Thoughts on Evernote…

The biggest challenge with technology is always learning to use it. Until digital tools become second nature we always find fault with the UX, complain about the process and eventually abandon it in search of something better. Good design creates a memorable user experience and keeps us coming back for more. It must look interesting and appealing and feel natural, not forced. Evernote doesn’t really feel natural, nor does it look great. But one could argue technology is also only as good as the user.

As most of my classmates have listed in their reviews, there are great aspects to Evernote. It helps gather information quickly and easily, clipping items or whole pages as you research. It allows for easy organization and recalling your notes but only if you put in the time to organize and create tabs. You have to want to make it work. You have to have found some kind of spark and want to use it everyday. Oddly, my program (Costume Studies) does not allow technology in classrooms of any kind—no computers, phones, etc. All notes must be written using pen and paper. If I could use Evernote ongoing, from class to class, it might make navigating and exploiting all its benefits that much easier. Using it in Creating Digital History has proven to make note taking a hundred times easier and the quality is infinitely better than using a pen and paper or trying to organize a notebook.

We want digital tools and technology to conform to our practices and preferences and function exactly as we do. We also want it to happen immediately, with little effort. As history has proven, mass-adopted technological developments are few and far between. Many have tried to create new ways to gather and share information but not many have succeeded for the long term. But they keep on trying. On the other hand, there are those platforms or devices that have changed our lives forever. These are the tools have helped change the way we learn, communicate, and think. Think iPhone (yay!) vs. Apple watch (boo!). Yet, every digital platform created is a small advancement and opportunity to create something better. It just takes time and practice.

In short, I am going to keep on working with Evernote and see where it goes. Would upgrading make it better? Perhaps. A very good friend of mine swears by Evernote for all aspects of her life. She uses it for recipes, personal organization and work. It gives a 360-degree view of her life, all of which she can access via her phone. That makes her happy and I find it inspiring. Evernote might, given some more time and patience,  help me to become the great note taker I have always wanted to be, or at least become a little bit better. I remain hopeful!

No Future With Evernote

When the semester began, I really wanted to commit to Evernote. I created a notebook for my Creating Digital History class notes, as well as created a separate notebook for my initial digital archive and Omeka exhibition topic: The Hans Hofmann School. In my Hans Hofmann notebook, I attempted to use Evernote’s web clipping tool and tagging features. However, I deleted this notebook when I changed my final project topic to The Subject of the Artist School, and by that time I had already started to feel a major disconnect between how I naturally organized my thoughts and how Evernote’s layout and features help organize material. I probably could have committed more by using Evernote for my other classes or by downloading the app to my phone. It is possible with more use, tagging all of my notes would not have felt like such a chore. It is also possible I would not have been so confused as to which items should be notes and which items are better off as entire notebooks.

Despite not readily taking to Evernote, I appreciate learning about new digital tools through the course readings and during our class discussions. Learning about Evernote resulted in my decision to explore other digital tools that could possibly be a better fit. Recently I looked at online tutorials for Evernote’s competitor,  Microsoft OneNote, which has a hierarchical setup that might better suit my organizational needs. While I recognize tagging can help with the issue of items that do not fit into one category versus another, I do not prefer to rely on tagging alone as a means to sort and find information. This preference may mean OneNote has a place in my future. I certainly enjoyed learning about the program’s other features, including its ability to read text embedded in images and its ability to record and embed audio files into notes. While the character recognition feature is ideal for someone like me interested in taking notes on the visual arts, the audio feature would also be incredibly helpful for the French tutoring sessions I began this semester, especially since they focus on pronunciation.

For me, actively having to use Evernote opened up a conversation about other tools scholars are using to manage the abundance of sources that have become available during the Digital Age. In addition to actively trying OneNote for the notes I create, I will likely also explore citation management devices like Zotero and Mendeley for information I take from the web. This semester I learned both Zotero and Mendeley can extract information from online sources and PDFs to create a running bibliography. Such tools would have been incredibly helpful when I wrote my graduate thesis for Christie’s Education on contemporary artist Berlinde de Bruyckere.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Marthe, 2008, Courtesy of Christie’s New York

Many of the sources about the artist were web sources, and many articles repeated the same information. By the end of the manuscript, I felt much of my time had been focused on searching through an endless stack of printouts and binders, re-looking for information. I also devoted too much of my time to the tedious task of creating footnotes and a seven page bibliography from scratch. I am relieved to hear such tools as Zotero and Mendeley exist for scholars in the Digital Age, and I look forward to the launch of other, easy-to-use digital tools designed specifically for academics. I am sure I am not alone when I say other instructors should be promoting these tools so their students are more aware of their existence. While I had classes on different art historical methodologies, I never had a course that focused on research methods or digital tools until now. I think its a worthy question to ask why instructors do not feel obligated to teach research methods. Perhaps this dilemma will sort itself out in time.

Fashion Archives & Digital History

The creative process for large fashion corporations, from design houses to fast-fashion behemoths, is breakneck, furious and often wasteful. Fashion companies on average deliver up to eight collections a year and mass companies can churn out up to 52 “micro-seasons” a year, with new trends hitting stores weekly.[1] Season after season, week after week, ideas are generated, textiles are developed, prints and patterns are drawn, stitches, patterns and techniques are developed and samples are created. All parts of the product development life cycle are carefully detailed and documented to share with manufacturing facilities around the world. This process utilizes thousands of people and continues non-stop, every day, all year long. In order to keep deliveries on time, and ultimately, customers coming back for more, this process requires working twelve months or more in advance. And once the process of garment creation is underway there is an immediate need to market these collections.

Industry giants dedicate tens of millions of dollars a year to launch massive advertising and public relation campaigns in order to keep fashion feeling new and exciting. Like the creation of apparel, marketing also follows a relentless life cycle creating new visuals and ideas of engagement season after season. Ideas are generated, photo shoots are executed, media is bought, pictures are printed, websites designed, stores are updated, packaging created, direct mailers are delivered and the excitement continues.

How many of these ideas are actually new? How many times are garments recreated? Is fashion ever original? How many unique and innovative images and campaigns can be created year after year? Or is repetition reinvention? Are familiar designs and a recognizable aesthetic the keys to a successful brand identity and, ultimately, longevity? Does recognizing a brand’s past help build a solid future? Or does it matter at all?

My thesis is rapidly approaching and the process of research has begun. These are the questions my I will attempt to answer by exploring the value and meaning of corporate archives in today’s fashion industry. It will also take a look at principles and practices—how to build them, what the benefits are and the cultural effects they may or may not.

Creating archives for non-fashion related corporations has been well documented, dissected and debated. There are countless journals and associations related to the research and development of business archives. Many of these journals, paper and articles are going to help serve as research for my thesis. Yet despite the growing interest in creating fashion-related archives, evidenced by the number of diverse brands that have existing archives, there remains a dearth of information on the development, utilization, management of these private libraries. In addition, business and historical archiving, as well as library science are void of fashion specific information technology.

Creating Digital History has served as a wellspring of information, rich in resources and platforms that will benefit my thesis and possibly the end use of creating a real archive for my current employer. The use of Omeka as an archival tool, while not the most fluid or advanced interface, is basic and solid in its straightforward and uncomplicated user experience. I can clearly see how this could translate into a similar system for a fashion company and the development of a corporate repository. All of the information combined in this course has given me hope and confidence that a universal, yet customizable, archiving system for fashion companies can easily be developed. Now bring on my thesis!

Sources:

[1] Whitehead, Shannon. “5 Truths the Fast Fashion Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know.” Huffington Post. October 19, 2014. 

The final verdict on Evernote: “Meh.”

I had heard of Evernote before I took this class, from a friend of mine who swore that it was a lifesaver in terms of helping her keep her life organized. I have even attempted to use it before, but to little effect — I found the setup confusing and, despite having the app on my phone, often forgot I had it available to me and would just continue keeping notes the old-fashioned pen-and-paper way.

This time, my use of Evernote was a little more involved and, therefore, a little more productive. I made a conscious effort to use it instead of just writing it off after a week the way I did the first time I used it, and I made use of the Web Clipper for things like wikipedia articles and random news articles that were clogging up my Bookmarks tab. Again, though, I found myself forgetting to use it, even though I had it on both my phone and my laptop, and even though the little elephant icon for the Web Clipper is always sitting there up on the taskbar of my Google Chrome window.

A snapshot of my main notebook for this class, which concerns my digital archive.

Part of it may just be reluctance to try something new: I know that even though I have the Web Clipper available to me, I only started using it when my bookmarks were getting too clogged up, simply because the ability to access the page itself — rather than a live version of it hosted on Evernote — felt, strangely, more secure. But part of it is just that, despite my efforts to go into it with an open mind, Evernote’s organizational framework and my own don’t really work together as well as I would have hoped.

About halfway through the semester, I discovered another note-taking software, OneNote. I did not use this one for either class notes or for my digital archive and exhibit; instead, I used it for my fiction writing. However, I found that, despite its many flaws (one of which being how irregular the syncing process can be), it worked better for me as an organizational tool for taking notes than Evernote does. The way the notebooks work in OneNote made organization both easier and more visually appealing. In particular, the fact that the notebooks can be divided into sections made it much easier to separate different aspects of whatever project I was working on into categories, and that in turn made it easier to find things when I needed them.

Granted, OneNote does lack the tagging system which for many people is Evernote’s main appeal. But for me personally, sections and folders are easier to find things in than tag lists, especially when the amount of material you have in one tag starts to pile up. (I know this from my experiences in trying to find specific photos of a certain celebrity on a Tumblr blog whose tag for that person has 15+ pages of posts.)

This sounds like a negative review, but it isn’t. I don’t hate Evernote. I don’t even dislike it, really. I just struggled to adapt it to my own organizational style, and, when that failed, adapt my style to it. It’s obviously a very useful program for notetaking and organizing, and I have to admit that the Web Clipper is pretty amazing even though I didn’t use it much. It’s just not for me — simple as that.

Evernote joins the global conspiracy against left-handed people

I’ve spent the last two years in library school, but somehow it still never occurred to me to use note-taking and information management software for my own purposes until I took this class.  I’ve used the same system for note-taking and information storage since my freshman year of college.  Though for the most part it has served me well, I have noticed that as projects got larger, I tended to spend much more time skimming frantically through multiple documents searching for one thing I vaguely remembered reading somewhere.  Evernote’s full-text indexing and searching, as well as its tagging feature, have helped me synthesize my research and complete my assignments more efficiently.

I typically take notes in an outline format using word processing software.  It’s not a very sophisticated system, and it transferred almost seamlessly into Evernote.  The one incredibly small issue I had with it is that when taking notes, I tend to have the active document on the left side of the screen, and other documents (for reference, etc.) to the right side of the screen.  I think this is a holdover from when I took notes on paper:  since I’m left handed, my paper was always on the left, and my book was always on the right.  Evernote’s layout (as far as I know) can’t be switched around, so it took a little practice to get used to referring to the right side of my screen for the active document.  I wonder if Ned Flanders’ Leftorium has expanded into software yet….

Tagging was probably the feature of Evernote that I enjoyed the most.  (Full-text searching across the entirety of the documents in the database was a close second, but it doesn’t save that much more time than searching OCR-ed PDFs individually.)  Being able to supply my own more detailed and granular metadata made it much easier and faster to retrieve information.  My previous storage system used hierarchies of folders to mimic a very rough tagging system, but it doesn’t allow me to associate multiple tags with the same object, and tends to involve a lot of clicking.  It also requires me to remember where in the multi-folder hierarchy I saved a document:  since I couldn’t associate multiple categories with objects, if an object applied to more than one folder category, I would save it on the same level as both folder categories.  I thought this was ingenious when I “invented” it in college, but now I realize that it was NOT the best way to do things.  Rather than relying on the OS X directory structure to organize my research, I should have investigated third party software sooner.  It would have made my senior thesis much less frustrating.

I wish that the tagging functionality in Evernote did allow for some hierarchical organization, if only for the sake of having a neater-looking and more navigable tag page.   I can imagine that for projects longer and larger than this one, the tag page in Evernote gets very messy, very fast.  I also wish that I had spent a little more time developing my tagging system.  Some tags ended up referring to too many notes to be of much use, and I wasn’t always consistent about applying both subject- and format-related tags to notes.  (This is another example of how hierarchical tagging in Evernote would be useful:  I could tag notes related to people or places as “visual” or “non-visual,” depending upon whether they included illustrations that I could use in my archive or exhibit.)  I’ll keep that lesson in mind when I begin organizing my capstone research.

I did not end up using Evernote to draft my blog posts or exhibit text.  I need a visually “quiet” desktop environment for writing, and Evernote just has too many things going on that catch my attention and distract me.  I also did not use Evernote to store most of the items I used in my digital archive, since the free version only permits a ludicrously small amount of data to be imported every month, and I’m pretty sure a single TIFF would exceed that allowance.  Even the relatively low resolution JPEG photographs of archival materials that I took on my phone were too large to import in a single month.  At least the Web Clipper can download PDFs directly into Evernote without using the imported data allowance!  I would probably have stopped using Evernote if that function didn’t exist.

One other slight roadblock to using Evernote as the one database to rule them all was the fact that I ended up needing to use several books in my research.  It would be really great if Evernote had a mobile application similar to the Web Clipper, which provided document scanning and OCR functionality through smartphone cameras.  The fact that this doesn’t exist yet makes me think that it’s because of (everyone’s favorite!) copyright law.  The Web Clipper can download PDFs exported by academic publishers’ databases, but it doesn’t work even for single (full) pages of books in ebrary or other access platforms for e-books which are still under copyright.  Evernote’s Web Clipper is only one of many content-scraping web tools which have various legitimate and nefarious applications, and which publishers’ digital rights management software is built to block.  Print books don’t have the same DRM software built in, but Evernote’s developers could still be sued by publishers for facilitating users’ copyright infringement if they did provide a document-scanning app like the one I described above.

Evernote is not a perfect solution, but no software ever is.  Furthermore, most of my frustration with the software was the result of my being too cheap to upgrade to a paid version, and I recognize that it’s not entirely fair to blame the product itself for the business model which supports it.  It would be nice to have a free, open-source platform with similar functionality to Evernote.  After my experience using Evernote for this class, I plan to investigate those options further before I begin the research for my capstone project next semester.  However, if that search is unsuccessful, I’ll probably pony up the $50 for a yearlong Evernote subscription.

My Evernote Review

In today’s world, there is an endless supply of digital tools and applications.  These digital tools provide a means of organization and accessibility.  Prior to this class, Creating Digital History, I had never used nor heard of Evernote.  Throughout my entire career as a student, I have created notes the old fashioned way, paper and pencil (well mostly pens).  Overall, I have found Evernote to be easy to use as well as a useful tool for organizing notes and for saving research.  Personally, I do find that I often forget about Evernote outside of class.  This could be due to the fact that I am not completely used to using it just yet.  At the beginning of the semester, I made a conscious effort to use Evernote for all of my note taking, both in class and outside of class time.  I would organize my thoughts about the assigned readings via Evernote and would add to those notes in class during discussion time.

When I began researching for the digital archive, I used Evernote to brainstorm and save documents for future use.  I have found it useful for working with documents in an archive, because of its search capabilities and features.  When I want to return to an object or note at a later date, I can search for it in Evernote.  Evernote assists with organization and keeping track of previous notes or web clippings.  Unfortunately, I recognize that as a user I have not used Evernote to its complete potential as a resource.  In the future I will make more of an effort to tag my notes.  The tagging feature will make searching in Evernote even more enjoyable.  Tags make notes easily accessible; especially as your notebook continues to grow.

Overall I have dabbled with the web clipper feature.  The web clipper is a way to integrate Evernote into your Internet research.  The web clipper essentially saves information directly to your Evernote notebook.  There are various ways of saving with web clipper (PDF, screenshot, links, etc.).  I also like that there is an Evernote app.  I downloaded it to my iPhone, but to be honest, I have not really used it.  I have found that it is much simpler to use Evernote on my laptop.  If I had a tablet, I might enjoy the application more – due to the screen size, etc.  

Evernote is an useful tool for saving information and its use of “notebooks” creates an accessible space for your research and notes.  I think with continual and consistent use, Evernote could easily become a staple tool in my academic career – potentially as a professional tool.  I will definitely continue to use Evernote for research and gathering Internet search information because of the web clipper feature.  I will also try to be more consistent with the tagging feature as a means to beef up the search ability of my notes.  The app makes it easy to take Evernote on the go!  There is no longer a need to carry around notebooks and pens.  Evernote not only helps organize notes, but it also helps alleviate back pain caused by overly stuffed backpacks.

Exhibiting the Nonexistent

An exhibition about the Subject of the Artist School seems like it would be a rather straightforward task: display some advertisements or invitations that were used to promote the evening lectures, include some edited lecture notes compiled by the founding members and guest speakers, and choose some photographs that show the attendees. However, after combing through the archives of New York City’s art museums that own works by the schools founders — David Hare, William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman — and after looking through the papers compiled by these artist’s estates, there is a possibility no physical materials were ever produced during the year of 1948-1949 when the school was in operation. Or, if physical materials were produced, they no longer exist. Very few materials documenting Studio 35 (what the Subject of the Artist School was renamed when New York University acquired the 35 West 8^th Street space in 1949) remain. An invitation to one of Studio 35’s lectures is housed in the Louise Bourgeois Archive, while the Dedalus Foundation has a few photographs taken by Aaron Siskind and Max Yavno, photographers who happened to capture the discussions of the school while trying to document the downtown arts scene more generally. A discussion between Julia Link Haifley and artist Grace Hartigan  in 2008, which was later transcribed for the Archives of American Art, at least reveals a few details about the otherwise mysterious Studio 35, including the fact members had to be voted in to the school in order to enjoy the conversations and cheap steak dinners hosted on Friday nights. This likely means no advertisements were ever produced for Studio 35 since members and attendees likely heard about the lectures through word of mouth, when they attended a gallery show or frequented a local hangout like Cedar Bar Tavern. Furthermore, the school was discussion-based. They were not a studio school that produced work nor an exhibition space that would have had a greater chance of being documented.

The transition of the Subject of the Artist School to Studio 35 is one worthy of scholarly research not only due to the well-known names attached to the venture, but also because the school was founded at a pivotal moment in history when the art capital shifted from Paris to New York after World War II.  The founders were among a collective of artists who learned from the stylistic traditions of the expatriates who relocated to New York after the war but were determined to push the medium of painting forward into new territory. The art produced by these artists transitioned from work rooted in Surrealism to new work that would later become recognized as Abstract expressionism. Although the doors of the Subject of the Artist School and Studio 35 did not remain open for long, the conversations that occurred likely influenced the signature styles of the founders and the rise of one of the most important American art movements.

Barnett Newman’s Concord, 1948, which displays the artist’s signature vertical “zips.” Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The challenge becomes how to document the school’s part in this crucial moment in American history when there are few resources to work with. Even when art historians organize exhibitions about performance art, conceptual art, land art or art work that has deteriorated due to the unconventional materials from which it was originally constructed, these professionals often have documentation to display. In the case of my project, I have a few poor photographs and some oral histories, footnotes, invitations and wrinkled letters that mention the mere existence of the school. In order to produce an online exhibition that is both visually interesting and engaging for a general audience, I have had to rely on short gallery advertisements, excepts from experimental magazines like The Tiger’s Eye and VVV magazine, as well as images of artwork produced by the founders during this time period. For my exhibition I will also build my own visual tools, both maps and timelines, to make the context more manageable, especially since there are multiple founders showing at different galleries, producing different works and contributing to different publications simultaneously. As I continue my research in hope of filling a whole in the Greenwich Village Blog still lacking in entries from the 1940s and hope to fill a hole within the art historical literature, I am very much open to suggestions on how to find additional resources and how to go about the final display of my materials.

“The Hottest Live Wire in the U.S.A.”

My favorite person in the early New York punk scene may be an eight-year-old girl.

Let me explain.

A large part of my research thus far has involved trawling the “vault” of PUNK magazine, whose website includes select scans from the magazine’s back issues. The one thing in the magazine that really grabbed my attention – more so even than John Holmstrom’s illustrated front covers – was a feature called “PUNK of the Month,” in which the magazine took submissions from readers who would explain, through often-sardonic claims of the ways in which they embody the punk rock lifestyle, why they deserved to be crowned punk of the month.

The submissions vary greatly from each other, each of them showing, through both text and layout, the unique style and temperament of the person who submitted it. There are huge disparities in tone above all else, with some “punks of the month” writing in a relatively calm tone while others went straight for the jugular with whatever cynical, shocking, and offensive statements they could come up with. The November 1977 PUNK of the Month, instead of submitting a photo, sent a “blood smear” (maybe fake; maybe not; who knows?) and proclaimed: “Here’s more of me than a picture could ever have.” (This particular submission also employed a non-reclamatory use of a homophobic slur, which just goes to show that even within what is meant to be an anti-establishment, anti-“ism” scene, you still come across a lot of “bro” types who just don’t Get It.)

Nellie “Live Wire” in PUNK Volume 1 Number 12 (January 1978).

And then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have little girls who love Patti Smith and beat up boys with their hairbrushes.

I admit I was surprised to see eight-year-old Nellie the “Live Wire” in a publication that is known for lewdness, swearing, and all sorts of inappropriate content. I was much more surprised to see how indulgent the magazine was with her submission, captioning her challenging pose with “Don’t get in her way!” Too often do we see adult male fans of rock music – from hardcore punk to pop-punk to alt. rock to emo – dismiss the musical tastes of young girls and even attempt, both consciously and unconsciously, to chase them out of the scene. It’s incredibly important to see that, even from the very beginning, young girls have been fans of punk rock, and it’s important that the magazine that gave the scene its name is not ashamed to acknowledge that.

I hope to find a place for Nellie in my exhibit. I’m not yet sure where I could put her, but the girls of the punk scene are an important part of the development of the punk aesthetic and its journey into the mainstream, so this gem may not be a complete tangent after all.

Sources:

PUNK Volume 1 Number 11

PUNK Volume 1 Number 12

To see the rest of the PUNK vault, click here.

Mapping Fever

Odyssey home page

My mom came the United States from Vietnam in 1989. She resettled in San Diego, California, where she worked three jobs on Adams Avenue. During her two-hour bus ride to and from work, my mom studied and memorized her U.S. naturalization guide. It included segments from the Constitution, history and meaning of the flag, and a map of the fifty states and their capitals. To keep me quiet during our commute, she recited and quizzed me on my U.S. state capitals. I remember looking at the map and absorbing where each state fell on the page. I closed my eyes and, for example, saw California’s lazy recline, Louisiana’s boot, Maine the shape of an oven mitt. The map helped me remember not only the states’ locations, but their capitals as well. I didn’t know it then, but maps would be a very important part of my historical training.

Of course we know maps guide us from one place to another. They help us visualize events and feelings. Military strategists plot violent operations on a map. In many public school classrooms, students press pins into states or international countries where they or their families are from or have visited over the years. These places of origin and vacation, as well as battlefields, summon associated emotions and stories about this, that, or the other. Sometimes we walk into a room and map where everything is. We map what’s missing or determine our course through the space, and in that sense, maps also function as catalogues, records, and indexes for the disappeared.

To understood the visible and invisible histories of Greenwich Village, I consulted the Odyssey mapping platform. Odyssey is an open-source tool that “allows [us] to combine maps, narratives, and other multimedia into a beautiful story.” Designed by CartoDB, Odyssey users create “projects” on their webpage. The projects contain “chapters” featuring found or user-created maps that can move across space, time, and themes. In each chapter, users upload their project’s content into what Odyssey calls a “Sandbox.” The Sandbox can include text, images, videos, music, and hyperlinks. Users can make as many chapters as they want. They can make the Sandbox as simple or as sophisticated as they want. Each Sandbox comes with a “markdown.” The markdown contains the necessary information for publication: title, author, presentation option, etc. Each Odyssey map can be viewed in slides, scrolling, or torque form. Users choose the form that best fits their project. Advanced users can incorporate Javascript or other HTML codes to amplify their project. When finished, users can publish their projects directly to their webpages or use the Odyssey iframe code to embed their project elsewhere.

Odyssey publish function

I first used Odyssey in Professor Jack Tchen’s “Chinatown & The American Imagination” undergraduate seminar during Fall 2014. Jack divided the class into five groups. Each group researched a specific block in NYC Chinatown. They created walking tours and in-depth biographies of the block’s known and subaltern histories. To demonstrate changes over time or document fascinating artifacts, each student group created an Odyssey map for their final. The Odyssey map made their subversive walking tours available online and, in fact, simulated the walking tour by taking the viewer on a visual journey. We’re currently culling all the student group maps and publishing them on a course site so interested teachers can implement Odyssey in their classrooms.

The results were quite spectacular. Though some students were hesitant at first, they found Odyssey incredibly easy to use. That, of course, is one of its merits. Odyssey’s clear instructions and visual guides make building projects smooth and troubleshooting streamline. Because it’s still in development, some functions remain rather shaky. For instance, it’s unclear how we can edit or expand Odyssey maps after we publish them. It’s unclear if there are ways other than copying and saving the raw code to another location in order to work on a project in multiple sittings. It’s also unclear if projects can be worked on simultaneously by multiple people on separate devices.

http://bl.ocks.org/anonymous/raw/f7523ccc4a896af9dcd1

Above is an Odyssey example our students made. They examined the history of Chinatown’s Chatham Square. Landmarks, sounds, phantom highways, and political figures make their way into this project. A student even made her own video recording of a poem she wrote inspired by conversations she witnessed in the Square. The group overall really took advantage of the platform and inspired me to do the same on my project about queer Asian American life in Greenwich Village during the turn of the century. The importance of maps is that they present information in another way. While historians and researchers turn quickly to timelines and similar interactive features, maps aren’t widely regarded tools for visualizing, processing, and communication meaning of information. I argue maps can do the work we rely on timelines for. Imagine mapping events across time in the spaces they took place. Imagine showing human movement across space, in addition to time. It certainly takes historical scholarship out of the familiar realm of “past dates” and situates human events firmly within places, informing how we see and interact with them. I, in fact, cannot walk through Chatham Square without seeing, smelling, or hearing what the student group saw, smelled, and heard. My hope is in using Odyssey is to present sights, smells, sounds, and sensory details to people unfamiliar with Greenwich Village’s queer Asian American past and to trouble the ways that past continues to live in the present.

Finally, the nice thing about Odyssey is that its developers welcome suggestions to aid their building the platform. Please feel encouraged to use Odyssey in mapping your next project and send some feedback their way!

From Henry James to the Triangle Fire: A Century at 27 Washington Place

Washington Place has a distinctly nostalgic feel.  The block between Washington Square East and Greene Street is probably the closest New York University comes to resembling a suburban college campus, with violet and white flags flying on both sides of the street, and the greenery of Washington Square Park as a backdrop.  Many passersby are doubtless reminded of their own college days.  But the block also hints at something older.  The cobblestones that still pave Greene Street, and the architectural details of buildings saved by the Greenwich Village historic preservation movement, transport visitors back to the nineteenth century.  Conveniently, this is when the story of 27 Washington Place begins.

In 1842, Henry James, Sr. purchased a townhouse at 27 Washington Place.*  The birth of his first child, William, on January 11th of that year may have inspired him to find a more permanent home for his family.  However, James had rented in the neighborhood for several years.  He occupied a bachelor’s apartment in the University Building on Washington Square East in 1838, and then—with his new wife, Mary Robertson Walsh—moved to 2 Washington Place.  He knew firsthand that it was a good place for a well-to-do family to settle in New York City.  The former potter’s field at Washington Square had been transformed into Washington Parade Ground, a military parade ground that also served as a public park, in 1828.  Local residents strolled and children played there.  “The Row” of Greek Revival-style homes recently built along Washington Square North was one of the most fashionable addresses in the city.  Its wealthy residents included Mary’s family, in whose home Henry and Mary were wed in 1840. The closeness of 27 Washington Place to the studious atmosphere of the University Building may have also attracted Henry.  (The two buildings were only separated by one house, 29 Washington Place.)  He was a theologian who took his work quite seriously.  Perhaps he had enjoyed the university’s community of scholars and intellectuals as a resident, and hoped to continue to participate in it as a neighbor.

Detail from an engraving of the University Building by Robert Hinshelwood, with 27 Washington Place visible behind it.

Henry’s second child, Henry James, Jr., was born at 27 Washington Place on April 15, 1843.  Like many of his siblings, he followed his father’s intellectual bent.  Henry James, Jr. would become one of the most important Realist writers of the nineteenth century.  He spent most of his adult life in Europe, but looked fondly upon his childhood home from a distance.  His memories of his grandmother’s house on the Row inspired his short novel Washington Square, published in 1880.  Finally, in 1904, Henry James, Jr. returned to Washington Square.  He was not pleased with the changes that he found.  He shared his resentment in The American Scene: 

“The gray and more or less hallowed University Building—wasn’t it somehow with a desperate bravery, both castellated and gabled—has vanished from the earth and vanished with it the two or three adjacent houses, of which the birthplace was one. This was the snub for the complacency of the retrospect, that, whereas the inner sense had positively erected there for its private contemplation a commemorative mural tablet, the very wall that should have borne this inscription had been smashed as for demonstration that tablets, in New York, are unthinkable…but that we have only to reflect an instant to see any such form of civic piety inevitably and for ever absent.”

During Henry James’ decades in Europe, New York City expanded northward, and the neighborhood around Washington Square lost its suburban character.  The wealthy and fashionable residents of the Row began to move away.  Meanwhile, many of the immigrants who had fled famine, political and economic strife, and religious persecution in Europe constructed their own communities in neighboring areas of Greenwich Village.  Residential buildings around Washington Square were demolished or transformed into commercial buildings in which workers toiled for long hours at low wages.  Other buildings were subdivided into cramped tenement housing.  Even the houses on the Row became multi-family dwellings in the 1880s.

27 Washington Place was not immune from this change.  By 1894 Joseph J. Asch had acquired it, along with 23, 25, and 29 Washington Place.  Asch demolished the houses in 1900, four years before Henry James’ return from Europe, to make way for a ten-story commercial building.  When the Asch Building was complete, a pair of business partners named Max Blanck and Isaac Harris moved their factory to its eighth floor.  As Henry James glared up at the building that had usurped his birthplace, hundreds of immigrant laborers sweated at the sewing machines of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company.

The story of the fire at the Triangle factory has been told elsewhere.  It deserves more attention than I can give it here, but in short, these are the facts.  146 people died in half an hour.  They were mostly women, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants, some as young as fourteen.  146 people who were trapped in a burning building by locked doors, a small elevator, a broken fire escape, and fire department ladders too short to reach the eighth floor.  Some victims fell from the windows.  Some jumped, rather than burn alive.

It is incredible, almost insulting, that the Asch Building survived the fire when so many people did not.  Yet it did.  The upper floors were rebuilt, and the building was renamed the Greenwich Building.  Frederick Brown acquired it shortly afterward.  New York University began to rent classroom space in the building in 1916, and in 1929, the Brown family gave the building to the university as a gift.  It is now called the Brown Building.  New York University students attend classes there daily, in a world that shares little with those of either Henry James or the Triangle Shirtwaist Company employees, except its location.

In The American Scene, Henry James bemoaned the lack of a physical historical marker at his birthplace to match the one imprinted in his memory.  There is still no historical marker for Henry James on the Brown Building today.  He is commemorated elsewhere.  However, there are three historical markers on the Brown Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, remembering the victims of the Triangle factory fire.  It is a small oversight, perhaps, but Henry James was one man who lived a full life of privilege and fame.  They were 146, poor and otherwise unknown.  How many times in history has the reverse occurred?

The historical markers on the Brown Building. Photo by Harmony Barker.

The history of 27 Washington Place serves as a case study in the changing character of Washington Square throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  More than that, it serves as a reminder that, especially in places where space is limited and populations are dense, history marches on.  Henry James might have wished for the Washington Square in his memory to remain unchanged forever, a monument to the great writer and his great works.  Likewise, a witness to the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company might have wondered how the site of such horror could ever become anything else.  But the story of Washington Square, both joyful and tragic, continues to grow and change.

*The house was actually numbered 21 Washington Place when Henry James, Sr. purchased it in 1842, but the street was renumbered two years later.  For the sake of clarity, I have referred to the James house as 27 Washington Place throughout this post.

Sources:

Thomas J. Frusciano and Marilyn Pettit, New York University and the City:  An Illustrated History, 1831-1996.  New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Luther S. Harris, Around Washington Square:  An Illustrated History of Greenwich Village.  Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Habegger, Alfred.  “James, Henry.” American National Biography Online.  February 2000.  Accessed September 22, 2015.  Available online at http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00842.html.

Henry James, The American Scene.  London:  Chapman and Hall, Ltd, 1907.  Accessed November 9,  2015.  Available online at https://archive.org/details/americanscene00jameuoft.

“Henry James, Birthplace, Location of.”  Biographical Files; New York University Archives, New York University Libraries.

Administrative Papers of the Chancellor Henry Mitchell MacCracken 1884-1910; RG 3.0.3; Box 16; New York University Archives, New York University Libraries.

Records of the Office of the Treasurer, 1910-1963; RG 10.9, Box 47; New York University Archives, New York University Libraries.

Cornell University ILR School, “Remembering the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire.”  2011.  Accessed November 9, 2015.  Available online at http://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/index.html.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory National Register of Historic Places Registration Form.  Revised August 1986.  Accessed November 9, 2015.  Available online at http://focus.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NHLS/Text/91002050.pdf.