When introducing my thesis topic back in November, I started with a personal story:
Doug and I will meet on Sunday mornings in CIT at 10am. Here is a tentative schedule for how the project will work:
"This is the story of Nancy MacIntyre, a Tale of the Prairies.
My connection to this book began in 1912, when a soldier named Felix picked up a used copy on his way to enlist in the army. He carried Nancy with him while fighting in WW1, and he became known for gathering fellow soldiers together around the campfire and reading the book aloud. When he returned to the US, he continued this tradition with friends and family, but as Nancy's popularity grew finding new copies got harder and harder. So Felix financed a special edition, and spent the rest of his life carefully choosing friends and family worthy of their own personalized copy.
Each book included a history of the Nancy's travels, Felix's connection with her, and the following instructions: "You are to read this book ALOUD to yourself and your family. Then you are to read it ALOUD to a few carefully chosen friends on certain occasions when the time is appropriate. Thus, you will repay your debt to an important era in American civilization. With all good wishes, Felix Harris."
Jump forward to 1999 -- half a century after my great grandfather settled and published his book -- I began my own generation's version of reading around the campfire:
I started a blog. It was called The OnGoing Effort, and I started it at the request of my grandfather, who wanted to know what I was up to in college. Over the last eight years, it became a place for everyone to know what I am up to, and it has become an important archive of both the trivial and monumental events of my life over that time.
If you look at these objects independently, they aren't anything special. Its not like Nancy MacIntyre is a great work of fiction. But this little book, and the tradition of reading it aloud, brought people together in a time of great turbulence, and gave them a connection to their culture and their homes that no form of technology of that time could give them. The OnGoing Effort, too, will never win any journalistic awards. But it has been a place that, in equally turbulent times, has connected me to friends and family all over the world through writing and pictures.
But if you put them together they form a sort of technological spectrum - from highly analog to highly digital. And this spectrum became the genesis of my thesis topic: what is the nature of place if both a 50-year old book and a 10-year old blog could both evoke a sense of it?
I would like to devote an independent study to documenting the story of Nancy MacIntyre, and its connection to my family. I see it as the physical, analog entry point into the concepts I deal with in my later thesis work. My research would combine a short written narrative about the history of the book, a collection of interviews with three or four family members, as well as a collection of images with a comprehensive index.
While my first instinct is to make a book about it, another (more challenging, given my lack of experience) avenue could be a collection of sound recordings - StoryCorps style - of various people reading the book aloud, with the goal of distributing it online in ways Papa Felix could have never imagined. (The book was first published in 1909, and so is not only having its 100 year anniversary this year, but is also in the public domain.)
I am lucky to have immediate access to the following primary resources, which could form the content of my study:
- Books. I have five or six copies of Nancy MacIntyre herself, from various Felix Harris editions, as well as a first edition that I believe was the one Papa Felix himself bought in a used bookstore around 1916.
- Logs. I have three of the four journals where he kept a detailed inventory of who received a copy, why, and what number in the special edition he sent them. They are a really interesting window into the types of people Papa Felix chose to share the book with.
- Letters. I have spent some time over winter break making a digital archive of close to 500 letters that were sent to Papa Felix regarding his special edition of Nancy MacIntyre. They are quite fascinating.
- Family. I plan to email several of Felix's surviving grandchildren to get their memories about the book, with particular emphasis on finding someone who actually heard him recite it in person (so many of the letters mentioned above reference hearing Felix recite the poem from memory that I can only conclude it was greatly entertaining).
Doug and I will meet on Sunday mornings in CIT at 10am. Here is a tentative schedule for how the project will work:
- January 11
Have collected text content
Sent out email questions to family
Rough sketches of sample spreads - January 18
Written history finished
Email questions collected
Revised sketches of sample spreads - January 25
Book is blocked out at thumbnail size
First full size mockup - February 1
Second full size mockup, edits - February 8
Should book be finished this Sunday or the next? - February 15?