Chapter One: Baltimore Writers

Baltimore has long been associated with  Edgar Allan Poe, even though he was born in Boston and lived much of his life in Virginia and New York. It was in Baltimore however that Poe first rose to  prominence, winning a literary contest in 1835 for his story “A Manuscript Found in a Bottle.” And of course, it was in  Baltimore that he mysteriously died. Poe’s grave, at the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in downtown Baltimore, is still a pilgrimage site for his fans.

For much of his time in Baltimore, Poe lived in a tiny house on North Amity Street, and this house has been carefully preserved as the Poe House and Museum. In the uppermost room of the house, Poe wrote many of the stories and poems for which he is now famous.

The Sheridan Libraries abound with Poe-related material, much of it a result of the assiduous collecting activity of our Librarian for American Literature, Gabrielle Dean. These include:

• 19th century periodicals, with Poe’s works
• 19th century editions of his works
• French translations of Poe. He is probably even more well-known, and appreciated, in France than in the US.
• The Edgar Allan Poe Collection, consisting of secondary materials (primarily newspaper clippings) and writings about Edgar Allan Poe.

The Enoch Pratt Free Library also has a significant Poe collection; including letters, clippings, books, and a lock of both Poe’s hair and that of his child bride, Virginia.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Literary Baltimore: “A Look at the ‘Sage of Baltimore,’” and perhaps the quintessential intellectual Baltimoron (if that’s not too much of an oxymoron), H.L. Mencken.

If you want to get a head-start, check out recent French films the library has on DVD – I bet we have more since you checked last. And for you scholarly cinephiles, I probably don’t even need to mention our research guides for Film & Media Studies and French Language and Literature – you’re probably finding books and articles right now!

I have friends who are addicted to their Smartphones and social media. They are constantly updating their Facebook (FB) status, tweeting, downloading pictures to Flickr, or glued to their smartphones, talking or texting or playing with an app of some kind. Be honest, now: can you leave home without your smartphone? Have you gone one day without Facebook, blogging, or tweeting?

We all know that social media can certainly become a river down which all of your time flows. However, the number of ways in which social media and e-devices contribute to the educational goals of students and others is remarkable. For example:

• Some professors create FB pages for their incoming freshman classes, so that students can get to know one another as well as ask questions of the professor, the librarian, and the TA’s before their college careers begin
• Twitter has been shown to be a successful tool for generating interaction among students and creating a stronger presence for the professor, especially in online classes.
• As for smartphones, tablets, and e-readers, there are amazing educational apps available: Spanish for Dummies (Nook) or the history of the Great Chicago Fire (iPhone), anyone?

How do you use social media or your smartphones/tablets/e-devices to educate yourself? Please tell us!

Have you ever gone cold turkey on one of your favorite social networking spaces? If so, how did you feel? If not, give it a try and let me know how your life changed.

• psychology
• psychiatry
• animal behavior
• neuroscience
• social psychology
• educational psychology
• history of psychology

It covers different types of literature:

• peer-reviewed journal articles
• periodical articles
• book chapters
• dissertations

It also covers a huge amount of time: 1880s – present! Journals in 29 languages are indexed by PsycINFO.

PsycINFO also offers lots of ways to focus your search. In a previous post I talked about the limits offered by PsycINFO. A future post will look at the thesaurus PsycINFO offers. If you’re interested in other library resources about psychology or neuroscience, we have a library guide just for you.

There are also marvelous blogs.

I know about a few (and I’m obviously reading yours), but who else has a blog?

Hopkins Interactive is a social media website “designed to enable prospective and admitted students…to connect with the University by offering them candid, uncensored information about student life on campus and throughout Baltimore.” Their site has blogs about life at JHU, written by current students, faculty, and many others.

Some academic departments and programs have blogs, such as this one, run by master’s students, from the Institute for Policy Studies.

Other university-related blogs include the Carey Business School’s blog entitled “On Leadership.” Read discussions about aspects of leadership by members of a distinguished panel who write comments that take note of recent news stories.

New Hopkins blogs are being launched all the time: I’m delighted to see the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Office of Facilities Management leap into the blogosphere. OFM’s blogs (News and Alerts) will keep us informed about physical changes and conditions around Homewood campus. And JHUP’s blog has started with authors’ comments about Iraq veterans, advance medical directives, and TinTin.

Follow some of these so that you always know what’s going on!

Hmm, good idea. But how could I ever keep up with all this information?

If you’re using a feed reader, you can easily subscribe to an entire blog or even just a particular category. For example, MSEL’s blog gives you announcements about library hours, news about the Brody Learning Commons, time-saving tips about how to use the library catalog, getting help with your term papers (like that animal behavior report or your paper that needs primary sources), and even how to find fun things (like the latest best-sellers and DVDs). If you love it all, click the “subscribe” tab at the top of the page. Or if one particular category catches your eye, just click the RSS link to the right of it. Don’t forget, you can always just subscribe via e-mail so you never miss one.

Being fair to the Census Bureau, the old AFF could have used a facelift, but why change the mechanics completely? The old AFF prompted people to start at the most crucial starting point – CHOOSE GEOGRAPHY FIRST. Census data availability is always affected by the size of the area you want to study. At smaller geographies (tract, block group), less data is available due to confidentiality issues (and sometimes things just aren’t collected at that lower level). If you are planning on using decennial census data or American Community Survey data on the new AFF, here’s what you should do – pick your geography, then pick any topics you want  to limit your search by (this includes specific population characteristics such as race  because the Race and Ethnicity filter can be too narrow), then pick your dataset (also listed under Topics). If you’re going to be looking at one table or just a couple tables at large geography, the new AFF isn’t so bad. The problems start when you want to download multiple tables matching on geography to use that data with ArcGIS or any other statistical package.

Here is my advice to you – if you’re going to use decennial census data or the American Community Survey, use Social Explorer instead. You will notice that it has a very familiar and friendly interface. It also has decennial census data back to the beginning of the decennial census, as well as some other goodies. It took me 3 minutes to read a downloaded file (all Baltimore City Tracts, multiple tables) into Stata. Seriously, 3 minutes. If I were to do the same within the new AFF (and I tried) I would have to remove all the excess text at the top of my file, rename all the variables to unique names, merge discrete tables together, and then write a program to read the file into a statistical package. If you’re up for the challenge, I admire you – I chose the simpler path (are you listening Census Bureau??).

Höfer visited Baltimore back in 2010 to photograph GPL and the neighboring Walters Art Museum. Who knew lil’ ol’ Baltimore has such international architectural appeal?  (OK, we always knew.)

Want to learn more? Hopkins’ professor Michael Fried is giving a lecture on Höfer and her work on Saturday, February 25, 2 pm. Space is limited, but do consider attending.

If this piques your interest and you want to learn more, check out the books we have about Candida Höfer, books written by Michael Fried, books about the George Peabody Library, and materials about architectural photography in general. There’s a lot of reading to do – you’d better get started!

Even more, you say?? Wow, you’re inquisitive! Investigate the various tools on the Art History Research Guide for scholarly journal articles, images, authoritative websites, and a lot more. And, if you can’t find what you’re looking for, feel free to ask a librarian!

Once upon a time, however, there was a world without photography. That world had images, to be sure, and it had image reproduction technologies: wood-cuts, copperplate engravings, lithographs. But photography put a certain kind of startling realism within reach of the masses. At the same time, because they were seen as the “pure” creations of sunlight produced without human artistry, photographs often seemed to their early viewers like the truth-telling visions of an impartial god. From the beginning, photographs looked both natural and supernatural.

Photography, like many technologies, was not exactly “invented”; several experimenters in the 1820s and 1830s tried out different methods of fixing projected images onto various types of surfaces—and they were building on discoveries that went back to the 5th century BC, like the camera obscura. But the daguerreotype, as the first widely publicized photographic technique, has the honor of providing the official start date of 1839. One wonderful thing to know about daguerreotypes: no digitized version is going to provide you with the experience of looking at an actual daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes were positive, single images chemically etched with microscopic precision onto polished copper plates coated with silver. The picture that resulted was highly reflective; it could be barely visible in bright light or when viewed at certain angles. These first photographs, so powerfully realistic to their viewers, were also ethereal and even eerie.

It took many steps, many tools and lots of practice to make a daguerreotype; other photographic processes, like those required to make calotypes, albumen prints, ambrotypes and tin types, were equally daunting. Nevertheless, a brave band of entrepreneurs and hobbyists embraced the challenge. And as you might expect, manuals and guidebooks soon emerged to aid those intrepid image-makers. These early how-to books offer fascinating insights into mid nineteenth-century science, professional identity and of course taste: they contain hints about everything from the procuring of equipment to the preparation of chemicals, from the furnishing of portrait studios to the arrangement of props.

You can explore many of these early manuals in the library’s rare book collections. We have the one of the earliest accounts of the daguerreotype process, published in Paris in 1839, along with a translation published in London in 1839 and a “Notice of the Daguerreotype” from the Maryland Medical and Surgical Journal of April 1840. (By nineteenth-century standards, this was news traveling at lightning speed around the world!) You can also see how the fashions in early photographic processes changed. Reynolds’ Photographer’s Guide, Being a Complete Revelation of All the Mysteries Connected with the Daguerreotype Process (1850) focuses exclusively on daguerreotypes, as its delightful title indicates, while Snelling’s History and Practice of the Art of Photography, or, The Production of Pictures through the Agency of Light (1850) contains “all the instructions necessary for the complete practice of the Daguerrean and photogenic art, both on metallic plates and on paper.” Coale’s Manual of Photography (1858) reviews various methods but is mostly devoted to a particular albumen process; Waldack and Neff’s Photography on Collodion (1858) and Russell’s Tannin Process (c. 1861) leave behind the daguerreotype altogether. These particular volumes are all housed at the George Peabody Library, where you can read them in a nineteenth-century milieu that, appropriately enough, continues to be an enticing subject for modern-day photographers.

One such student is Ellen Urheim, JHU Class of 2014. Ellen had a class at the George Peabody Library in which she and her colleagues had the opportunity to work with 19th century travel diaries and other neat old books and manuscripts. Ellen totally loved handling all sorts of old stuff, and she is now one of our star interns at the Peabody, having scanned and transcribed a portion of an account of one traveler to Baltimore in 1818 (the poor fellow was not taken with the “repulsive & unpleasant effluvia” of Fells Point).

Ellen’s most recent project involved researching a rather interesting scrapbook created sometime in the 1870s by a woman named Louisa Cullen. This scrapbook isn’t just cutting and pasting old newspaper articles; a lot of care went into embellishing the pages with intricate designs, patterns, and poetry. In fact, the scrapbook is a fine representation of Victorian photo-collage, an art form in which women of the time excelled. The Cullen scrapbook is also home to the infamous Tom the Creepy Cat! Seriously, do you now need any further reasons to look at the Cullen scrapbook? We didn’t think so!

Of course, after reading this and surviving a meeting with Tom the Creepy Cat, contact Heidi Herr if you would like to volunteer in Special Collections!

Wednesday, February 29

Mason Hall

6 pm Reception/6:30 pm Reading

Margaret Sanger became one of the most vocal advocates for birth control at a time when the mere mention of such things was not only taboo but a felony. She pioneered the first family-planning clinic—the forerunner to Planned Parenthood—and became a lightning rod for the cause. In this lively new biography, historian Jean H. Baker argues convincingly that Sanger deserves the vaunted place in feminist history she once held.

Jean H. Baker is the author of several books on nineteenth-century American history, including Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography; James Buchanan; and Sisters: The American Suffragists. Baker earned her bachelor’s degree from Goucher College, and received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She is the Bennett-Harwood Professor of History at Goucher College.

RSVP here or at 410.516.7943.