Treasure your badly-scanned papers from 1980, and be thankful you didn’t have to do historical research by sorting through bad scans from the 1980s of printouts of microfilm archives (yes, instead of scanning the microfilm) of photos of the original documents that were photographed in 1961 at a 45° angle by a lazy archivist who used the cheapest film he could get his hands on. And the scans have blotches that make some pages literally unreadable because the microfilms were allowed to sit exposed to moisture for 25 years before being digitized. No I’m not bitter and my collegiate education wasn’t a waste, not one bit of either.
I occasionally dabble in genealogical research. OP’s meme is baby stuff, and I don’t even know the field. I feel you, anonymous internet stranger. You would enjoy handwritten census records entered by a barely literate person with shaky 19th century cursive, microfilmed in the 60s, scanned in the 90s, and “transcribed” by a Mormon granny who’s never left Utah County in her entire life.
This was a wild ride of a post. Once I hit the historical research part I thought I knew where you were headed, only for it to get worse in that way that anything to do with history seems to do.
If you want even worse, I know somebody who needed a manuscript that wasn’t digitized, so he had to actually fly to the UK and go to the small university that had the manuscript. As if that isn’t enough of a pain in the ass on its own, the actual research consisted of carefully leafing through a moldy 700 year old book written in medieval Latin, analyzing the handwriting to decipher certain nonsense words that it turned out were actually just spelling mistakes, and shining special lights at weird angles to read faded ink. And then in the end, he found out the part wanted to cite (about a clergyman burning a granary to punish a village for their sinfulness) was was actually just a passage about tax levies that was deliberately mistranslated by one of those charlatan gentleman archaeologists from the 19th Century who wanted to discredit the Catholic Church.
And then in the end, he found out the part wanted to cite (about a clergyman burning a granary to punish a village for their sinfulness) was actually just a passage about tax levies that was deliberately mistranslated by one of those charlatan gentleman archaeologists from the 19th Century who wanted to discredit the Catholic Church.
This is a great example of how much effort it can take to pick apart bullshit, damn. Thanks for these comments, they’ve been really interesting to read!
Treasure your badly-scanned papers from 1980, and be thankful you didn’t have to do historical research by sorting through bad scans from the 1980s of printouts of microfilm archives (yes, instead of scanning the microfilm) of photos of the original documents that were photographed in 1961 at a 45° angle by a lazy archivist who used the cheapest film he could get his hands on. And the scans have blotches that make some pages literally unreadable because the microfilms were allowed to sit exposed to moisture for 25 years before being digitized. No I’m not bitter and my collegiate education wasn’t a waste, not one bit of either.
That good old History PhD PTSD.
Yeah the real PTSD is realizing that you spent 6 years getting a History PhD.
I occasionally dabble in genealogical research. OP’s meme is baby stuff, and I don’t even know the field. I feel you, anonymous internet stranger. You would enjoy handwritten census records entered by a barely literate person with shaky 19th century cursive, microfilmed in the 60s, scanned in the 90s, and “transcribed” by a Mormon granny who’s never left Utah County in her entire life.
This was a wild ride of a post. Once I hit the historical research part I thought I knew where you were headed, only for it to get worse in that way that anything to do with history seems to do.
If you want even worse, I know somebody who needed a manuscript that wasn’t digitized, so he had to actually fly to the UK and go to the small university that had the manuscript. As if that isn’t enough of a pain in the ass on its own, the actual research consisted of carefully leafing through a moldy 700 year old book written in medieval Latin, analyzing the handwriting to decipher certain nonsense words that it turned out were actually just spelling mistakes, and shining special lights at weird angles to read faded ink. And then in the end, he found out the part wanted to cite (about a clergyman burning a granary to punish a village for their sinfulness) was was actually just a passage about tax levies that was deliberately mistranslated by one of those charlatan gentleman archaeologists from the 19th Century who wanted to discredit the Catholic Church.
This is a great example of how much effort it can take to pick apart bullshit, damn. Thanks for these comments, they’ve been really interesting to read!
Damn I guess I won’t complain about blurry copies of old schematics after all. That’s a nightmare.