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choco_frosh) wrote2006-06-16 01:12 pm
choco_frosh) wrote2006-06-16 01:12 pm
Realm: Academic - Subrealm: Research trip
There are some times in this research project (and I get the impression, in any such project) where you spend ages looking through stuff that might conceivably be useful, only to discover that, in fact, there´s nothing worthwhile there.
My whole trip to Karlsruhe was like that.
OK, not quite. I did get photocopies of the charters by which the abbot of Reichenau, his monastery, and several towns belonging to him all took citizenship in Konstanz in the fateful year 1429, and noted down a few intereesting transactions noted in a Research guide. And it was worthwhile to know that that there was, in fact, nothing of interest to me there.
...well, ok, there probably was. But it was going to take forever to find it. Especially since the room with all the manuscript catalogs was only open 5 hours a day, and I giving myself eyestrain since everything in the archive is microfilmed. (See previous rant). Oh, and you know you´re in some kind of meta-archive zone when the manuscript CATALOGS are so old that they´re only available to the public in photocopies, and you need advanced paleography skills to read them.
It could have been worse. At least I only had to make one trip. This was thanks to the generous hospitality of James Hunt, the computer-geek son of a North Haven acquaintance of ours, who´s been in Germany for the last 17 years. For a paunchy, middle-aged geek, he has a pretty cool life, since he has his own company that´s creating some completely new variety of animation softwear and headquartered in very nicely redone space in a 19th century brewery, has a brasilian girlfriend, and drives a moptorcycle.
He also (more prosaically) loves asparagus and has a one volume collection of all Janosch´s Tiger/Bär stories. I especially recommend "Post für den Tiger", which features the kleiner Tiger having codependency issues, the invention of various forms of mass communication, and a frog getting into a fight over who gets to date the Tiger-Ente.
Yeah, you can pretty much figure out how I spent the evening.
My whole trip to Karlsruhe was like that.
OK, not quite. I did get photocopies of the charters by which the abbot of Reichenau, his monastery, and several towns belonging to him all took citizenship in Konstanz in the fateful year 1429, and noted down a few intereesting transactions noted in a Research guide. And it was worthwhile to know that that there was, in fact, nothing of interest to me there.
...well, ok, there probably was. But it was going to take forever to find it. Especially since the room with all the manuscript catalogs was only open 5 hours a day, and I giving myself eyestrain since everything in the archive is microfilmed. (See previous rant). Oh, and you know you´re in some kind of meta-archive zone when the manuscript CATALOGS are so old that they´re only available to the public in photocopies, and you need advanced paleography skills to read them.
It could have been worse. At least I only had to make one trip. This was thanks to the generous hospitality of James Hunt, the computer-geek son of a North Haven acquaintance of ours, who´s been in Germany for the last 17 years. For a paunchy, middle-aged geek, he has a pretty cool life, since he has his own company that´s creating some completely new variety of animation softwear and headquartered in very nicely redone space in a 19th century brewery, has a brasilian girlfriend, and drives a moptorcycle.
He also (more prosaically) loves asparagus and has a one volume collection of all Janosch´s Tiger/Bär stories. I especially recommend "Post für den Tiger", which features the kleiner Tiger having codependency issues, the invention of various forms of mass communication, and a frog getting into a fight over who gets to date the Tiger-Ente.
Yeah, you can pretty much figure out how I spent the evening.