[This was first published at AMPed.]
To say those from the South are proud of their heritage is putting it mildly. Every year dozens if not hundreds of groups, towns and culture centers celebrate some aspect of Southern life from Civil War reenactments to living history villages to a wide array of festivals honoring everything from fruit and food to music and specialty local events. 1
To help commemorate the South’s (and also America’s) illustrious background and to give a voice to the Southern perspective, the University of North Carolina has put together a digital initiative of primary and secondary sources on the Internet. Since 2004, Documenting the American South has been the premier location for education and research materials on Southern life not just on the Internet, but also in the world. The fourteen thematic collections offer wide range of digital materials that includes books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs. This vibrant digital collection consists of numerous large print, photograph and rare materials collections made possible by Southern Historical Collection, the North Carolina Collection, UNC’s Rare Book Collection and the Davis Library.
What makes Documenting the American South such a rich resource is not just because of the various large collections that have been consolidated into a single landing point for research and discovery rather it is also because the scope, design and ease of use of the site that makes it such a valuable resource. In addition, the site is consistantly updated with new information and materials, making it not only a valuable resource for things past, but also for things present and future.
Documenting the American South has a number of discovery and mapping tools to help viewers explore the collection. This includes a Highlights section, a monthly update that explores content in the collection, which is also available via RSS. In addition is the Collections section, a listing of the digital collections by theme, also available for researchers and educators to use for finding materials that range from first person narratives, slave narratives to Southern literature and more. Specific content can also be found by using the Subjects, Geographical, Authors and Titles tabs in the top navigation bar. And if you still can’t find what you’re looking for, there is also a search option to search the entire collection by keyword to find exactly what you need.
UNC has also put together Classroom Resources, which includes kits, lesson plans and additional materials to help bring Southern life vividly into the classroom.
This is a wonderful treasure trove of materials, that is not only rich for discovery but also a valuable archive of not just Southern life, but American life as well.
1. In addition, Southern Festivals is a fantastic resource for festivals happening in the South. This site is organized by state, so if you’re traveling south this year and looking for things to do, this would definitely be one site you want to bookmark.
Month: June 2010
The Power of the Retweet
[This was first published at AMPed.]
I’ve discussed Twitter in a variety of capacities on AMPed but mainly within the context of using mashable technologies that include Twitter, but I have not discussed a feature of Twitter that sometimes is overlooked – retweeting.
What exactly is retweeting? Retweeting is taking a tweet that was originally sent by one person that you follow and you in turn forward it on to your own followers, usually with an added comment so that the new tweet would look something like this:
Awww RT@stephenfry Plus *eyelidflutter* Steve Jobs said “Hi, Stephen” *swoon*.
In this case I’m commenting on a tweet originally sent by @stephenfry, whom I follow and in turn, I forwarded that tweet to my followers along with my comment. Because of the format of the tweet, it is generally understood that everything before the “RT” is by me and everything after the “RT” is by the originating author. And this is accepted as the norm in Twitter communication for since time immortal (or 2006).
It is exactly like email forwarding, with the exception that you cannot selective choose who your retweet goes out to, it has to go out to all of those that follow you or none at all.
When Twitter first came to being, it didn’t have an official re-tweet option, at least not on Twitter.com. A lot of the retweeting that went on was done by hand, meaning simple cut and paste with formatting to make it fit within 140 characters. As Twitter, and obviously by extension tweeting, became more popular, applications and websites like HootSuite, Seesmic and TweetDeck started building tools within their clients to make retweeting easier, thus no more cut and paste! One could simply select the option to retweet a tweet and the application would do the formatting for you.
But then, everything changed. In the fall of 2009, Twitter announced they were going to do something a little bit differently: change how people retweeted. This may not seem like earth shattering details but in the context of how people use Twitter and for people who use Twitter.com, it was a big deal.
Here is what they did:
For ages, applications were already incorporating ways for people to retweet content, allowing people to style how they disseminated the information as seen by my example above. Twitter.com, sometimes late to their own party, decided to shake things up by adding a retweet option natively into the website. What this option did is that if you were reading your Twitter timeline on Twitter.com and saw something you wanted to retweet, the retweet option would re-post the tweet for you but as it originated from the author, with no option to restyle it or adding commentary. So, if I retweeted my example from above to my followers, what they would see is the tweet as it was originally sent by Stephen Fry with “retweeted by” appended on. The interesting thing about this new option is that for those who ALREADY follow Stephen Fry on Twitter, they would not see my retweet since it already appeared originally in their timeline.
Applications and websites have started incorporating this option into their software, giving users a choice to do it natively or to add commentary.
Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter, explains the rationale behind the the new format and the ideology of how retweeting emerged organically.
So now that we’ve covered what retweeting is, how it’s used and how to use it, what exactly makes it powerful? There are a number of reasons (in no particular order):
- It introduces new users to your followers that they may not already know. For example, there are a number of Twitter users who have become massively popular due to the viralness of retweeting, such as @ArchivesOpen and @UkNatArchives. The viralness of a Twitter account is not limited to an account that is for pure entertainment, as news & culture magazins, think tanks, research groups and individuals that I do not follow have appeared in my timeline, retweeted by people who think that information is interesting or useful.
- It draws attention to a particular action, ideology or commentary that you believe in and want to share with your followers.
- It illustrates something you agree or disagree with, but sharing the orignal tweet with your own commentary, thus drawing attention to something that may not have been noticed before.
- Retweeting gives credit to sources, which again goes back to expanding your social network, either professionally or personally.
- It creates conversations with your followers by them retweeting or responding directly to you about your retweet or by retweeting a tweet that originated from yourself.
This list is just the tip of the iceberg and there could be a series on the power of retweeting, but for now we’ll just cover the basics to lay the foundation on becoming a better tweeter. By understanding why people use retweeting, how to use it, what it does and why it can be so powerful gives you a better foundation to be a better tweeter and at the end of the day, isn’t that what everyone wants?
Hire me or the pug gets it.
Hire me or else the pug gets it.
The closer my friend Jessica got to graduation from our alma mater, the more worried she got about not finding a job. Understandably, Jessica had been pimping herself out for six moths prior to graduation and had not so much as a phone interview yet. Jessica was my litmus stick in the world of job hunting – if SHE couldn’t get a job (and Jessica is super awesome beyond words), then my chances of obtaining employment nirvana upon my graduation were damned near close to nil.
Literally two weeks before our exams at the end of December, Jessica bagged not only an interview but also a job offer! The day after our last class together, Jessica packed up her crap and moved to Chicago. While I knew she was stressed about the barely-making it to her deadline, she would often tell me that she wasn’t AS worried because things would work out – they had to. You couldn’t, she kept telling me, stress about probabilities because things could and CAN change in an instant, as certainly shown by her obtaining a position seemingly minutes before graduation.
My own graduation was looming six months after Jessica’s and based upon Jessica’s experiences, I swore to myself that I would start immediately on the job hunt once we came back from holiday break in January. I would apply weekly! Keep a spreadsheet! Be diligent in my cover letters and resume tactics!
For the most part, I did all of the above starting with having a few friends who have worked as professional editors help me prefect my resume near the end of the fall term. In addition to the professional editors, I also had my resume looked at by professionals in the librarian and archives fields. I even started the damn spreadsheet and kept track of my job hunt diligently. I networked like crazy and while I didn’t apply weekly for jobs starting in January as I had planned, the closer I got to graduation, the more frequently I applied. Spending hours shifting through mailing lists, job sites, and emails from friends looking for a job, any job, that would fit me. But as I started automating the process of applying for jobs, I began to notice several trends:
- Job descriptions were more often than not vague and/or really generic. “We want a creative or innovative person!” (One of the most common starts to the job ads.)
- Qualifications, at least when listed under “desired,” sometimes bordered on the outrageous or impossible. “10 years in social media experience.” Say what? Sure you could PROBABLY make the claim that community managers from days of yore could be counted in this, but in reality, not really.
- Jobs looking for someone tech savvy would use least likely tech savvy way of contact. For example, position for a job required faxing my application and resume, which was fine except nowhere on the HR or institution’s website was a listing for email OR phone number for HR or even hell, the library system. So, if I had questions – how was I to contact them?
These are complaints echo what I’ve complained about on Twitter, but I couldn’t REALLY justify the bitching: In comparison to many of those in my graduating class at said alma mater: I was getting interviews and rejection notices. Many, if not most, were barely getting the latter. My frustration may have been with the system but I was still getting a response from the system, many of my peers were not. Here is how my stats break down: As of June 10, 2010:
- Total number of jobs applied for: 28
- Total number of rejections (email/snail): 12
- Total number of interviews (phone/video/f2f): 7
- Total number of rejections from interviews: 4
- Total number of still open applications: 10
- Total number of still open interviews: 3
Right now I have three open interviews, which means that I have not heard back from two of them (those were done in the last week or so) and the third is attempting to schedule something to fly me out to do a campus interview, as I apparently rocked the video interview but there seems to be scheduling conflict. Of the two outstanding, I’m pretty sure I won’t be extended a second interview for one of them. I realized in the shower the day after WHY I wasn’t getting beyond the first interview with least three of them, and possibly one that is still open: I am prepping for a job description that does NOT match what they are looking for.
For example if a university says they want someone with knowledge of HTML, fine. But there is a difference between having working knowledge and being a full blown web developer. Stating that you want someone with preferred qualifications in a specific ILS does not translate into asking me about information architecture, usability or what my work flow is for web development. And when I ask you, for example, about the ILS qualification, being told that your institution is replacing it with another brand also makes the qualification seem slightly above silly, even more so when the ILS’ are wildly different.
This has been a costly mistake to me: the bugger all is that I CAN speak intelligently about information architecture, usability, and work flow design. I DO have examples of how to mock up a website and examples of my work. I AM knowledgeable on social media and networking. But I’m prepping for their job description, not my resume. This has been the largest, and hopefully only, mistake that I’ve done. I’m hoping that my understanding of this now will pay off in the near future. In conjunction with applying for jobs, I’ve started putting together a talking points list of questions I bombed, unintentionally, in past interviews.
The point of this is that when asked to discuss on X, I have keywords to help jump me off on the topic and keep my thoughts straight. This is inspired by the institution that wants to fly me out who sent me a list of questions they were going to ask me 24 hours before my video interview. What was so great about this is after I put my thoughts and notes down, I didn’t need to check the list since it was all fresh in my brain. Since it was all fresh in my mind, I was able to rock the interview. The irony of this is that the questions this institution asked me is almost identical to the ones asked of me by the places that I bombed. Heh. Like I said, expensive mistake. I’ve also been plotting with a few experienced librarians about my assault on #ALA10, which includes interesting ways to get my resume noticed. And if after all of this, and the continued job search AND the assault on #ALA10 doesn’t pan out – then what? I’ve got two other life plans worked out – but that’s another entry for another time.
P.S. Please do not comment about the “Dos” and “Don’ts” of resume/cv, what HR’s are looking for and what have you. Not only have I heard them all BUT a lot of the “advice” I’ve been given contradicts itself. For example, was told by one HR person my resume was “far too detailed.” When I related this to a hiring manager at another institution, who was in fact interviewing me at the time, they said that having details makes it far EASIER to scan for keywords. Making my resume too general doesn’t allow me to stand out of the crowd. Secondly, I’ve had my resume/cv looked at by a number of qualified people in my profession (all of whom are on or have been on search committees) who helped me with some adjustments but they all pretty much said my resume was rock solid. Clearly, it is NOT my resume that needs help. I’m just ranting/ruminating on the process thus far and am NOT seeking advice. Thanks and etc.
May the 4th Be With You: Lisa and Justin got married.
Lisa & Justin, 1998
Originally, I was going to write up some pithy (well, not really) blog post about how we got here and the decade long separation between the last time we dated and now and why we are getting married. The entry was going to post at the time we were due at to the courthouse, but yeah, didn’t happen. So, instead I’ll go with this: to the left is montage of images that were taken in 1998 with a Logitech B&W webcam from when we were living together in the Bay Are. The images are small enough that blowing them up pixelates them beyond recognition, so it was just easier to create the montage. My favorite image is the one on the lower right, that look he’s giving me — that he’s still giving me 12 years later. Then he would have waxed poetic about how much he loves me, now he’ll wax on that the look is from gas.
I remember when these pictures were taken, that the whole idea of publishing your life online was still a damned novelty and yet “The Lisa Chronicles” was launched that same summer the pictures were taken. A year after those pictures were taken, we would have broken up and it would be nearly a decade until before we would speak again. We are older & fatter now and I’m definitely more wiser – though according to many who know us claim we have not aged. We claim the sacrifice of virgins, but as this is Detroit, that is getting harder and harder to maintain. We got married for a plethora of reasons: love, legal status so that I can pull the plug if he is on life support, health insurance. People keep asking me if things have changed now that we’re legally hitched and the answer is: Not really, we’re still Lisa and Justin.
So on May 4th, next year and every year after, wherever you are: Raise a glass in salute to love lost and love regained, to the impossible and improbable and to Lisa and Justin getting married.