New experiment: do yellowjackets think tofurkey smells like real meat?

My war on the yellow jackets AND European paper wasps continues unabated.

We've had the darn yellow jacket traps out for months now; earlier this week I re-baited with the pheromone packs. The yellow jackets have seemed only mildly interested. So I figured I'd up the ante by adding a food bait. According to the literature with the traps, at this part of the season (spring, early summer) , yellow jackets are interested in protein food sources. (By late summer, they will be more interested in sweet foods, such as fruits and sodas, so plan accordingly!).

Recommended protein baits are lunch meats. But of course, we are vegetarians. So, research question: do yellow jackets find vegetarian lunch "meats" attractive? Clearly an experiment is in order!

I got out my Tofurkey hickory smoked deli slices and divided a single slice into four sections, one for each of my traps. (I didn't want to waste four whole delicious slices, if the yellow jackets are not interested.)

Mmmmm, tofurkey

They've been out 24 hours now; I have caught exactly one new yellow jacket--which is not a lot, but is also above average, as I don't catch even one/day right now. Will have to update if the tofurkey seems to be increasing the number I catch, as I figured I'm not the only vegetarian with a yellow jacket problem who was wondering if this would work!

Update (7/7/2016): I did catch marginally more yellow jackets since putting out the tofurkey. I am not sure, however, if this corresponded with having added tofurkey or just getting to the point in the season where there are more yellow jackets out and about.

National Day of Civic Hacking

Saturday, I went to my first-ever hackathon: Code for Denver's event for National Day of Civic Hacking. Ostensibly we were working on the low-income housing challenge suggested by the national organization (although one group was specifically working on the EPA/waste-visualization challenge). While I'm not sure about how successful the development process was, it was a great learning experience for me and helped me in my quest to understand how code/programming can be a social good/helping profession--that failure of imagination I think I've mentioned before on here.

So, being my first experience, my general takeaway: very overwhelmed, and also, I should have prepared differently (could have used more info from our host location, but I could also have done more with the national site to prepare: they had a lot of really neat ideas up there).

One thing my location did that I think was a great idea, but that didn't work out so well in implementation, was having a representative from an area nonprofit (MetroCaring) come to talk about his organization's needs. I think this was a really good idea, but a couple of problems: first, they don't actually work in housing (but they do refer people to other agencies that do, so there was at least a related need), and second, the rep had to leave pretty much immediately after his statement, which means that as process questions came up, we would get stuck trying to guess how they would use various features, and which ones most closely met their needs.

We ended up having several groups working on various projects: I chose to work in the group dealing with MetroCaring's case. (Other groups had already-in-process projects, such as data mapping or....data visualization. Everybody likes data visualization, I guess, but that brings me to another point, which I'll address below: what are the limits of coding application to actual real-world problems.) Our group was about evenly divided, with four developers and three new-to-tech types. I ended up being the proxy-stakeholder, because for the morning session, at least, I was the only person with any experience working in nonprofits. (In the afternoon, one of the developers had experience working with emergency shelter nonprofits, which led to a bit of a midday pivot from facilitating access to vouchers to facilitating access to emergency shelter.)

But what was surprising to me was that one developer in particular kind of hijacked the project because: a) he knows better than nonprofits (since folks in nonprofit work "benefit" by the problems continuing, in that they can keep their jobs), b) he was bound and determined that we could find a way to develop a product that paid for itself, and even made a profit to spin off its own "descendant" projects, and c) he was wedded to using two proprietary products, even though it meant changing the problem we were solving because of limitations in those products. So instead of generating a tool for tracking voucher availability that would be update-able by any disbursing agency and check-able by any referring agency, he (and I say he, because really no one else could be involved, as nothing he wanted to do was delegate-able) created a sort-of-working zap that would call an agency when someone updated a particular spreadsheet, and ask that agency to call them back with a number of available beds.

Difficult personalities aside--because those are omnipresent--it was not exactly a success, but the rest of the group did at least have some interesting discussion and maybe made some progress toward defining a different version of the project, working from the United Way's 2-1-1 resource. One of the developers found a good data source in a non-intuitive place in 2-1-1; another scraped it, with resultant JSON that could potentially be used for a more accessible data source, rather than duplicate-calling the same shelters, depending on how many of the entries were up-to-date.

In the day-end wrap-up presentations, the other groups had made some progress on their data visualization projects, whether it was triangulating average housing cost, access-to-transit, and access-to-schools in a single map or visualizing waste flows.

But what is most interesting to me here is how few of the projects seemed actually to meet a need, rather than just generating something that looked cool. One of the mapping apps is intended to help folks determine where to focus their housing search, based on where they work, where their kids go to school, and where they can afford to live, in a mobile-friendly/responsive format. So that could be useful. The other projects really didn't meet a concrete need, as far as I could tell, although of course, more information shared with more people is still good.

So my failure-of-imagination, in reference to being able to figure out how programming can really help people, in the sense of a public good (like the helping profession post from a few weeks ago), continues. The hackathon experience was a good one, even though we didn't get much actually accomplished--I think it pointed to ways tech can and cannot help with actual problems.

And then this morning, the weekly Nonprofit with Balls blog post: Hey tech people, stop thinking only you can save the world. And it is just really good. My most-favorite part was about how a tech-can-fix-it-all!-approach can lead you to ignore the root problems of social inequity, for instance. It came up at the hackathon: we aren't going to solve homelessness. We aren't. But maybe we can make a tool for helping folks get access to vouchers (since this was before the pivot...). One of the attendees wanted to work on a mapping tool for low-cost properties that could be developed into low-cost housing, so that would be a tool for increasing supply, and thus actually addressing the problem on the ground, but there is (as yet) no way to code actual living spaces, and frankly, is unlikely to be. (I dunno, 3D printing?)

I don't really have a conclusion. I'll keep exploring. I love some of the National Day of Civic Hacking's ideas, and I love what Code for Denver is trying to do. So I guess it's all about tempering expectations, and realizing that data visualization doesn't actually solve everything.

Armenian Literature

Good news yesterday morning: German MPs recognise Armenian 'genocide' amid Turkish fury. What's good about that? Well, the documentation seems pretty clear that what happened in 1915 meets the threshold for being described as genocide. (Just like the USA's treatment of North America's First Nations/Native peoples does--which I bring up because, while the US does live in a glass house and should throw no stones, we can still recognize it.) Similarly Germany. So kudos to Germany, or rather, some of Germany's politicians, for being willing to acknowledge what I think is a pretty obvious truth, even though it may not be particularly politically expedient to do so. From the reading I've done on the Armenian genocide, it sounds like the main reason the US doesn't officially recognize this Armenian genocide is for self-serving political interests: Turkey is a strong US ally in a volatile region.

I suppose I'm naive: I find it hard to understand why acknowledging historical errors, even crimes, is so problematic. When I say, "I've done some reading and it sounds like the Armenian genocide of 1915 was, in fact, genocide," that doesn't mean that I think today's Turkey is horrible, its people racist, or anything like that. I suppose the trouble comes from questions of restorative justice, reparations, and the like. And that is both understandable and difficult to resolve. I unfortunately have no answers.

But for purposes of educating ourselves (this was supposed to be a book blog, after all!), here's a useful list of "essential Armenian literature." I've only read 1.5 of these books, so I have lots to go for a more nuanced and overarching view of the Armenian people and their history, but it just so happens that the two books from this list I've read dealt with the events of 1915 (and then I had to go look up some more info on what happened, as I'd never heard of it at all prior to reading these books!).

OK, so, which 1.5 books did I read?

• Black Dog of Fate, by Peter Balakian: I thought this was very well-written, readable, informative, and insightful. Definitely recommend.
• The Sandcastle Girls, by Chris Bohjalian: This one gets so much hype, and I had such high hopes. It was remarkably similar to Black Dog of Fate, but I couldn't finish it, though I started it first. Why? Because I have an aversion to literature using genocide as a backdrop for a sappy love story. Oh, sweet little white missionary falls in love with a dangerous-but-sensitive Turk. I just couldn't. A lot of other people could and did, but I honestly found it insultingly bad, for cheapening the very events it tries to shed light on. Just my opinion, but it is very much my opinion.

I absolutely want to read more, but (a) time is so short and my reading list is so long, and (b) I had trouble finding copies of the other titles on the list, so I'll have to do more looking.

And as noted above, it's hard to know what to do, in hindsight, to try to do something to improve the lives of people affected by these events. As usual, my go-to social welfare nonprofit was Kiva, which does have loans to folks in Armenia. Presumably there are also individuals of Armenian descent in other countries represented there, but it'll be hard to guess who, exactly, so looking at Armenia proper seemed like a good start. (Periodically there are also loans available to folks in Turkey, but it looks like Kiva's field partners there are relatively new to the Kiva interface, so there are comparatively few loans to Turkish residents fundraising at this time.)

Buzzword: "Curate"

Thesis: museum work has been trivialized by the appropriation of the word "curate." It's a contributing factor to why people think my degrees are worthless and volunteers can do what I have been trained to do.

Curate: the chocolate bar

I suppose that, inherently, the problem is that "curate" is kind of tricky to define....or maybe just museum types like problematizing definitions? I think it is a rather slippery term that varies widely in usage, with particularly unclear areas of overlap with collections managers, for instance. I was just reading through some materials on AAM's website, particularly the Curators Committee (CurCom), just to see if maybe it was just fuzzy in MY mind, and it sounds like nope: if you read the Code of Ethics for Curators (AAM, 2007), you find a lot of tasks that, in my experience, fall to folks with the title "collections manager" or, dare I say it, "archivist/librarian." Which is hardly shocking, as the document itself notes. The Curator Core Competencies (AAM, undated, post-2014) maybe narrow it down even better: curators are defined by competency, not job title, and they have responsibilities in collections management, research, and education/outreach. (:sigh/want:)

In my experience, they are a little lighter on the collections management end--usually those tasks, beyond the planning and accession/deaccession review phase, fall to the collections manager and/or registrar. So that means that most curators, from what I've seen, focus primarily on the research, planning, education, and outreach components of the job. This is particularly interesting in cultural anthropology and archaeology collections, these days, as much more work is done collaboratively with source communities. This is totally appropriate, as anthropology has had it's postcolonial come-to-Jesus moment and realized that some of its practices were not reflective of what they had learned about other people and ways of being (cue cultural relativism and self-determination), or even morally consistent with just being a good and compassionate person.

I think it's worth noting that curation in an anthropology/archaeology context is a little different than in other disciplines: while it's fine and good to have expert academic knowledge of a subject, that is generally not the most important thing. Better to be able to serve as a liaison with people who have an (for want of a better term) authentic or lived expert knowledge of said subject--or, of course, to have that lived knowledge yourself, which I put last in this list because that is a state of being that is not really acquired as a competency for vocational reasons. In anthropology, it seems that the "[academic] subject matter expert" is on the way out, and with, well, reasonable reason. It's part of the democratization of the representation of people's lived heritage and the "companionable objects," to use Kenneth George's term, that correspond with that lived experience.

But I digress: curatorship. If we discount most of the day-to-day collections work, as done primarily handled by collections managers and registrars (and, not gonna lie, interns and temp workers), and recognize that, in anthropology, at least, the subject-matter expert piece is waning and the community liaison piece waxing, what do curators do?

The answer seems to be mostly education and outreach. That can, again, go back to the cultural liaison piece, but also has a lot to do with programming, exhibits, advocacy, and so forth. And that's interesting because it's probably about the last thing we think of when we think of curatorship.

So I guess we can see why "curate" has been picked up in popular culture, as meaning "making a list of things I like," or really, "choosing." But that is madly frustrating because curatorship is not just making lists of things I like. No, Etsy members, you are not curators, because you lack any of the competencies of curatorship. Moreover, your notion of curatorship doesn't involve knowing a body of literature or any information outside your own self and your own preferences. It can--maybe some of these folks do make a study of historic textiles or what have you, but at heart, it's "what I like," reflecting more of the self than of any external idea, or maybe at best, "things I found [and like] that all have this one thing in common [have a picture of a penguin on them, include a feather, whatever]."  I don't mean to sound terrible: I love me some Etsy! I have lists of THINGS I LIKE, but I do not consider them "curated lists." They're wishlists, guys. Come on.

And the reason that this really gets my goat is because, in professional positions that were, in effect, curatorial (although the title was archivst), I got pressure all the time to let other, non-trained folks do the collections work because, since it's just about choosing stuff you like, anyone can do it! Not so. And that is why, when I go to the grocery and see a rack of faux-healthy candy bars named "Curate," I start banging my head on my shopping basket.

Of course, all this goes out the window if, as one of my friends suggested, they don't mean curate-the-verb, they mean curate-a-church-official.

Edgar Sheppard, Curate at Marlow and Hornsey and a canon of St George's Windsor