Documenting History

Selective Documents make History


History involves storytelling

 History storytelling

primary and secondary language
by nature its selective
this history is from my perspective.

earliest urges to chronicle

western history based on experience validated physical 
(lack of trust in primary)

start here

both pictures and words can tell a story.

in relation to my thesis lets look briefly only at:

secondary language that uses both pictures and words together to tell a personal story from experience.

Although it is fluid, a web of select shared stories, bias, perspective.

Western history is (validated) narrated through the process of documentation.

and it is from this vantage point where I stand.

Serving the purpose of storytelling, both pictures and written languages

 More literally, one could argue that our earliest urges to chronicle experience was the very birth of history.  Our inherited responsibilities to record experiences have allowed our species to develop a commonwealth of pooled knowledge covering thousands of generations.   

"stand on the backs of giants"

  role in the foundation of a society's identity,
history is often referred to as being sturdy cohesive reliable and factual
really fluid, a web of select shared stories, bias, perspective.
living document
although today the internet is offering an alternative with websites like Wikiperdia, history has traditionally been objectified: converted into a static medium, a physical artifact.


It can serve an individual or unite a society. Inter Intra

If Poetry is playing with language, history sorts it

I find it interesting to compare the significance of language in early childhood development to its role in early cultures.  


 From these roots grew the traditions of visual art as well as the later symbolic writing systems. 


 In a similar way, art exists naturally and without any formal training as the first written language for most children.

Documentation of individual experiences juggling both visual and written languages required a great deal of social and cultural sophistication.  


The Renaissance inspired a multifaceted educational revolution that demanded innovation in the record-keeping of individuals.  Although they likely started as transitional studies for his paintings, Leonardo Di Vinci’s sketchbooks grew to record his interests in nature, science, and invention (3).  They were clearly written for himself, with the text often written backwards and quickly jotted down in his own shorthand.  Even so, these books would eventually be reorganized by subject after Di Vinci’s death, providing invaluable insight into his process and ideation.

For centuries following the Renaissance, an age of exploration and colonization called on generations of artists for travel documentation.  All three of Captain James Cook’s voyages across the world included enlisted artists who visually documented the travels through their sketchbooks.  Artist Conrad Martens joined Cook on his second trip aboard the famous Beagle with a young Charles Darwin (4).  From his experience with Martens, Darwin later commented on his own written accounts of the expedition: “From not being able to draw, a great pile of the manuscript from the voyage has proved almost useless” (5).  Years later, it was Darwin’s granddaughter who sought out Martens’ sketchbooks and deposited them in the Cambridge University Library (4).  These books are now accessible online through the library’s website.

 Today, a wide range of personal documentation is used by a diverse group of people for a variety of purposes.  American Volcanologist Rick Hoblitt (5) and Indian animator Prashant Miranda (6) may have completely different motivations for recording events in sketchbooks that look nothing alike, but they share an emphasis on capturing important moments to chronicle their experiences.  Books like Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art (5)  and An Illustrated Life (6) compile these and many other perspectives of journal practitioners with surprising similarities despite remarkable differences.


 

For my thesis, I will be focusing on the relationship between art and language.  The different languages I employ to communicate informs both my internal and external perceptions, and how I interact with the world (see Appendix 4).  I feel there is a fundamental need for people to record, reflect upon, reconfigure and share their personal experience through documentation; equal in importance to creating a dialogue using active spoken or signed languages (see Appendix 3).  It is through the process of taking notes that I find this application of art and language.

My experiences working for the RIT/NTID access services and their alternative needs communities expanded my awareness of how language is used in and out of the classroom.  I was hired as a notetaker during the first year of my undergraduate program; a position I had been completely unaware of beforehand.  With such a diverse academic population across the campus, I was fascinated by the ways I was able to cross colleges and disciplines as a notetaker, and how important personal documentation was in the educational process.

time, artifacts, objective art, other exhibiting thesis artists, stories