These first few weeks of this semester I am finishing up my time here at CLIR CCEPS. This experience has taught me so much and has shaped how I think about local history. The Inland Empire is such a unique place and has experienced more than a few waves of change. It has been so rewarding to not only learn more about the place that I have spent the last three and a half years, but it has also been rewarding to learn the skills required to preserve historical documents in the digital age. There is one thing I will not miss, however: the computers. I have been at war with each of the computers here at CLIR CCEPS and I have most definitely lost to them. Despite the technological frustrations, I have grown and learned so much here. I also would like to say thank you to Tanya for supporting me and teaching me so much. Thanks for reading!
Up(loaded), Up(loaded), Up(loaded) & Away!
This week I spent a lot of time uploading files onto
CONTENTdm Project Client. In other words, I watched the culmination of all of
my work from the past few months make its way into the world. It is exciting to
think about what some of these documents could be used for. Maybe someone will
use them for a project, paper, or maybe even a book. The other day I was in a
meeting with my advisor and he was even curious about what he could use some of
the documents for. I am excited to think that someone might actually be able
to access these documents that were previously only available in the Upland Public Library. Although uploading these large files on CONTENTdm Project Client is a
little tedious, it is nice to see all of the documents uploaded!
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Knowledge Production and Subject Terms
Today is the day! This morning the CLIR CCEPS fellows–myself included–presented to library staff and friends. Each presentation was interesting and highlighted the variety of experiences people had throughout the duration of their time with the fellowship. After the presentations, the floor was open to questions from the audience. During that time, someone asked about the process of assigning particular subject terms as a way to push some of those categories to fit new modes of knowledge production. Particularly, the person asked if subject terms like “colonization” had been used. Here is my response to that question: I have been wrestling with that thought throughout my work on the CLIR CCEPS project. I am wary to apply those terms because in many ways it traps the information within an epistemological field that is ever-changing and is gaining popularity. Assigning those subject terms–like colonization–now can help current students, researchers and patrons obtain that information. However, the online data will last forever, and therefore all of the subject terms assigned to that document will be linked to it permanently. It’s incredibly hard to think about how to both push the metadata process to be more accommodating of particular kinds of knowledge production, especially those that work to critique structures of power, while simultaneously thinking about the implications of circumscribing certain documents within categories whose knowledge production and outcome we have yet to know. I will continue to ask myself, as I assign subject terms to metadata, what knowledge is this producing and what knowledge is it obscuring?
Culminating Presentation
This week I spent time working on my culminating presentation for the CLIR CCEPS Fall 2018 semester. The topic of my presentation will be similar to my blog post from October 25th, which discussed how the San Antonio Water Company Oral History Collection interacts with the things I have learned in my class (Re)learning the Love of the Land. In creating the presentation and writing some of the slides, I realized just how much work there could be done with the interviews that I digitized. They are important tools in understanding this region’s history and conceptualizing why it came to be this way. I hope that other people might find the documents as useful as I did in thinking about the world. The valuable analytical tools that I have gained from my class have been sharpened through this fellowship and I am very excited to share what I have learned!
Flying over the Inland Empire
This week I am visiting my family in Colorado for Thanksgiving break. My favorite thing to do on the flight home, is to look out the window and look at all of the mountain ranges, rivers, valleys, lakes, and plains. Flying from Ontario International Airport to Denver International Airport, you often fly over the San Bernardino National Forest or Angeles National Forest. Tomorrow on my flight back to Colorado, I’ll be looking for the rivers, dams, and roads that I have learned about from the San Antonio Water Company Oral History Collection. It’s very exciting to know so much about this area, but I can’t help but think of all of the local history, especially the water history, that I don’t know about Colorado.I hope I get a window seat tomorrow so I can see all that I have learned about from the CLIR CCEPS fellowship this semester, from above!
The book scanner is back!
This week, I spent a lot of time with the book scanner. The scanner resides in the Special Collections Reading Room and has been out of commission for quite a long time. Each week I come in hoping that maybe it will be working again. This week the scanner was up and running again! I’m not particularly excited to work with the book scanner, as its a little more tedious than working with other scanners, but it was nice to finish up a few projects! Last week, I reached a point in my work where all I had left to do for the San Antonio Water Company Oral History Collection was to scan the covers of the transcriptions with the book scanner. It seems strange that I have now completed nearly an entire box of transcriptions! I’m looking forward to new documents, but part of me will miss the amount of personal information that comes from oral history interviews.
Voting and power
This week I spent time reading letters and documents between various stockholders of the San Antonio Water Company. Many of the letters addressed to the company appointed L. S. Dyan to vote in their place. I was surprised that these individuals trusted someone else to vote in their place. The San Antonio Water Company met annually with its stockholders to vote; the stocks corresponded to the number of votes that person had. L. S. Dyan therefore gained significant voting power because of the number of stocks he had been entrusted to represent. Although the democracy in the United States of America does not function like a stockholder vote, the two elections– the one I read about in 1886 with the stockholders of the San Antonio Water Company and the other in an increasingly polarized society in 2018– highlight the correlation between voting and power. It is easy to think that one vote does not matter in the grand scheme of things, but the sense of collective power that has been conjured on this election day calls many to vote, in some cases for the first time in a midterm election. I am writing this post fairly early in the day, but am feeling hopeful that the opinions of my generation will be heard loudly and clearly, as we have inherited this world wrought with many problems and have already been creative in solving some of those problems. We need to take advantage of the collective platform given to us by voting, to enact change.
Flooding in Upland and the End of the World
Recently, the United Nations published a report about climate change, warning the world of the potentially irreversible damage the phenomenon might cause if we don’t radically change our actions (http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/). That report has been on my mind for a few weeks because it feels like I am going to graduate college just as the world is ending. But, this week I was listening to an interview with Elizabeth A. Craig-Klusman. In the interview she was describing the disastrous floods in Upland in 1938. It must have seemed like the world was going to end! Maybe (and this is the most optimistic version of myself speaking) climate change will just be a momentary emergency in our lifetime and sometime in the near future we will have changed the way we interact with the world and the people on it. If it isn’t, we might look back at the time in our lives as a time characterized by endless and wasteful consumption.
History of Place, Resistance, and Water
This week I spent time reading an interview with James C.
McCoy. About twenty pages into the transcription of the interview, McCoy begins
discussing how urbanization had negatively affected the Native American
population in this area. He said “In my opinion, no one else in the United
States has suffered more than our Indian citizens.” Currently, I am enrolled in
a course entitled “(Re)Learning the Love of the Land” with Professor Joe Parker
at Pitzer College. In many of our classes we spend time learning from and
listening to indigenous activists/cultural liaisons/people/educators from the Tongva
indigenous group. Reading the transcription of McCoy’s interview made me
realize that he was talking about the violence inflicted upon indigenous people
here in the Inland Empire, something I have spent a lot of time thinking about
this semester. As I am enrolled in the course at Pitzer and continue my work
with the Upland Public Library San Antonio Water Company documents, I am
noticing the overlap. The course focuses on resistance to the continued
colonialism in this region and the interviews I have been processing help me
trace the history of how the area was colonized. This week, in a reading for my
class, the author discussed how water has been colonized throughout the United
States via dams, aqueducts, and irrigation. I have realized how many of these
interviews recount that process. These interviews have helped me think more
deeply about my studies, and I hope they help others understand what has happened
in the Inland Empire.
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Women Who Shaped Upland’s History
This week I had the privilege of reading through transcribed interviews of two women who lived in Upland. Elizabeth A. Craig-Klusman and Margaret Bassett were the first two women interviewees who I have encountered. After looking over these documents, I reflected on the role of women in history. Women’s voices are often muffled because of their domesticated roles in the home or they are often silenced by the voice of their husbands. These interviews are important in gendering the history of Upland and further complicating how we think about the past. If we were to only hear the voices of men, it is dangerously easy to think that the history of Upland was only shaped by men. These interviews tell us that the history was importantly shaped by women, as well.