So this week in class we talked about Zotero, which I was actually pretty familiar with due to having taken a variety of anthropology classes the past five years which all really wanted us to make use of it. Though I don’t actually often use it, I will admit that it is a pretty fancy program and probably more useful than I give it credit for. I suppose I’m a masochist for the pain of searching for that article you read a week and a half ago on Jstor. I can Zotero being particularly helpful with this assignment though, because all of the sources will be pretty similarly titled, which will make searching for them again a very large pain. As for source types, as useful and interesting as primary sources can be, I personally prefer secondary sources. I feel as though this is mostly because the way that historical secondary sources are written is far closer to the way anthropological ethnographies (which are somewhere in between a primary and a secondary source) are written. Also because I loathe trying to decipher old handwriting. It is a migraine waiting to happen. Also secondary sources tend to cite multiple primary sources in the reference section, so when I do require primary sources I am able to refer back there and know exactly where to look for the most useful sources.

So today I finally was able to get my netbook running again (while it is good for some things, being consistently reliable is not one of those things) and was able to finish up the vitals and really dig into my soldiers documents. Setting up the vitals was a bit mind numbing to say the least, especially as a lot of the information was either not available (such as his physical appearance other than height) or completely illegible (I had to estimate the year of his birth based on his age of enlistment and the date he enlisted.

When I went through my images to pick the one to upload to Drive with OCR I ended up picking the one that discusses Adam Meyer’s  surgical records on it. When I did eventually get it to work correctly, it got the introduction portion and the sign off portion correctly. However, the entire main point of the transcription was completely skipped over. I would rather just type the transcriptions up myself as opposed to relying on this and having to pick out all the tiny errors or just have to fill in for all the large errors.

The source I chose was the New York Division of Military and Naval Affairs which focused on the newspaper clippings. These clippings are public domain it would seem and the page was created to showcase various viewpoints on the war from the people living through it at the time.  These viewpoints from soldiers, family members, and other random people help bring the war vividly to life before our eyes, making researching these soldiers much more interesting and more meaningful for me as a student and for other people with their own personal interests.

Learning such small things about his life as well as his regiments movements has made Adam Meyer that much more of a real person to me.

So I will start this off with saying that this task is the precise reason I initially chose to be an anthropology major and not a history major. The tedious work, the eye squinting, and bad handwriting of days gone past were enough to turn me off of the studying the field altogether.

That said, beyond those complaints, this was actually fairly interesting. And to make it slightly less tedious, I decided to make a game out of finding the correct date, because after a while there were LOTS of dates on a given page so deciding which was the one I should write down was a chore all by itself. I also found it interesting that my soldier, Adam Meyer, and his wife Mathilda were very clearly of German descent, given their birthplaces and a fair few of their notaries obvious German names.

I do acknowledge that this is a necessary step in understanding what data I have to work with, and am glad to have it finished and have the resource to refer back to when I start working on the more in depth parts of the project. An inventory like the one I just finished will be useful in that if nothing else, it will tell me exactly what sort of information is in each image file.

I have yet to complete the second part of the inventory task and make a spreadsheet of some of the more detailed information about Adam Meyer but when I do, I’m sure that it will be equally as useful over the course of the semester.

What aspect of the way that historians think is the most unfamiliar to you? Well this is actually a fairly easy question to answer as I am an anthropology major. I find the rigidity of their thinking to be the most unfamiliar aspect of the way that historians go about their research.

As an anthropology major, we are taught to think very holistically about everything and are encouraged to come up with out own ways of looking at the world and cultures but in all of the history classes I have taken (and I have taken a fair amount as for a while I was wanting to get a history minor with a concentration on East Asia) you were always forced to stick to credible sources and were never encouraged to try and look at a historical event in a different light.

Now, because I do very much enjoy history, I can objectively see why this way of going about things is necessary; to get the facts straight and out to the world. But on the other hand, I feel like historians could benefit from thinking about their work in a more holistic anthropological light at times, if just to give them a new perspective.

I just find it unfamiliar because after five years taking anthropology classes, I cannot imagine not looking at the world in an anthropological light anymore. Anything cultural is more than fair game for looking at it in that manner and anything historical someone would look, even if it was only 20 years ago, will have a slightly different culture that it is apart of so it seems silly to not try some of the more open-minded paradigms you find in anthropology.