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

[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.