Graphic Recording

I didn't know it, but all my life I've engaged in "graphic recording" when it came to exploring new ideas or learning. I never went as far as the artists who made a series of recordings for the sustainable agriculture and food conference, but my subjects were technical, and I was a technical kid growing up, so my "confections," as Tufte calls them, were more mathematical, graphical and textual in nature. I used them to illustrate things to myself, like working out visually how cycles represent waveforms in musical instruments. Now, I see them as graphic recordings. I was a bit ashamed of them, since I thought it meant that I wasn't a good learner and tried to suppress or limit them. That was a mistake.

The drawings are simply wonderful and I got put onto them by Brenda Dawson who tweeted about the graphical recordings made for the March 29 2009 conference
Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability at the University of California, Davis. How much better a "presentation" these graphic recordings make than a PowerPoint presentation!

These drawings are a lot like my vision for an information system, called Strands, which would be as thick and filled with complexity as the Talmud and as visually expressive as these graphic recordings. If only the web could be like this. When I think of Twitter and Tabloo, if they could be combined, I think we'd be close. Tabloo enables users to create visual narratives (through the structure and relationship, size and aspects of images) and Twitter enables users to create conversations out of small fragments of thought flowing continually.

The Inuit Paradox

"How come the people here, who for long periods eat nothing but the meat from one type of animal, are healthier than we are?" Andreas Viestad, author of "Where Flavor Was Born," poses the nutritional question in Where Home Cooking Gets the Cold Shoulder. This is another example of how an evolved system is superior to an engineered one. It shows the connection between culture (cuisine and taste) and nutrition. A food culture that survives, survives because the people are still alive to continue eating according to their food ways. This is also another way in which folklore affects us.

The more distance you put between yourself and the nutritionists with their reductionist theories, the better your health will be.

I disagree with the statement by nutrition researcher Harriet V. Kuhnlein, who says "Every time you process or cook something -- anything -- you are likely to be losing nutrients at every step..." This is not true for cooking tomatoes, which liberates and makes certain nutrients more bioavailable. We don't know what the tradeoffs between raw and cooked are.

It is worth noting the author's book is concerns flavor. Because taste is an important determinant in the choices a food culture makes. We suspect that in pre-scientific socities people somehow discovered what foods, what parts of the animal, were the most nutritious and the higher status or wealthier people (quite the opposite in the West, where eventually wealth meant less nutritious foods) ate the best parts. It turns out the best parts provide critical nutrients not found in other parts of the animal.

Traditional cultures cannot afford to waste any part of the animal and therefore generally eat liver, brains, etc. that are undesirable to most Americans or modern Westerners. These parts have gradually disappeared from the Western diet because they are "yucky" to think about. These parts can be an acquired taste. So it leaves open the question, were these pre-scientific people guided by taste or by observing people were healthier when they ate these parts? Maybe it is simple as a large number of groups eating different diets, the ones with a better diet survived, and their choices became a food tradition.

Fresh or Cooked?

In recent years tomato sauce was in the nutrition news. It turns out that cooking tomatoes makes Lycopene more available than in fresh tomatoes.

This went against the prevailing grain of nutritional thinking, which said that fresh was always better. Nutritionists argued that cooking reduced the amount of vitamins in food. They backed this up with scientific studies showing that cooking vegetables (or fruits like tomatoes) does reduce the amount of vitamins. An obsession developed over "keeping as much of the vitamins" in your food as possible. Steaming was touted as a way to avoid "losing" the vitamins into the cooking water. The typical English way of preparing vegetables was dammed as washing away nutrition. New technologies were advanced in an attempt to retain as much of the nutrients (known ones) as possible. Some radical eaters adopted entirely raw diets hoping to not lose a single molecule of nutrition. The trouble with this view, was that it overlooks the reality cooking can make certain nutrients available that are not available in fresh foods.

Why bring this up? I've been reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (well, actually I read it in two days and lent it out and haven't seen it since). I had thought of this before reading his book, but I was reminded of this "paper vs. plastic" debate brought about by nutritionism and of the importance of culture to eating. The question is, how do we decide what to eat, fresh or cooked? It seems to me that food culture provides the answer to this question. A cuisine or food way develops over a long period of time to satisfy the nutritional requirements, the survival, of a people. Embodied in this food way must be the right balance between fresh and cooked.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the cooking and crushing involved in the canning process makes the Lycopene in tomatoes more available than fresh, since canned crushed tomatoes are frequently the base of pasta sauces. Because Lycopene is fat-soluble, serving cooked and crushed tomatoes in an oil-rich sauce is thought to make the nutrient more available.

If we look at Italian cuisine, we are probably going to find an optimal balance of fresh versus cooked tomatoes, otherwise the people eating according to the Italian food ways would likely be very sick. That the cuisine offers a lot of cooked tomato sauces attests to the nutritional value of sometimes cooking away those vitamins. Here is a food way that encapsulates nutritional knowledge that food science took centuries to get around to counting and measuring. Ignoring the wisdom inherent in Italian food ways is another example of nutritionism and the reductionist view of nutrition, which only considers the parts we can count and measure. It ignores what our senses, our taste and smell can tell us.

The reality is that cooking foods makes available nutritional elements unavailable in fresh food, and very like fresh food contains higher levels of other nutritional elements than after cooking. The right answer is a balance between them. We really do not know yet what nutrients are made more available by cooking, combining or processing foods. Food traditions are a good way to make the decision, given that nutritional science is still in its infancy. We can make use of hundreds or thousands of years of food tradition to answer this vexing question: fresh or cooked?

The Growing Importance of Folklore

With publication of Pollan's In Defense of Food, I think we are seeing the emergence of folklore into the mainstream. Most people think folklore is something they have very little in common with. It is old fashioned music or people dancing around in costumes they wore hundreds of years ago. People feel it has very little relation to their lives. They also believe that we live in a scientific, rational world and somehow folklore does not belong. There is also an association between myth, legend and folklore as meaning fraudulent, fantasy, lies. This is a problem of perception and mis-perception, which is not new. Shortly after becoming literate, the Greeks abandoned and ridiculed their own folklore, the "myths" we read about today.

For a new perspective on what I call "folk knowledge" or what might be categorized as "folk culture" instead of folklore, since it is more correct and encompassing, we need only look to authors like Adrienne Mayor. Through long, independent research, she discovered that the ancient Greek myths about monsters were actually stories about people finding beds of fossilized bones of ancient creatures. These "geomyths" as they are called convey, real, true, factual information and represent a kind of scientific method even preliterate people engaged in, despite conveying them in a dramatic way.

In Pollan's book, food culture or food ways, as a folklorist would call them, represents knowledge that the best scientific nutritionists failed to see, take advantage of and learn from. The nutritional systems which evolved out of thousands of years of trial and error passed down by mothers through the generations, amounted to a better set of food choices than did a hundred years of scientific rational nutritionism.

In books like Blink, Albion's Seed and Stuff of Thought, we are beginning to see how our unconscious knowledge and folk knowledge shapes our decisions and opinions, sometimes without our knowledge, absorbed by osmosis through our culture. Frequently, this knowledge proves more accurate and useful than scientific rational knowledge, especially when the science is new, incomplete and arrogant, such as nutritional science.

If you don't think you participate in folklore or that it has a place in the modern world, take a look at Sadobabies, a film about urban homeless kids. Or Music District, a film about urban music. Everyone creates folklore, everyone lives in a folk culture, in reality, many folk cultures, for each folk way is a folk culture, you probably practice a food way, a work way, a everything way. You also build new ways out of old ones, from both things learned from your parents and neighbors and scraps of commercial culture. Rap is a folk culture. Commercial rap feeds into rap, and the folk culture cycle goes on. At work, if you are a programmer, you probably learned many things that are not in books on coding. This is "programmer lore" and is a folk culture and represents folk culture, which shapes the software we use in daily life, that controls elevators and space shuttles. If you don't think folklore affects your life, think again the next time you're riding an elevator.

Reading In Defense of Food

I am reading Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food. I had just reached the end of his forward when I was struck by one of the closing paragraphs, which says that eaters have real choices now thanks to the revival of local farms and farmer’s markets, which make practical the availability of whole foods. I had to stop, the words echoing in my mind, because they were incredibly resonant with what myself and Tom Davenport are doing at farmfoody.org, reminding us that our health, the health of the land, the health of our food culture are inextricably linked.

I continued my reading and came to the point where Pollan relates the story of dentist and amateur scientist Weston Price, who abandoned his practice to study the food culture and nutrition of various aboriginal peoples around the world, untouched by the Western diet. Price concluded the common denominator of health among these peoples was, as Pollan says “to eat a traditional diet consisting of fresh foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients.”

Tom and me believe that the survival of small, independent farms is dependent on leveraging their local characteristics, just as wine makers leverage terroir as as an argument for the uniqueness of their wines. It is not a stretch to believe, as Pollan does, that the richness of the soil has an influence on the nutritional richness of food. Price’s description mirrors that of the small, independent farm supplying the local area with food, which was common before the second world war.

Moreover, Pollan writes that Price believed that “by breaking the links among local soils, local foods, and local peoples, the industrial food system disrupted the circular flow of nutrients through the food chain.” I am not sure about the disruption of nutrients, but it is those broken links we wish to restore by making some new links of our own, linking local soils, local foods and local peoples together again through social networking.

As I turned the pages, I discovered another passage that resonated with our intuitions about linking together the land, food and people though locality, food and culture using the technology of the 21st century. In the latter half of In Defense of Food the author lays out rules of thumb for escaping the Western Diet, but before doing so, he observes that food does not consist of nutrients alone, but “comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.” Our hope this is exactly what our website will do, create a web of social relationships reaching back to the land and to other people, through the farms and foodies, sharing their pictures and their recipes, a little bit of who they are with each other.

That is as far as I’ve got, but with farmfoody.org, Tom and me want to enable people to create, sustain and nurture change in our food culture, because we believe that a healthy society and a healthy people is a product of nurturing a set of relationships with food, the natural world and people.

From the Brother's Grimm on DVD

My friend and partner in developing Farm Foody and project director of the Folkstreams project, Tom Davenport, has opened a store for his From the Brother's Grimm series of films for sale direct to individuals (for institutional use, see his Davenport Films site). Tom is a farmer and filmmaker in Delaplane, Virginia.

The films were frequently featured on PBS in the local D. C. area, so they should be familiar to a generation of children who are now adults. They are live action retellings of classic folk tales in an American setting. Some tales are from Appalachia while others are interpretations of European folk tales with strong overtones of Appalachian culture and setting.

Willa, a favorite, draws upon traditional medicine show culture, documented in films like Free Show Tonight available for anyone to watch on the folkstreams.net website. Mutzmag
is a powerful film in an Appalachian setting, which contains a fair amount of traditional fairy tale violence, but the lessons are appropriate given the dangers children face today. Perhaps they could learn a few survival lessons from Mutzmag's clever outwitting of the ogres and other less than savory inhabitants of the forest, who have designs for her.

God's Peculiar People

I've been reading Elaine Lawless's book, God's Peculiar People, which arrived here in good condition today. She explains how Pentecostals are in daily contact with the paranormal. They keep one foot in the spirit world, to place it in context with the notions of pre-literate cultures. The "willfulness principle" was observed by Lawless operating in these communities that held strong beliefs in the power of "witches" to influence events. The willfulness principle was coined by Barber and Barber to explain the notion that in pre-literate cultures, natural effects have supernatural causes, principally the actions of willful spirits. It is worth noting that in Miyazaki's films (Spirited Away and My Friend Totoro notably) there exists the same close association between the natural world and the spirit world Lawless discovered in her observations of Pentecostals. His films express this notion of a spirit world parallel to and mirroring the natural world, which is a traditional feature of Japanese culture, arising from the pre-literate period in which the willfulness principle operated. It is not dissimilar to the attitudes of Pentecostals who reject the natural world to keep one foot in the spirit world accompanying the natural.

This "abandonment of the world" appears similar to Zen's entreaty to abandon worldly things as causes of suffering, and entry into a spirit world of meditation, which can be likened to the "unspeakable joy" that Pentecostals feel upon receiving the "holy ghost" and their general happiness derived from their faith. The levels of blessing Pentecostals strive for seem to echo the levels of attainment in zen.

(In addition to Elaine's book, you can watch Joy Unspeakable on the Folkstreams website).

The Folksnet: Folk Culture and Web 2.0

Although I am not a folklorist, through my work on the Follkstreams website, I have come to appreciate the study of folk culture and understand how expansive a field it represents. Folk culture is the culture people make for themselves and share with others. Web 2.0 is a folk culture, it even coined a phrase "folksonomy" to denote a system of categorization that replaces a vocabulary controlled by an authority or group of authorities with a vocabulary created ad hoc by the people involved in using the system of categorization. The media sharing sites like YouTube and MySpace and "mashup" systems like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly enable a rich shared folk media culture to arise. Increasingly, as we head into the 21st century, it is a supreme irony that folklore is taking on greater importance as nearly everything is democratized and individualized, and is poised to become perhaps the most significant field of research in this century, after having for centuries remained an overlooked backwater in academia.

Folklore already possess the vocabulary and methods to comprehend and measure such a brave new world. It has the attitudes and assumptions, the knowledge frameworks ready at hand. As we understand how the mind works, as we democratize, we will realize the central role played by narrative in the workings of the mind and society, that society is a kind of virtual reality similar to the internet in which abstract things affect the real world, that narrative and oral tradition exist everywhere and explain how people know what they know and apply what they know to the world around them. This is a profound shift from the rationalist assumptions that have driven Western civilization since the beginning of the Enlightenment.

Social Science and Folklore

The kind of social science work exemplified by Albion's Seed and the kind of work done by folklorists demonstrates the value of vernacular material, the potential usefulness of photographs of ordinary people and places. The scholarship of Albion is based upon two pillars, the first is social statistics and the second is anecdotal. The latter is used to confirm and explore the culture as it existed, such as Byrd's secret diary. The former is used to verify anecdotal and cultural evidence (from the diaries and art of the time). In the eighteenth century photography had yet to be invented. This means that now is the first time we are beginning to use photographic evidence, the documentary tradition, as scholars have used written documents, letters and journals.

The photograph, and recorded visual imagery in general, which includes photography, video and any new technologies in the future, such as 3d visualization, present us with both a documentary record useful collectively to social science and an individual record similar to the anecdotal one of journals. Photographs are both evidence and require interpretation. What is in a photograph we can measure and aggregate into social statistics, what is happening in a photograph is open to interpretation. This is where context becomes important, since we must rely upon the anecdotal written record, upon stories and recounting of events to understand the image. If we fail to record the social context of the photograph or reconstruct it through providing context, we fail to understand the image.

In any event, there is a connection and relationship between social science and folklore, the aggregate and the particular, the evidentiary and the anecdotal that are required and mix together to create a more accurate picture of the past.

Mapping Card Photographs

Today, I posted the following to the GenPhoto email discussion group. I thought it would make a good addition to the blog as well.

Google has a new service called My Maps enabling anyone to create a public or private map containing descriptive markers for just about anything. The markers can contain rich text and images.

Card photographs make an ideal subject for mapping, since they generally are imprinted with the location of the photographer's studio on the back or front. This makes is possible to create a marker for each studio. If the photograph has a known date (a tax stamp date, indicated in writing or estimated from the card style or knowledge of the subject), studios can be mapped as the photographer moves.

I have mapped the known studio locations for J. G. Mangold, a significant nineteenth-century studio photographer and publisher of stereoviews in the Quad Cities region and Florida.

I encourage everyone to note the photographer's imprint on the back of the card photographs in their family collection and create markers on Google's MyMaps (or other similar collaborative or shared mapping services). It would be a fascinating exercise and could provide useful data on historic studio photographers to map their studios. For example, an overview of studio distribution could be seen; the movements of photographers as they migrated west could be made visible.

It is also possible to do this on wikimapia.org, which is a collaborative project where anyone can describe a location. You may find it a little more difficult to use than Google's MyMaps, but the
idea of an independent non-commercial (at least for now...I do not believe they are associated with the Wikipedia, but seems to be done in the same spirit) mapping project is appealing. I will leave that for others unless I have time to explore this possibility. I have not explored Flickr maps or Picasa albums or the wikimapia for this purpose yet.

It would be nice if Google maps could associate a date with the place, so that historical layers could be shown, so that historical locations and descriptions could be separated from contemporary ones. I made sure I put circa dates on the entries so people are not confused when the map comes up in Google search. It would be helpful, for example, to display locations between a range of dates, so that the studios between 1861 and 1865 only could be mapped. The distribution prior to 1861 could be mapped and compared to before and after the war.

What would be truly powerful is if the collaborative mapping could be combined with shared mapping to allow collectors of photographs and people with family photographs from the nineteenth-century to cooperate and somehow merge this kind of information. So that if I
create a map of studios from my card photographs and someone else does the same, that one could look up the photographer and see a combined list of all the locations. Or the same if everyone located the individual photographs. I suppose this might be possible through
Picasa if it were integrated into the mapping system or through Flickr's geotagging maps system for their albums.

What I need to do is attach an album of photographs to a location, since there can be more than one photograph and more than one imprint per location, but this is a good start. With Flickr or Picasa albums, I suppose it would be possible for collectors to put their photographs online, map them, and the display an aggregate map of all the images.

I hope to revisit the map with more data and pictures and in time explore the other possibilities.

The power to map any kind of data easily could have profound affects on folk studies, genealogy and social history.

Most people don't understand Americans ...

"Most people don't understand Americans because they don't know how frightening it had been to leave home completely and to pull up your roots and face the wilderness." -- Alan Lomax

I was startled by how Alan Lomax in the film Appalachian Journeys anticipates David Hackett Fischer's findings in Albion's Seed, discovering evidence of British folkways transplanted to America. Speaking of the poetry and song of the Scots-Irish, Lomax observes "This 70,000 square miles of beautiful tangled green hills allowed this British tradition time to reshape itself ... when it was being cut to pieces by the industrialization of Great Britain, it was finding a new home here ... taking on a new life ... a life out of the corn fields, the feuds and the whisky stills..." Americans were shaped by the unique environment of a new land, but they were were also shaped by the persistence of old world culture.

Although, the unique flora and fauna of America, such as the poisonous snakes, "which few Britains had ever seen," shaped American identity and expression, "much also was carried over from Great Britain like this jumping jack and its jigging step" which was still popular in English pubs as well as the Appalachians when the film was made. Lomax makes many of the same connections between Great Britain and America made in Albion's Seed.

You can see the film Appalachian Journey on the Folkstreams.net website.

The Acceptance of Oracles

In a previous post I said no one truly knows anything. Of course, we must use reasonable knowledge. The knowledge we act on is always imperfect, it's important to recognize that, since many people go about their lives believing they are acting on evidence. I doubt anyone really makes their daily decisions on evidence.

There is always a smarty pants who says that saying "nothing is truly knowable,"is just a high toned stance of philosophers and not really anything people in the real world should go by. The problem I have with such statements is that there exist people in our world, called rationalists, who pretend to act only on evidence in their decisions and lives. They act as if everything is knowable and that everything they know comes from evidence. They are frequently vocal advocates of science and reason as the only legitimate truth. That may be, but since we know reason is subject to fallacy, and that reason is a product of the human mind, it lacks the power to discern truth. Reason is a tool to be used to extend scientific knowledge, but it requires experiment, observation and prediction to verify that flights of reason are representative of reality. Even then, this mechanism may fail since we may lack complete observations, miss the one exception that proves the rule or disproves it. We may look at the data we have and say, continents never drift, then look again at later data as see that nevertheless the move. Science isn't truth. It's a successive approximation to the truth. It may be reasonable to trust science more than what someone says to you on the street, or what the good book tells you about the creation, but that does not mean either of those sources are wrong. In fact, if the lesson the Getty museum learned over the purchase of the Greek statute (Gladwell, Blink!), which science "verified" and an expert determined was a fake from a single glance lasting a few milliseconds, has anything to say about truth, is that sometimes individuals without any evidence are more accurate than scientists with rooms full of instruments and the wrong assumptions. It may just be, we have to recognize that there are times we must depend on oracles.

Some day, we may be required to accept the pronouncements of software intelligence, without any evidence at all, maybe not even evidence we could comprehend, with our limited mental capacity.

Citizendium: Multiple Truths Welcome?

I've been reading the Citizendium's approach to governing what goes into their content. This new attempt at a wiki encyclopedia favors an approach with less rules, greater oversight and tries to accommodate a multiplicity of views on truth.

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Neutrality_Policy

I wish they would not call it a neutrality policy. I strongly dislike the oxymoronic "neutral point of view."

I don't know how far the Citizendium will go, but I do believe multiple truths should be represented transparently. There is no reason not to accommodate multiple truths and no reason not to build information systems capable of accommodating multiple truths.

Contrary to popular belief, there does exist more than more than one truth. In genealogy, for example, the idea of multiple truths is necessary, since the same individual is frequently claimed by more than one family. Information about the past is sketchy and subject to interpretation. When the first online genealogies were being discussed on the GenWeb mailing list, it was ultimately concluded that there should not be a single unified global genealogy, since the "facts" could never be reconciled perfectly. There would by necessity be a need for representing multiple truths, based upon facts weighted by how much confidence we have in the sources (familiar to anyone who sources their genealogy).

Moreover, the truths we hold in our minds are imperfect, and emerge from our folk knowledge, through narrative and are based upon assumptions, which generally are made not on evidence (and probably can never be made upon anything else), but on the folk knowledge we absorb from our surroundings.

An absolute truth may exist and be determined by the physical universe, but there are many questions that arise about the human mind, society and the constructions of the human mind, which society is an example, which have no physical existence at all and it may never be able to determine what is true. There is also the nature of our knowledge existing only as sense perceptions, which makes science a kind of honorable delusion, as accurate as we can determine to agree on shared descriptions of phenomena. We have a reasonable idea of what we know is true or not through careful scientific inquiry, assisted by not guaranteed by reason, but in the end the only thing we know is: No one truly knows anything.