It's Always More Complicated

Brain’s sex differences are subtle and contradictory, large MRI study finds:

But even apparently null results, as in the current study, are useful, Sanchís Segura says, “because it’s important to talk about when men and women are similar” in a field that is biased toward finding bias. For example, the way brain activation mapped onto behavior was largely the same for men and women, the new study found.
“You can prove that a difference exists, but you cannot prove that a difference doesn’t exist,” she says. “You can put into PubMed, ‘sex differences,’ and you will have thousands of papers, but what if I want to look for the absence of differences? We don’t even have a word.”

No evidence for ‘witches’ marks’ claims at old English buildings, historian says:

Over the years, English Heritage and Historic England have claimed to have identified large numbers of “witches’ marks” or “ritual protection symbols” on the walls of historic buildings, including medieval churches and houses.
Now a leading architectural historian has said there is “absolutely no evidence” that these marks have anything to do with witches or any “mystical meanings”.
Daisy wheels, or hexafoils, are among symbols that are no more than the marks of stonemasons who worked on those buildings, according to Jennifer Alexander, a professor of architectural history at Warwick University and author of a new study.

What Do You Do with a Phantom Sailor Suit? A New Note with Some "New" Old Evidence on Cornell Woolrich, the Blackton Sisters and the Infamous Story of the Sex Diary

I had some vague knowledge of Woolrich, but pretty much only as 'er, wrote noir novels in the 30s or thereabouts? some of them became movies???'

I'm also slightly sceptical of the 'unconsummated marriage' alternative narrative simply because if you realised you had made A Dreadful Mistake this was probably an easy out via annulment? (will concede that I have personally written scholarly article deconstructing a famous allegedly non-consummated marriage narrative in the light of the British divorce laws of the early C20th)

But the whole 'create sensationalist account on basis of I think this happened/I made it all up' is not unfamiliar to moi.

Maybe reading is having a moment with people going on about it in various places??

Anyway I was beswozzled, bothered and quite boggled to read somewhere - and seem to have failed to have retained a link anywhere - somebody saying they were getting back into reading, and what they found actually helped was taking the time to look up New Words They Had Not Come Across Before.

Which is the sort of thing that I remember we were given as homework once, and you know, I was hard put to it to find words in the chapters of the relevant set text that I did not know already or could work out from context what they meant or fair approximation.

I can't imagine anything more dreary, but hey, diff'rent strokes for diffr'ent folks, I am no better and neither are you, etc etc etc.

On the other hand I think I can quite get behind this, which popped up on bluesky today:

What you read is less important than whether you ever spend time thinking about what you've read.

And on reading and also writing and not always doing big showing: Say it, don't show it: A contrarian take on exposition:

almost as if the reader is being enlisted as a collaborator, using their own imagination to fill in details that are merely implied in the words of the book.

Latest in the Guardian You be the judge column: should my girlfriend stop scrolling on her phone while we’re watching TV?

After we finish work in the evenings, she’ll constantly be watching videos on Instagram or reading stuff on Reddit while we watch television together. I think that the time we spend together in the evenings should be sacred. I want to do stuff as a couple, but can’t if she’s not fully present. We recently had a friend from university, Penny, come to stay with us and Fran started scrolling during a film we were all watching. Penny backed me up and told Fran it was irritating.

(Hint: I think it's Edward.)

Plus it becomes clear that they treat watching TV/movies as a different kind of experience (whether this is to do with Fran's ADHD or not, deponent sayeth not, people are various):

I watch a film with my own eyes, not someone else’s, but my boyfriend and best friend seem to think it’s a collective experience. They want to enjoy the punchlines and discuss the plot together.... I watch a film with my own eyes, not someone else’s, but my boyfriend and best friend seem to think it’s a collective experience. They want to enjoy the punchlines and discuss the plot together. I have my phone on mute when they are watching TV, so I don’t buy the fact that it disrupts their viewing experience.

Okay, the whole Twitter/Musk thing seems to be extremely up in the air and (self-reflexively, what) full of sound and fury and who knows what it signifies and how everything will pan out...

But all the people running around going 'move to X or Y' different social media platform -

- sure, I would like to see more people on Dreamwidth! - hello, any new people! -

- no way is Dreamwidth doing the same sort of thing as Twitter or Facebook or the various other places where people hang out.

The different places are not fungible and they are different ecological niches.

I do different things involving different people on Twitter than I do here -

And some things which have gone the way of the dodo I still mourn, there were listservs which had lively debates back in the day and while there are still one or two maybe still going like that, the main set of academic listservs I'm still subscribed to are not conducive to the same back and forth (may be network-dependent?).

I've also been thinking - while thinking of 'social media' as comprising this diversity of spaces and potentialities of interaction - of the discourse that it's a horrible snakepit of toxicity.

And okay, there is a lot of that, but there are also a lot of unhistoric acts of pleasantness and random acts of kindness and positive connections? And people giving good advice? In various places.

Perhaps it is not entirely a Pollyannaish glow of positivity to shaming-quote-tweet anything which invokes 'dusty archives' especially if somebody purports to have discovered something 'lost' in them. Or point people at more reliable sources for certain canards about the Victorians... But at least I'm not actually deliverately searching out instances, just tackling them when they cross my horizon?

If I were to be publishing the short stories of a given author in three volumes, with introduction and critical apparatus, information I think might be helpful to people interested in these volumes would be:

A LIST OF THE CONTENTS OF EACH VOLUME.

Okay, my own motivation in the matter was actually trying to find the title of a particular story by the author in question, or at least to glance over the titles to see if one of them stimulated the memory of the story I recalled.

But nowhere, no, not even on the publisher's site, was there such a list.

Chiz.

(I subsequently located one of my own collections of works by the author in question and looked in it and think I have found the relevant tale.)

Also, if I were proposing to do something based on A Particular Source recommended to me by another person, I would go and take a look at that source before getting a definite go-ahead, just in case when I got to it it did not set my little grey cells productively whirring, rather than only when I had.

But I daresay we all have our different processes...

A fun, well, relatively, afternoon in the British Library once I had reconciled myself to the fact that I thought I had ordered a volume of a periodical that the system didn't think I had (silly me, thinking that ordering a date span will bring up the middle year as well as the years at each end: yes, I am interested in a very narrow period of time). But anyway, I was sort of planning another BL trip later in the week anyway.

And neither of the volumes that turned up contained anything relevant to the matter on hand (I was, in fact, anticipating more from the midway year, for Reasons), but my eye kept falling on things and my mind kept going 'interesting' even though it was nothing whatsoever to do with any other thing on my research horizon at the moment.

***

Dept of, these people are alienz, or I am: Why 4 a.m. Is the Most Productive Hour.

We also think these people have a very restricted online social circle if

By waking up at 4 a.m., they’ve essentially wiped a lot of those distractions off their plate. No one is expecting you to email or answer the phone at 4 a.m. No one will be posting on Facebook.

If your natural wake-up time is 4 a.m., good on you, go with it, whatever works for you. But don't make it this moral high ground, productivity-hack thing (especially as, if everybody starts getting up at 4 to get a jump on the day, those benefits of quiet solitude will be gone, gone, gone.)

Being, perhaps, somewhat pedantically, even preciously, irked by Yet Another Thinkpiece going on about city/rural divide.

Because, really, surely most people in US live neither in big metropolises or in contact with the soil and the rhythms of nature in country settings? (my sense of modern agribusiness is that anyway it has little or nothing to do with the timeless rhythms of the seasons.)

People live in small cities, in towns of varying sizes, in suburbs: and within these categories there are huge differences in themselves.

Perhaps this particularly springs to mind because of the book I was reading about homosexuality and masculinity in the industrial north of England, late C19th to mid-C20th.

a) There was a substantial discussion of Edward Carpenter, who, in spite of his rep as being all about back to the land and small communities, actually lived in a smallholding very near Sheffield, and was a well-known and accepted local character in that industrial city.

b) the author (Helen Smith) finds that there were very significant cultural differences between large industrial cities of the north of England, in particular between cosmopolitan, outward looking cities such as Liverpool and Manchester, and more inward-looking cities, such as Sheffield. (And this didn't play out in terms of toleration of men having sex with men in the way one might imagine.)

So, the idea of monolithic kinds of places where people live, and in particular any binary distinction or homogeneity within categories (hi, I live in London, where there are quite significant differences between specific boroughs, for how this operated, again, somewhat counterintuitively in terms of maternal health in an earlier era, I recommend Lara Marks, Metropolitan Maternity), really problematic.

Every so often, people with opinions (esp prob people paid to have OPINIONZ) will wring their hands and declare that Those People On the Internet Exist In A Cosy Confirmation-of-their-Views Echo Chamber.

Well, hell, yeah, most of the stuff I see on DW/LJ, FB, Twitter, etc, is coming from a position that is usually one that I can sympathise with.

Does that mean that I have to spend time, energy and emotional resources in seeking out the necessary to See Both Sides?

(Oh gosh, this is getting back to comfort zones again, innit?)

No, actually, one is scarcely unaware that there are other views out there, because, you know, Our Sort Dearie are quite often being aghast about the kinds of things Not Our Sort Dearie are saying and getting up to.

I think of that phenomenon I have come across as an archivist and a researcher, which is that the archives of a cause (or cause-related person) usually have quite a bit about The Opposition, and, as I point out to researchers trying to research 'pro-life' activism, while the bodies and individuals engaged in that cause have been surprisingly (??) backward in placing their records in publicly accessible repositories, you can really find out quite a lot about what they were up to and what they were saying by looking in the archives of organisations dedicated to reproductive choice. (Which also means that you are not obliged to make nice to 'P-L' activists to get access...)

Anyway, I am aware of quite a lot of things going on which, were I actually inhabiting a cosy echo-chamber of like minds, like, we remark, unto Angela Thirkell's inhabitants of Barsetshire, where even the one guy who is a Labour MP is anti-the party establishment and probably about to switch sides, I would know nothing of. (Angela, you really lost me at the point with the dissing on the Gummint wasting money on universal healthcare and That Awful Welshman.)

I have been guiltily aware that I still have not addressed the prompt that boxofdelights gave me about 2 months ago:

[A]bout different social expectations in different cultures. You know how with some social expectations, like "walk on the left/stand on the right," or "when someone gives you something, you say thank you," no matter how often people fail to behave that way, you still expect them to? But with other expectations, you can just decide ah, that is not how they do things here?

Do you have different social expectations of Americans and English people? As friends, or colleagues, or just people on the same escalator? Would you talk about the most interesting or most irritating such difference?

This was because I was having/am still having quite a lot of difficulty thinking about this in terms of specifics, and wonder if this is because from quite an early age I was aware that Other People didn't necessarily do the same as my family and thus I was perhaps always aware that different expectations are usually in play, even within the same and fairly homogeneous culture (as when I was growing up).

Though this doesn't mean that I am not thrown when I encounter a different national culture where they don't behave in certain public situations in the way I expect, e.g. when we were in Madrid in the 90s, the tendency of people in the street to walk right through you rather than do the little 'after you Alphonse, no after you' mirror dance I was used to (I think this may have faded somewhat anyway, because people with their mobiles tend not to notice other people in the street); or in the Netherlands on the last visit where it wasn't so much about the walk left/stand right rule on escalators as 'let's all of us stand right across it, what, walk on an escalator, why?' However, after bitter experience I now know that in Italy, you buy your bus ticket in the bar/tobacconists before boarding. I still do not think that this is altogether intuitive.

I think I am now mentally prepared for the three-step cheek-kiss (not sure if this is uniquely Dutch or more generally European) - first cheek, second cheek, back to first - from my Dutch friends. Though for all I know this has now changed.

I do have different social expectations, I think, of British and North American friends. If I don't actually go around formally addressing my UK friends or at least calling them by their surnames even after they've saved my life while tiger-shooting, there is, I think, still a certain degree of reserve. I'm just slightly ambivalent about the greater openness and forthcomingness that I associate with NAm manners and customs, because while this is lovely when practiced by my lovely friends, and I really appreciate it, at another point on the spectrum it is those people one has only just encountered on a train journey or whatever asking intrusive questions and providing TMI about themselves.

Also, in the UK, random strangers at bus stops are very unlikely to start asking one questions about Jesus, one's relationship with.

Plus, the sales-tax thing, never not confusing.

***

Should anyone have any further prompts, please do comment below.

(And still open to suggestions...)

This question/prompt came from kindkit.

This may be partly an artefact of the UK situation, in which there are separate training systems and job opportunities for working in archives or in libraries, though some people end up in places where they have to deal with archives and manuscripts and books as well (also sometimes paintings, photographs, and artefacts of interest that people have kindly donated). But in the UK it's perfectly possible to spend your entire career in record repositories.

The thing is, that working with archives, and working with books, journals, digital databases etc, are rather different things.

A book is a book is a book, and while some books fetch ridiculous prices (I cannot believe what some modern first editions go for) the text is going to be the same in any copy (of the same edition) in any library anywhere (with some exceptions for early printed books, associational copies, and really, really rare items).

Whereas archives and manuscripts are unique, though some mss are more unique than others: though I suppose that minor differences are discernable between the notes kept by C18th medical students of the lectures by the same noted anatomist around the same year.

Manuscripts are sort of like books, in that they are discrete items (and medieval/early modern mss are very like books indeed). But archives aren't, really.

In archives, context is important. Identical documents may be found in different archives, but they will be in different contexts, e.g. in one case, letters from the taxman will all be carefully filed and form one example of the person's meticulous habits, in others, they turn up all over the place with shopping lists or personal memos written on the back.

The received wisdom on cataloguing archives is that the original arrangement should be respected, though this is sometimes a utopian hope rather than a guide to practice, as when the person donating the papers remarked that auntie used to keep them in suitcases and turned them out on the floor when looking for something. Or simply because they've undergone a lot of moving around. Even in a relatively coherent archive there may be inconsistencies and things out of place.

Quite often an archivist has to live with chaos for a bit in the interests of ultimate order. Whereas librarians, my impression is, like to be able to give a book a clear classification in whatever system they use, asap.

Archives are multifaceted and labyrinthine and fuzzy at the edges. There is a belief, at least among archivists, that they require a rather different mindset to being a librarian. The impression one gets of how librarians regard archivists is that they can quantify how many books they catalogue in given time period, why can't archivists do something similar? It takes the time it takes.