Mistake at the Factory

People usually think I’m right when I say things. This was a much better power before the advent of the internet. I don’t know why my brain is a useless information warehouse; I can remember the phone number for Frank’s Cleaners or the Erie Yacht Club twenty years after the last time I dialed either, but for nearly a year I thought I had already turned thirty-five—I had simply forgotten how old I was. It is not useful to know tons of random bits of information. I once remarked to my German professor that I often hope to be struck by lightning, in the belief that all those phone numbers would be replaced by the German grammar I still struggle to remember. I’m fairly certain that resulted in a pity A-. But people are accustomed to the random knowledge, so I’ve always been the recipient of odd phone calls asking me how to spell things, or when the Treaty of Ghent took place, or what you feed a baby bat. I’ve always been perplexed that people believe I would know such things, and then take my word for it when I give them an answer.

Some smart people don’t. And they have the internet to back them up. And then they never, ever, let me forget about that time I was wrong. So for the record, I admit that Richard Dreyfuss was not in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or A History of Violence, nor was he in any other films by auteurs I dislike. There was a case not long ago when I became convinced that there had been a mistake at the Chick-O-Stick factory. If you’ve never had a Chick-O-Stick, you’ve been missing out. It’s hard to describe the satisfaction of snorfling down a log of crunchy peanut butter encrusted with toasted coconut that for some inexplicable reason is orange. The Chick-O-Stick comes in several sizes, which I usually call Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear, and Fetus. I have pictured all except the nubbin size here, as it proved elusive to locate in the greater Baltimore area.

Baby Bear Chick-O-Stick is shockingly lacking in coconut encrustations.

After thirty years of eating Chick-O-Sticks, I finally noticed that the baby bear size does not have coconut on the outside, unlike the rest of the family. Having only a single example to go on, and unwilling to allow for genetic variation in the Stick Family, I insisted that there had been a “mistake at the factory.” It stands to reason that all of the Chick-O-Sticks are made on the same equipment at the Atkinson Candy Company in Lufkin, Texas. My friend, being one of the smart ones and wise to my brain, told me without hesitation that I’m an idiot. In my indignation, I got Atkinson PR on the horn; they gently informed me that I am, in fact, an idiot. Baby Bear Chick-O-Stick has the coconut on the inside, on purpose. While I remain dissatisfied with the logic of having only one size of Chick-O-Stick without a nubby coconut exterior, I admit defeat. There was no mistake at the factory, although I’m pretty sure Richard Dreyfuss is a major stockholder.

This brings me to my second project for Clio Wired. I’m not someone who views the internet as a shiny new toy, able to make toast and manage my collections while I wile away the hours on Facebook. While I’m very impractical in my personal life (e.g. giant brick pile), I’m remarkably pragmatic when someone pays me to do something. Filthy lucre makes me very practical. So when the institution I’m working for spends all of its time and money having people perform mind numbing tasks like processing collections into a giant database, I want to be confident that it’s being done in the smartest way possible. Having now created many smaller databases myself, I get cranky with the ones I encounter that are created by others. No data dictionary? Apoplectic. Content notes “hidden” in the back end? Vexed. No standardization? Spastic. What makes me really grumpy, however, is the cover-up. To me, an online “corpus” is a sleek legerdemain; it the secret handshake between the institution and the lazy thinker; the Cliff Notes version of history for the researcher who can’t be bothered to get off his ass and look for answers. The internet can give you Richard Dreyfuss’ oeuvre with the hit of the return key, but it can’t tell you why you should hate him and his ratty little beard and his squeaky little voice and his fawning over the social sciences. A database is only as good as the quality of the information that humans have entered into it; it’s only as useful as the queries you create. And when you put limitations on that database in the online environment, it just gets worse. So it’s cute that you can create a wordle of Moby Dick that’s kind of shaped like a whale, but in terms of scholarly exactitude, it’s a parlor trick.

I sometimes get paid really well to find stuff that other people can’t or don’t know how to. It makes me a fantastic researcher and curator, but not necessarily a good historian. I don’t know if I’m good or not, but I am at least responsible. And I will always be Little Miss Half Empty, as one of my more lackluster colleagues once dubbed me, because I am always going to point out the mistakes, the gaps, and the problems first. This does not make me popular with stultifyingly inept bosses who refuse to see that the emperor is stark naked, but it does make me popular with researchers who depend on my inquisitorial zeal to find materials for them within the collections I am responsible for.

Having now voiced my qualms about online databases, I am going to attempt to find one’s porcupine. The work I did for my master’s thesis involved learning two languages and conducting primary research in four countries. It was a joyful, arduous hunt for both funding and documentary evidence, and the end product was as satisfying as finding that perfect pound of bacon after you’ve rejected every package in the grocery store for being too lean. I defended in 1997, prior to the advent of the internet being a remarkably useful tool, and I was largely overseas when email bloomed. I missed the revolution while living in a borrowed apartment on the Letna plain. All of my work was done without any access or reference to online resources, yet at the time it was considered exhaustive.

Fast forward thirteen years, and I’ve returned to school and my ghetto. Living up to the manifold obligations of the title of Little Miss Half Empty, I’m going to attempt to repeat my research circa 1997, using only online resources. It’s work that I would need to do anyway (there’s that porcupine!), so even if it turns out that there’s no mistake at the factory, I still won’t be wasting my time. But I’m not giving up my crown and sash without a fight.