Salon post: November 30

[jenett]

Happy Friday!


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Topic of the week
There is a comment by Janet's father, in pameladean's Tam Lin that one can be entirely ignorant of three periods in one's field, and still be a perfectly reasonable sort of professor.

I am, in fact, generally a lot more lousy about the period between 1780 and about 1910 than other points in Western history or literature.

Which leads me to a question...

For reasons tangentially related to my work (seriously, my job), I have been invited to a tea party celebrating Jane Austen's birth in mid-December. It has been a long time since I've read any Austen. (I'm pretty sure I went through Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Emma at various points around high school.)

Clearly, I should read or reread at least one book before this party, so as to make appropriate conversation. Tell me, oh, inestimable commenters, if you have a recommendation, or how you'd approach this question if you don't have a rec.

Or, y'know, talk about periods of history you have mostly ignored in favour of others, what you're up to, the amusements of your pets, and/or whatever else intrigues you at the moment.

What I've been up to
I won Nano! Go me. (Go everyone else who's made the attempt!) I still have too-much-heat issues in my apartment (boo).


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Comments

[batrachian]

I'm very fuzzy on anything before High Middle Ages, and what I know from then to, oh, early 20th stems from "placing SCA garb in context" and "figuring out what the history should have been in these Paradox Interactive games" (the actual game going...ahistoric very quickly, but the mechanics are based on Real Stuff) rather than anything in my formal education.

Am also quietly pondering how much that framework of "missing era" applies to the stuff I am trained in (EE/CS). And there's probably history soup tied in there as well, but also fields of specialization? I know very little about Large Scale Power, to take a nontrivial example.

[jenett]

Oh, it's also true with libraries! I am great with reference, for a number of topics that surprise me regularly, but most of serials work is entirely obscure to me, and my grasp of cataloging is heavily dependent on context.

(And I have some programming and instruction experience, but there are vast realms I don't do, and I eye jobs dealing with data structures or similar stuff and blink at them a lot.)

I will admit I'm probably a lot better in the just-pre-medieval for having taken a class on the Merovingians in college. (The Merovingians, so truly weird in fascinating ways.)

[batrachian]

I once heard a hhos joke about formal education being a progression of knowing more and more about less and less. And given the proliferation of topical knowledge in the last, oh, call it century. Harder and harder to be a competent generalist. (And now I'm thinking of Siz.)

Not that I know exactly what y'all do with data structures, but familiar enough with a lot of the theory to maybe lay some basic framework. If that's a thing'd interest you.

Don't know Merovingian from meringue, but there's a couple of my classes that stick the same way. Or stuck, anyway; uni gets further away every year.

[jenett]

It is really hard to be a competent generalist. Or to know the breadth of a field (and you're right, almost impossible these days.)

on the data structures, there's a lot of digital humanities positions these days, that are doing things like looking at human-unmanageable data sets for analysis (for example, all the trials in a particular court system over decades) and data crunching on them. I don't actually really want to go do it? Because I love reference. But I would like to poke at my data skills sometimes. (I've only touched on statistics as part of HS math education, so no stand-alone math courses in it, which is probably the start.)

The Merovingians were the proto-French dynasty before Charlemagne and the Carolingians, and the offical history stuff for them is full of "We are descended from a sea monster" and "We made important decisions about what we were doing next based on a series of visionary dreams" (They are sometimes known as the long-haired kings, because Reasons.)

The wikipedia page for them gives some sense of it - one of my papers for that class included one of the hagiographies of the type mentioned there, for example.

[cadenzamuse]

Woggy, I was taking this question the same way! I'm trained in social work and public health. I don't know nearly enough about epidemiology or environmental health, for example, and my understanding of human development past about age 25 is pretty vague and useless.

[batrachian]

We can't all be Secret Masters of the Universe, after all. :-)