Life in the workshops, streets, and bars cannot be reduced to work conditions or customs of lodging and eating. Everyday practices were the result of deliberation and strategizing, embedded in cultures constructed out of denial and submission, dreams and refusals, rational and considered choices, and above all a desire for legitimacy.
Comment: I really like this idea that some of the important parts about documents can come from extremely ordinary places or events.
Words are windows; they will let you catch a glimpse of one or several contexts.
Connection: I can't remember where I have heard this saying before but I really enjoy it. People can look out the same window and see totally different things, just as two people can read the exact same words and come to entirely different conclusions and interpretations.
The event is not that he is a migrant who has arrived in the last three years, but all that he has lost during this time: hope, health, job
Question: How do you come to this conclusion from this excerpt? Are there times when the conclusion can simply be a time frame fo when someone arrived somewhere?
The trap is nothing more than this: you can become absorbed by the archives to the point that you no longer know how to interrogate them.
Connection/Comment: When taking history of Colgate, i ran into this trap many times. The longer you spend time doing research in the archives, the tougher it becomes to decipher which documents will be extremely useful to you. You tend to throw away documents after only briefly skimming the surface of them.
When you're collecting documents there is hardly any way to leave any material aside, because the aim of the task itself is to assemble as much pertinent information as possible within certain predetermined periods of time and space
Connection: This is a problem I have run into many times while doing research for papers. How do you know which documents to leave out and which ones you must keep in and dig even deeper into.
These pages that Thorin wrote have retained a voice, an intonation, a rhythm. They uncover an auditory culture from the past in a way few documents ever could.
Comment: It is very interesting to look at historical documents and be able to have a sense of the writer's voice in them. I feel like documents like these become all the more useful.
Bad weather is a poor conservator. In the archives of the Bastille/ certain documents were temporarily stored in damp cellars where they absorbed the rainwater that regu-larly leaked in, before then being carefully reinventoried and catalogued. The ink has run, words are blotted out partially or entirely, and reading these documents can be quite tricky.
How do you approach reading documents that are in bad shape? Are there any strategies to understand documents that have words cut out of them due to poor conditions?