Sunday, August 2, 2020

The Cost of Research

This was originally posted in a Facebook group, I felt that it could use some wider exposure. I have tweaked it a bit from the original post’s text.

 

I thought it could be informative discuss the real costs of scholarly research. I occasionally see requests in Facebook groups and elsewhere asking researchers to hand over large quantities of research. It’s not that I, or any other researcher I know, don’t want to share. For most of us sharing is part of our passion. Sometimes though it seems that some feel our intellectual property has to be community property. For free.

That information comes at a very real cost to the researcher. Trips to libraries and museums cost in transportation and often hotels. We all know how quickly travel costs add up. Some museums and libraries charge for researchers to take pictures, most charge for their staff to take pictures or photocopies. Quality books (new publications) don’t come cheap, period books come at even higher prices. Collecting extant items for research comes with significant costs. Sure, some cdv’s can be had for $1.99 (fewer and fewer though) but a good condition dress can easily reach well over $500, and that would be a common style with unusual ones easily being higher. All of these come with storage costs. Even “book”, along with online and other electronic information, research has costs – bigger computer storage for those huge files, backup service or hardware costs, software for organization and tracking, etc. Tools for examining items – microscopes, magnifying glasses, linen testers, etc., do not come cheaply. Collecting objects requires proper storage containers, space, environment control, and software for tracking for the larger collectors. For those who are gracious enough to exhibit their collections add in some significant costs for dress dummies or other supports, hoops, labels, etc. Many researchers belong to professional organizations for access to conferences, resources and networking. Those memberships also cost money.

We can’t forget the cost of researchers’ time. Many people spend uncountable hours, reading, searching, organizing, discussing with other researchers, reaching out to staff at museums and libraries, and traveling, Even once all of that is done, consider the time spent to answer some questions. If someone posts or emails a multiple paragraph answer, chock full of site and links, it may well have taken half an hour or more to think through, type out, dig out the cites, and track down the links.

Again, it’s not that I don’t want to share, or don’t think researchers should share. I do think though that people need to understand what goes into that sharing. There needs to be some understanding of the financial and time commitment that goes into those answers. I think it’s important for people to understand why classes taught by someone who does good research costs more than a few bucks. Why when someone is teaching a class they aren’t also going to just hand over all of the research on that topic for free to another person. Why sometimes we’ll balk at handing over huge amounts of information to people we know are going to use it for commercial profit instead of doing the research themselves.
If we try to guide you to doing research yourself it’s not that we don’t want to help you, it’s that we are trying to help you to help yourself.

Does a little trip really cost that much?
Right before I wrote the original post I had I spent two days in Winterthur’s library working on research for an upcoming symposium talk and an ongoing research project. Winterthur isn’t all that far from me, it’s an easy drive. I travel pretty cheap, searching for hotel deals and eat in cheap restaurants (or grab yogurt at a grocery store, or forget to eat a meal). Hotel costs for two night were just over $230. At mileage rates at that point my travel was just about $200 plus nearly $30 in tolls. Travel time, round trip, was about 10 hours. In two days of eating lunch and dinner out I spend about when I spend for a week’s worth of groceries (I’m not going anyplace expensive, I just eat really cheaply at home). Winterthur currently lets researchers take pictures for free, last time I was there they charged. I spent @ 2 hours total digging through their catalog, making notes, and prioritizing what I wanted to look at before going. I spent a little over 12 hours in the library over two days. I spent at least another 5 hours in the evening loading pictures onto my laptop, checking notes to make sure they made sense while things were fresh in my mind, and doing some research to help explain some new questions. Financial outlay? About $460. Cost of my labor? 19 hours x $30 an hour = $570 (that’s a low estimate for trained skilled labor, a professional genealogist doing similar work might be as much as $75). Total = $1030. 2 days, one very small piece of two large projects.

Intellectual property comes at a cost and has a value.

What can you do to be a good consumer of other’s research?
Don’t insist that someone hand over more, more, more.
Don’t reshare their information without connecting it to the researcher by name.
Don’t make copies of workshop handouts to share with friends. And, don’t be the friend asking someone to make copies.
Don’t rely on others’ work for money making endeavors. Don’t buy one pattern and use it to stock your online store. Don’t accept a commission for something you don’t have enough background to make and expect someone else to give you all the information you need, for free while you make money from it.
Do some research yourself. Be one of the people adding to our body of knowledge.

Friday, January 3, 2020

The First American Knitting Book

What was the first American knitting book?
In which I attempt to resurrect the Long.Dead.Blog

Editing to add...sometime after I published this "Lonely Hours" finally made its way onto the internet! Thank you to the Boston Public Library and Internet Archive. https://archive.org/embed/lonelyhourstextb00amer

It seemed such a simple question. Indeed, it had a simple answer. But, in the rush to answer it the knitter, the historian and the librarian rushed headlong into each other, all landing in a heap on the ground. As I got up and dusted myself off, and made sure I had not impaled myself with the 0000 steels the knitter was holding, I realized I was at the edge of some great precipice. As I peered over the edge trying to figure out what it was the ground gave way and I went tumbling down…down…down…As I tumbled I thought I saw a rabbit, a white rabbit. I wondered if he was an angora and if I could have some of his hair. As I pondered the hare’s hair my fall finally came to an end. I looked around and saw the rabbit, the rabbit with his waistcoat and pocket watch. That was no simple hole I fell down, no, I had tumbled down the proverbial rabbit hole…

So, what was the first American knitting book? The first book with an American imprint was in 1842, a reprint of Mrs Lambert’s “The hand-book of needlework”. The first book with an American author was just a year later in 1843, “The Ladies' hand-book of knitting, netting, and crochet;: containing plain directions by which …” published by Redfield in NY.   It’s not that simple though. The contents of “The ladies’ hand-book” was actually the contents of the 1842 “The ladies' hand-book of knitting, netting, and crochet” published in London. Even though there were copyright laws in the 19th century, even international treaties, copyright violation was rampant. Even more rampant that I realized it turns out. Most of the early knitting books (including ‘knitting and…’ as well as general needlework books with knitting chapters) were reprinting other books, sometimes excerpted or rearranged and sometimes not. In fact one 1850 book was reprinted in part as late as 1886!* The continual and long term reuse of patterns raises questions about how far after something fell out of fashion a lady might have made an item. Did a woman in 1886 just know not to make the 1850 collar, which would be hopelessly out of date? Or that the 1850 bonnet cap which sat nicely under an 1850 cottage bonnet would be functionally awkward (and visually ugly) under a little 1886 hat? That topic would warrant its own post, if only I or anyone I’ve discussed it could figure out why they reprinted those patterns so far out of their context and what the implications really were! 

I’ve spent more hours than I want to know reading and comparing knitting books and patterns in some huge, warped, game of concentration trying to figure out which books were copies or excerpts of other books. Google, Google Books, Internet Archive and Hathi Trust all helped me ferret out matches but all also choke (badly) in trying to search knitting notation. (They also can’t really search two major projects providing image-only pdfs). What was I looking for? A book of, or including a chapter of, knitting with an American imprint and content which I couldn’t trace back to an English** book. Did I find one? Yes!

The 1849 “Lonely hours a textbook of knitting” by “An American Lady”, published by E. Gaskill in Philadelphia. It has “twenty-seven patterns and directions for the most useful and fashionable articles of knitting now in use. Adapted to American customs”
  
That last bit at first made me think these were just going to be rewritten English patterns but I’ve now sat on this bit of research for several years, watching as I dug through more and more books, looking at indexing patterns, and have not found these exact patterns in any other earlier sources. I believe that that is in fact the first truly American knitting book. I have absolutely no clues about who that “American Lady” might have been, I wish I did. 

Did this lady just happen to write this books and just happen to be first. Not really, it is in fact a reaction to the reliance of foreign patterns and lack of American ones. From the preface:

“The English works on the subject are almost unintelligible to the ladies of our country, owing to the difference of material used, and the obscurity of the technical terms, leading many to suppose that the difficulties of the art are insurmountable. Far from it. The alphabet of knitting is as simple as that of language – and it has been the writer’s endeavor to render the elements of the art so plain and simple as to bring the attentive pupil by easy and imperceptible steps to perfection.

                If success may but follow her humble effort, and the lonely hours of strangers as well as friend, be cheered by this most fascinating employment, as have been her own, she will feel amply rewarded for the thought and her labor bestowed upon it.”

Is there anything different about the content? There’s nothing earth shattering but there are a few little curiosities. The majority of the content is things like stitch patterns (I have not knit all of these up to see how close they are to earlier published ones), socks, and tidies. But, then there’s a nifty child’s “apron” which is a pinafore. There’s a sun bonnet with a knit brim (lined in colored lawn and with a muslin cape). I’ve seen nothing like it in any other publication and I know of just one extant bonnet similar to it and that’s in an American (private) collection. Then there’s a pattern for a lady’s knit bonnet, in cotton and shaped over a bonnet form. There’s another pattern for a knit bonnet contemporary to this but what sets this apart is a suggestion to dye it with saffron to imitate straw, something I have seen just one other time and again in an American publication. Did this American Lady make these things up on her own? I have no idea if they are original to her, stolen from other sources I have yet to find or, things which were already being made and she was the first to commit to print. If anyone has seen knit pinafores or knit bonnets (cotton), which could be from the 1840s/early 50s, in museum or private collections I would love to know about them, they could help give clues about how common they were and where this book fits in their commonness.

*The 1886 The work box and needle or rules & directions for netting, knitting, tatting berlin and lace work, by a Leading Pattern Maker, is a reprint of the 1850 "Ladies' work-box companion : a hand-book knitting, netting, tatting, and berlin work" minus its crochet section which had been reprinted from the 1847 "The lady's book of useful and ornamental crochet work, containing receipts for executing a great variety of useful and fancy articles". Oh what a tangled web they wove when they intended to print a book without doing very much work!
**Why English? Weren’t Germany and France really the fashion leaders in the Victorian era? I do look at French sources when I get the chance, and some of the patterns in American magazines were coming out of French publications. I will admit that my German skills, especially in the old Fractur, are basically non-existent. Through the 30s, 40s, and early 50s there are several English authors who do appear to be publishing original content, not stolen from the continent, it is that content that I find in books published in the US.