October 3, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

After a good half hour of searching through books that are older than my grandparents and have a distinct “old book” smell, I finally found the perfect,margin marked up, before 1923, book. Stacked on the PS shelf, it was staring at me: E. Barrington’s The Ladies!, published in Boston 1922.

Although it was not the book I originally set out to look for,it was from the same time period and the same subject, women, plus the spine of this book looked promising.

On one of the first pages had “NPN” branded into it, meaning this book was part of the New Paltz collection from before it was SUNY New Paltz. This book belonged originally to New Paltz Normal School– the college when it was a teaching school back in the early 1900s.

Even though this book was not extremely marked up, I found a few marginalia worth noting. Just from the cover page, someone was kind enough to note the Author’s full name- Emilie Isabel Wilson Barrington. The Person also wrote “Beck L.M.A.” I researched what this could mean and came up with nothing solid other than it may possibly be the name of the copyright.

In the back of the book I found someone left a simple math equation: 500+268= 768. Could someone have been multitasking reading and math homework?

One piece of Marginalia I found worth looking into was a simple, neat check mark next to the quote, “Indeed, Ma’am, I did my part as well as others.” After reading the before and after parts of the book I came to conclude this could be an important part to the plot because the duchess who says this line is defending herself to “her majesty.” Since the Duchess’s superior tried to make a joke of the girl, asking if she actually believed the duke would come for her, the Duchess stands up for herself with this quote that means yes, she did think so because she did everything she was supposed to, he is in the wrong. Considering women were not granted suffrage until 1920 and this book was published in 1922, it is very ballsy for this woman to take such a stand– and perhaps the person making this mark thought the same thing.

Looking for marginalia in old books turned out to be much more interesting than I expected. It leaves you wondering who left these marks and what they were really thinking, can our hypothesizes be correct? Leaving marks in books is like leaving a mystery legacy, you will never know who will find it, and no one will ever know you left it.

Book Traces

October 3, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

I found this marginalia in the book “Shakspere – A Critical Study of his Mind and Art” by Edward Dowden and made a submission to Book Traces. The call number at the Sojourner Truth Library is Stacks PR2976 .D6 1900. This version of the book was published in 1900, and the original was published in 1875. This was Dowden’s first book, and helped him to become widely acknowledged as a critic of Shakespearian literature.

The first image of marginalia shows that the reader underlined an entire section and wrote “IMPORTANT” in the margin, perhaps as if the reader was using this section to include in a research project or in work for a class. Perhaps the checkmarks symbolize where an important section starts off or ends. It is clear that the reader was annotating in order to keep note of certain sections of Dowden’s criticism.

The second image of marginalia shows that the reader wrote “characters are perhaps too one-dimensionally stereotypical,” presumably summing up Dowden’s criticism of Shakespearian characters. In this section, the book reads “Hence, too, the characters , while they remain individual men and women, are ideal, representative, typical” – this shows Dowden’s tendency to analyze and criticize Shakespeare’s writing and character creation. The reader is practicing the form of annotation that includes summarizing the writer’s thoughts on the margin for easy reference and understanding – something that I have personally always found helpful. His or her marginalia helped me to have an idea of what was written on the page before I even read it – and I knew nothing about this book when I first spotted the marginalia.

Overall, I felt that this was a very interesting lab and I enjoyed searching through the stacks to find interesting and unique marginalia!

Book Traces: Searching for My Past

October 2, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

“March 3, 1963”

My Nanny’s handwriting stared up at me from the book my Poppy had placed in my hand. I had never seen anything quite like it.

“My Johnny,

Lines of verse last a long time, but sometimes even those we love best of all, can be forgotten. But, you know, love lasts a lifetime, and even a lot longer, something called forever. With the help of God, our love will last even longer than forever.

Happy Anniversary John.

As always yours, Mary”

Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved finding writing in books. My mom and Nanny are both English teachers, so searching through the family library is like looking through a whole collection of personalized books, with notes in the margins, and lines under the words which give you the key to the tragedy of Hamlet, or a map to Watership Down. For me, there’s nothing like seeing a little smiley face in the corner of a page, my Nanny’s signature move, which tells you something either funny or heart-wrenchingly happy is about to happen. I mark up my own books too. So you can imagine my excitement when we were introduced to the Book Traces project in my DH class. Sitting in the library, I was ready to go and find that book I knew was waiting there for me. I looked up a couple of titles in the directory, but I just wanted to shuffle. I wanted to search aimlessly. That’s when you find the best stuff, right? I start pulling books off the shelves. Blue with brilliant gilded engravings, re-binded red with regular binding, green and brown and falling apart to the touch, I was loving it. Then, I happened upon it. An old copy of Hamlet with some sonnets in the back. I flipped through and found exactly what I had been looking for. A copy of Shakespeare With Notes, Glossary Etc. Volume X from 1900.

Someone desperately trying to make sense of Shakespeare (I know the feeling). But what really struck me were the obviously erased pages. It ripped a page out of my heart. Why would someone erase the notes that might help future readers? It didn’t make any sense to me…and the I realized why it hit home so hard for me. When I saw that, I saw all of my Nanny and Mother’s notes slip away. All of those notes left in a tree for Scout to find disappeared like Gatsby’s count of enchanted objects. I suddenly realized the importance of these marks in this book, the importance of any marks in any book: They are who we are. They are our reflections on the text. everyone brings something different into a story with them when they read, and this leads to different interpretations of the same text, and these notes, and all notes allow us to see the text through a different set of eyes. To experience things as others do. That is the true beauty of marginalia.

~Austin Carpentieri

Book Traces

October 2, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

http://www.booktraces.org/book-submission-a-journal-of-the-plague-year/

The book I found was “A Journal of the Plague Year” by Daniel Defoe. The original book was written in 1722 but the version I found was from 1908. It is a fictitious historical novel about the great plague that struck London in 1665. I forgot to upload one picture to the book traces website but I posted it here. I like how you can tell from the very different handwriting and use of either pencil or red pen that these are notes from different people.

The first picture with the script handwriting (I think) says, “Cold weather change eased plague”. This is a very factual statement interpreted straight from the text on the page. This excerpt from the book makes it sound very factual and historical, I wouldn’t know it was a fictitious story from this page.

The next picture with the red pen simply says “conflict”. After reading this page the story sounds more like a narrative, the character is talking about things he said during an argument with his brother. This excerpt also talks about Heaven and Christianity, which gives insight to how important religion was at the time.

The final picture from what I can grasp says, “Division of band(?) into parishes; church kept death records”. Once again this emphasizes the important role of religion/the division of churches into parishes was at the time. Instead of the city or state keeping record of the death toll it was the job of the church to have all that in order. This page of the book gives the readers the idea that there was a sort of correlation with the weather and the spread of the plague. The characters were worried about it being May and that the warm weather would cause the plague to spread and more people to die.

I found this lab a lot of fun and interesting, it was just challenging to find books during the right time period. I wish I had found some more insightful/personal marginalia but this was still interesting and very fact related to the text of the book.

Fusion Tables

September 28, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1PyfDJWHOqLv9g91if8WyxRvGU4Mj57XJJ0Wuk042

Google Fusion Tables/Charts

September 27, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

Legend of Zelda Games

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1HFRy0PLmbSaWBRb6gYbaYK6P5Y25p-_zpMnYmsg4

Copies of video games sold after American release date

September 27, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

So this is the research I did, I chose t do it on my favorite video game sequels and group them by the developer and the amount of copies sold in the firs month after their American release date. I had so much trouble with this project that I will not be using this site ever again. and in the future we should spend a little more time explaining how to use the software before we are thrown into the fray.

Google Fusion Charts

September 26, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

After many thoughts about what to chart and map using the Google Fusion service, I decided to document some of the cities I visited this past summer during my study abroad adventure in Germany. I mapped the various cities and their populations. I was curious to see how many people live within each city after visiting and experiencing them. Each category links to the original charts.

Cards

Here is an overview of the ten cities I visited or traveled through. I included the city name, country, an image, and the geographic location with latitude and longitude coordinates.

Map

Below is a physical map that highlights each of the cities.

Pie Chart

This pie chart demonstrates the city populations.

Bar Graph

This graph also charts city populations ranging from smallest city to largest.

Network

This network visualization shows the relationship between each city and its population.

Erica Gedney

Google Fusion Tables

September 26, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford ~ 2 Comments

I made my project about my favorite TV shows.

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=14Yrk2I7QesU-HKoWa_wIF1cSDujKAM0Bq30zMzoL#card:id=2

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=14Yrk2I7QesU-HKoWa_wIF1cSDujKAM0Bq30zMzoL#chartnew:id=3

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=14Yrk2I7QesU-HKoWa_wIF1cSDujKAM0Bq30zMzoL#chartnew:id=4

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=14Yrk2I7QesU-HKoWa_wIF1cSDujKAM0Bq30zMzoL#map:id=5

Charting with Google Fusion Tables

September 26, 2014 ~ Annie Swafford

I looked at the top 20 Twitter accounts with the most followers and chose ten of them [mostly because I wanted Ellen Degeneres on my list and she wasn’t in the top ten, but also because the YouTube and Instagram accounts were in the top ten and I didn’t think they would be as interesting to track] for this project. I recorded each person’s name, picture, occupation, their follower count [as of Thursday], the number of years they have had their accounts, and what city they live in primarily. Each label is a link to the original chart in Google Fusion Tables.

Cards Chart: