Narratives Afield: An Oral History Experience

This paper documents the comprehensive process of designing and executing a video oral history project through a case study of The Living History Oral History Project which is accessioned to the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. Discussions of each phase of the project from concept, design, field work, archiving, and interpretation demonstrates how expanding technology increases the narrative opportunities presented by oral history research. The added feature of digital video technology creates visuality, which is an expansion on Alessandro Portelli’s concepts of orality and history telling. Since discoverability and accessibility is a traditional problem in using oral history recordings as research materials, the case study includes discussion of the accessioning process, including indexing using the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer or OHMS. The paper also proposes a format for scholarly citation style to be used with OHMS indexing, based on the Chicago Style Manual. The paper concludes that the combined narrative elements of orality and visuality which rely on recording of sensations, goes beyond memory as the substance of oral history and taps into shared experience as the basis of memory

Description of a prototype gauge to measure magnitude and direction of hydrowire slope in situ between reversing bottles at all depths and under all conditions of ship drift

The discovery in recent years of vast deep oceanic currents running in a direction contrary to those at the surface provides additional evidence of our need for instrumental means to obtain accurate data on subsurface waters, particularly in little-known oceanic areas where pioneer lowerings are to be made. A description is given of a prototype messenger-operated wire-angle gauge which, used intermediately between reversing bottles, can furnish information on the direction of slope of the hydrowire and its actual degree of obliquity at a number of points. It is only the latter, of course, which can be computed from results obtained when unprotected reversing thermometers are used with the pressure-resisting type

Two Unusual Mind Diagrams in a Late Fifteenth-Century Manuscript (UPenn Schoenberg Collection, LJS 429)

University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, MS LJS 429, is a small booklet containing materials of natural philosophy, chiefly related to the effects of cosmic forces on human biology. Two of its diagrams illustrate the mentalizing process of the Aristotelian-Thomist psychology anima sensitiva, or the process through which sensory experience is formed as a mental perception. This essay points out the ways in which these diagrams differ from a standard (Thomist) medieval model of Mind. During the very late Middle Ages, the analysis of Mind as anima sensitiva and mens appears to shift from being action-based (analysed in terms of abilities and powers) to being substantive-based (analysed in terms of substantial agents using material tools). I will suggest that these two diagrams unusually model “faculty psychology” in a way that seems to foreshadow one we associate more with the time of Descartes, and even of Locke and Hume

An attitude on fishery hydrography

An essay on the theme that the fortunes of North Sea fish broods may be determined by some factor (or by some complex of factors) resident within those broad features of water circulation which are ruled by widespread wind conditions inferable from the study of atmospheric pressure gradients, followed thereafter by an ADDENDUM (due to Günter Dietrich) dealing with month-by-month wind conditions over the northern North Sea during the half century now ending, and by an ADDENDUM NoTE briefly indicating what progress has been made along the lines concerned and what is in prospect