Irons in the Fire

The blacksmith knows, when you have too many irons in the fire, the iron you leave in the fire will burn before you have time to hammer the iron you're working on. The expression 'having too many irons in the fire' comes from blacksmithing and stands for having too many tasks competing for your attention. I just realized how accurately it describes being overwhelmed by stressful commitments.

The trouble is, in life, we often need to put several irons in the fire. For example, you may need to go back to school for continuing education, but you can't go right away, so you make plans, you make an appointment for the required tests and schedule of classes, you anticipate months of class work. This one task, going back to school, becomes an 'iron in the fire.'

While you're anticipating going back to school, other things will come up, daily life, a new person, a new project, but all the worries of going back to school will still be on your mind. As life goes on, we collect more tasks and responsibilities that stretch out over time or will need to be done in the future, along with the task's we've already begun. Each becomes an iron in the fire, until we are overwhelmed by anticipation.

The irons, the things we need to do, but can't do right away but must eventually complete, the things we start but can't or won't finish, build up in the fire until we become overwhelmed, knowing we will have to abandon some of the irons to burn or abandon the iron we're working on.

Blacksmiths have a way of dealing with too many irons in the fire. They keep some of the irons out of the fire until they are ready, until they've hammered the irons they're working on. Maybe there is some way in life to keep some of those irons beside the fire, waiting, until the ones you're hammering are done, and the ones in the fire are ready. I'm going to try to mentally pigeonhole those tasks and responsibilities, setting them down beside the fire, but out of it, waiting their turn.


By the way, I've learned (to my surprise, since it is such a traditional, low technology craft), blacksmithing is an art that can teach us a lot of important lessons. It teaches that some things can only be learned through experience. Getting good at smithing requires using the hammer. It requires creating a muscle memory of simple moves, before you can make more complicated or sophisticated ones. It requires building up sufficient muscles before you can wield the hammer effectively. It is impossible to become a blacksmith just by being an educated person and following a series of instructions in a book cold turkey, at least not without going through the actual practice of making things. Blacksmithing, is a lot like Zen, it requires practice to realize.

I don't mean the kind of practice your piano teacher had you do as a child, although that is related, but the kind practice that means actually doing something, not as a study, but as a reality. You could purposefully make simple things to teach and strengthen your muscles, but the point is that you have to do it in order to learn it, to realize it, to gain the benefits of it. Talk won't get you there. Reading won't get you there. Knowing won't get you there.

User Curation of the Archive

We need to enable people to curate collections. This means blogging the contents of an archive, which can be as simple as a blogger selecting certain items (by surrogate, typically a picture but also 3D rotatable image or video) and posting them to the blog along with any caption available through the collection's online database. They don't have to say anything original to be useful. The basic requirement is that archives places their collections online, giving access to potential curators outside the archive. Curating is anything a user does to create context for the cultural artifact, commenting, annotating, writing that contextualizes the artifact (like wiki pages).

User curation of the archive helps people feel connected with the archive and its contents. Involving non-academics in the archives is important for the continued existence of an instituation and the collection, the value of which exists partly in the memories of people and in the objects themselves. I learned from genealogy that people only preserve what they care about, and that people care about things when they have meaning, and stories give artifacts meaning.

The context becomes a bigger and bigger net as it grows, bringing in more people from search engines. The effect of this net can be powerful, as I learned soon after getting on the web in 1995. I put a collection of family photographs from the middle 19th century online and within a few months several relatives of the people in the photographs had found them and made contact with me. After over 120 years of separation. This was when the web was very small, the users a very small percentage of the population. My idea to cast a net with the pictures and captions had brought in the catch I desired, helping to identify individuals in the images and reconstruct the family history, both photographic and genealogical.

I was intrigued by a project Social Media Classroom. It shares features with ones we envision for Folkstreams, as a platform for creating access to archives, but we also recognize that our site is mostly used in the classroom and that features of our site are shared with features of a classroom, such as the "contexts" accompanying our films, including transcripts.

Archives will, through online access, become an integral extension of the classroom. There will be less of a distinction between archives and classroom (and the public).

A Trip Through The Minefield of Knowledge

I have frequently been the victim of an author who has a peculiar view on a subject, which turns out to be simply wrongheaded. Because there are so many books, many more than I could purchase, read and evaluate and because turning to book reviewers is frequently just as useless as getting the wrong view from the wrong authority, the value of books can be somewhat limited.

It is easy to assume that if a book is published on a subject that the author knows something about the subject, that they are well versed in he subject and

The problem is that authors have differing views on the same subject. They have different backgrounds and differ about what is important to them. Writers generally write what they know. This is a problem, for example, in music. Thirty years ago you could not find a book explaining harmonic theory behind blues harmony. Oh, there may have been a few academic or musicological works on the subject, but generally, if you wanted to learn blues harmony you had to listen to recordings or ask a blues musician.

This was because the cohort of music theory writers disdained or held blues music in contempt, did not listen to it and thought it base or childish. Blues, they thought, lacked the sophistication of Western classical music. It was all bump, bump, bump and grind. It musicologically wasn't worth the time of day to them.

Yet, blues music contains the most sophisticated polyrhythms outside of Polynesia and the most colorful expressions and sophisticated harmonies of any music, borrowing the Western harmony and mixing it with expressive melody moans and instrumental vocalizations and "harmony" bordering on chaos and dissonance. These writers could not see (or hear) this, because they didn't want to hear or see it. They were racists or elitists or just didn't like the music. My parents, who liked 50s rock and roll, never liked singers who "yelled" and where "you couldn't understand the words." So to them, at least some of the blues based music was inaccessible because of its affront to the senses.

I noticed that despite my love of various forms of hard edged music, that even after enjoying several hours of hard rocking music, that my ears would tire of the distortion. I loved cranking up the distortion when playing electric guitar, but have to admit that hours, maybe even minutes as I grew older, became grating on the ears compared to folk music, classical guitar or classical European music (my brother found he could not concentrate on his work while listening to classical music because the strong emotions it evoked were distracting).

However understandable the reluctance to write seriously about blues music was, it was incredibly damaging to the quality of description, transcription and writing of blues and blues based music in book or sheet music form for a long time. This did not deter people from learning blues by stumbling through poorly written books, slowing down records on tape recorders and asking friends how to play licks.

But it did make it terribly confusing and difficult to learn anything about blues from books. You might ask where is this all leading other than to the ran tings of a frustrated guitar player? It raises a profound question about information, whether the "Wiki" model of authorship, collective authority, is best or whether the traditional model of authorship as a single authority is best. With the wiki model wisdom becomes refined by becoming conventional. There is a tendency for collective authorship to become settled.

(A word about why this bothers me: One of the things I was taught (part of my miseducation -- a story for another time, but an important concept as an education, because everyone gets a miseducation as well as an education) when very young was that what separated us from both societies before the introduction of movable type and before literacy, was the capacity to record knowledge in book form, by which knowledge could be transmitted to future generations and distant persons with perfect accuracy. All that was necessary to learn something, was to find a book on it, and follow the instructions. This turns out to be impractical and bordering on the absurd. Although there are rivalries between "book learning" and "experience" nearly all crafts, professions, activities engaged in by people require more than "book learning" to achieve any results. Most professions, from computer programming to music, require "folk knowledge" such as "programmer lore" or ways of solving problems, common algorithms, etc. handed down from programmer to programmer by "word of mouth" and deemed to minor to put in books. Of course, this knowledge can be vital to success in the real world of programming.)

Collective authorship can create greater accuracy, given the weight conventional wisdom formed by this authorship is ordinarily correct, than from an author with a peculiar point of view. However, you are much less likely to encounter a disruptive point of view from a radical individual who takes on a false conventional wisdom. There seems to be no solution to this problem of authority in information, other than to say sometimes conventional wisdom is correct because it reflects the intelligence of mobs and sometimes a lone wolf is correct while the conventional wisdom mob rules with a pack of profitable, self-serving lies or delusions.

So will it be the Digg model where the mob tosses the good stuff up on the heap, the Wiki model where the mob through collective wisdom and weight of numbers creates a refined collective wisdom, the Google Knowl model of collectively peer-reviewed free form works with bylines, or will it be the social network that filters knowledge through a mob of friends and groups that works best?