotten night I am there again

Her father stands in the open door
He’s waiting for her
There’s a ribbon printed with last respects
Blowing down the gutter
The rain comes in, she drops my hand, she’s turning, laughing
And I used to love the mortician’s daughter

I used to love the mortician’s daughter
We drew our hearts on the dusty coffin lids
There’s a lonely dove out on the telephone wire
I turn my head and she flies away

Now that you read the words you get to listen.

NPR’s collection of books that changed the world. I’m going to go listen to Hitchens talk about Paine now, as I do the morning’s dishes.

The ever-so-awesome James Bridle‘s new podcast of (kinda) daily readings: Mattins. Sigh.

Enjoy.

Okay. Enough excuses. I’m back. Really. I’m kicking things off with these:

Now aren’t you in a better mood? Were you dancing? I bet you’re at least thinking about it. Or wishing you were. Simple, joyous music.

My fantasy: I’m living in my grandmother’s time, on the prairies, everyone with ten to twelve kids. Big family gatherings. We eat stew thickened with browned flour and fresh veggies from the garden: corn, beets, small potatoes with thin red skins, and tomatoes and cucumbers sliced and sprinkled with salt. Finish it off with white cake doused in sucre a la creme. Then out comes the whiskey and the cards. The kids are under the table or in some corner upstairs, their world full of whispers and intrigue. Now my family was not so musical but I crave it. So in my fantasy out come an accordion, a fiddle, some spoons.

I’ve had little bits of this. I know what each piece feels like. It’s fun to gather up the fragments and put them together.

Think about it: Wouldn’t it be so nice if making music was something mostpeople did? Like writing and reading. Not something you consume. Not something veryspecial verytalented people make for you. Instead an everyday creative, collective act. A joyous togethering, washing away for a moment pain and discord. I would like that so much.

PS. I hear Eugene Hutz lives in Rio these days ;)