Hi! What cahn said, welcome, welcome, and welcome! We are delighted to have more people teach us and ask us questions and comment.
I'm also happy to help with any needed Dreamwidth tech support. I know it's not intuitive.
I'm really impressed by the thorough scholarship here
Thank you! I've been absolutely delighted to find that selenak shares my passion about rigor. I've always thought it was better to get the wrong answer for the right reason than the right answer for the wrong reason, because a good methodology self-corrects when new facts are acquired.
We also like to have fun and write crackfic and make jokes and speculate about who's sleeping with whom and ship our faves, which is an equally important part of the fandom space we've created. :D
selenak came up with the perfect description for us: gossipy sensationalists with scholarly instincts. ("Gossipy sensationalists" being a derogatory term used by a historian who didn't want to dirty his mind with thinking too much about Fritz's sexuality, and we reclaimed the term with pride.)
I do have access to the Electronic Enlightenment letter database
E-Enlightenment, eeeee! When I saw that I jumped up and down and clapped my hands. It's been on my wishlist--or, as cahn said, I've been salivating. ;) I just haven't been able to justify forking over the money at this point when I can't even properly preview what I'd be getting.
Can you clarify what format the letters are in? Are they handwritten facsimiles, non-copy-pastable scans of transcribed text, copy-pastable transcribed text, translations, some combination of the above, what? For me, the justification of the cost really depends on the answer.
Also! Is there a letter from Voltaire to Madame Denis from 1750 that contains the following passage?
I have been formally granted, my dear child, to the king of Prussia. My marriage has been celebrated; will it be a happy one? I have no idea. I could not stop myself from saying yes. The marriage would have happened anyway, after flirting for so many years. My heart beat nervously at the altar.
Gossipy sensationalists need to know!
I'm a university student studying biomedical science, so this is a hobby
That's awesome! You wouldn't know it from the amount of discussion we've produced, but this is a hobby for all of us. I'm currently not working because of health reasons, so I have the time to devote to it like a full-time job (which may change soon), but it's not like any of us are professional historians or anything. selenak is probably the closest, with a PhD in German lit and quite a lot of history knowledge. I have a weird interdisciplinary background that you can read more about in my profile, but I work in tech, and I've never formally studied history, and just read whatever catches my interest. cahn has a STEM background and is intellectually curious and asks ALL the questions. :D
How selenak has the time to have a job and a life and still produce as much as she does is beyond me, but she's awesome.
Whatever you have time for and interest in will be most welcome. Also, feel free to tell me a bit about your biomedical interests, I have little knowledge but a great deal of curiosity in that domain.
By the way, if you want to keep up with the discussion and haven't already discovered this feature, you can click on the little bell icon at the bottom of the post, above the comments, next to the heart icon and the envelope icon, and you can subscribe to the post so that you get notifications whenever anyone comments, even if they're not replying to a comment by you (you should get notifications of direct replies to you automatically). You can also get elect to get notifications whenever cahn creates a new post tagged "frederick the great", which she does every time one post gets a few hundred comments, and then discussion moves there.
Let me know if you need more precise instructions on how to do any of this. I'm not good at concise, but I'm good at precise (I'll never be a great writer of fiction, but my technical documentation at work always gets praise).
My memory isn't very good currently and I don't have a lot of confidence in my ability to really dig deep psychologically into the minds of the 18th century cast
Not a problem! A huge part of the reason we've been so productive is that everybody contributes something different. My concentration is currently shot for health reasons, so I have trouble reading connected text, but I'm A+ at looking things up and finding things, as long as I don't have to read more than a paragraph at a time. I am thus Royal Librarian, as well as Detective. selenak can chew through hundreds of pages at light speed, *and* is the only one of us who can read German, so she is our Royal Reader and Subdetective. cahn hosts, asks good questions, and encourages us! She is our Gracious Salon Hostess.
I like to think of it as: if selenak and I both knew German but had no Google-fu or programming skills, or if we both had mad Google-fu and decent programming skills but no German, we wouldn't have gotten nearly as far. :D
We would be delighted with anything you can provide. Since you have a university affiliation, you may, if you wish, elect to take the place of or supplement the Royal Patron, a friend of mine not in this fandom who's willing to use his university access to download old books that are public domain but for some reason require institutional affiliation to access. If not for him, we wouldn't have gotten our hands on Lehndorff!
What university are you attending, if I may ask?
Also, how's your French? That's currently our weak point. We have a native German speaker, but all three of us have just 2-3 years of French learned in school long ago and not kept up very well. We've been limping by with our ability to read maybe one page at a time, slowly, plus my ability to write code to churn French texts through the Google Translate API to produce bilingual translations, so that we can skim for what we're interested in and refer to the French where more precision is needed.
on account of my people skills being rather lacking,
Funnily enough, I have no people skills and was always seriously delayed in understanding people relative to my age peers. I've approached understanding humans like an anthropologist, and I read up on psychology and cognitive science and evolutionary biology until a few things started to make sense. Since my main interest is in trauma psychology (it's so relevant to evolutionary biology, which is an interest of mine!), that background has been super helpful in understanding what makes all these traumatized historical figures tick. But hilariously, I still have no actual skills when it comes to interacting with people in real life. :P I'm great with computers and bad with people.
So welcome! Please write a decent bit about whatever interests you and ask us all the questions you can think of! Questions keep the conversation moving, don't be embarrassed about not knowing things.
Re: Can... Can I join?
I'm also happy to help with any needed Dreamwidth tech support. I know it's not intuitive.
I'm really impressed by the thorough scholarship here
Thank you! I've been absolutely delighted to find that
We also like to have fun and write crackfic and make jokes and speculate about who's sleeping with whom and ship our faves, which is an equally important part of the fandom space we've created. :D
I do have access to the Electronic Enlightenment letter database
E-Enlightenment, eeeee! When I saw that I jumped up and down and clapped my hands. It's been on my wishlist--or, as
Can you clarify what format the letters are in? Are they handwritten facsimiles, non-copy-pastable scans of transcribed text, copy-pastable transcribed text, translations, some combination of the above, what? For me, the justification of the cost really depends on the answer.
Also! Is there a letter from Voltaire to Madame Denis from 1750 that contains the following passage?
I have been formally granted, my dear child, to the king of Prussia. My marriage has been celebrated; will it be a happy one? I have no idea. I could not stop myself from saying yes. The marriage would have happened anyway, after flirting for so many years. My heart beat nervously at the altar.
Gossipy sensationalists need to know!
I'm a university student studying biomedical science, so this is a hobby
That's awesome! You wouldn't know it from the amount of discussion we've produced, but this is a hobby for all of us. I'm currently not working because of health reasons, so I have the time to devote to it like a full-time job (which may change soon), but it's not like any of us are professional historians or anything.
How
Whatever you have time for and interest in will be most welcome. Also, feel free to tell me a bit about your biomedical interests, I have little knowledge but a great deal of curiosity in that domain.
By the way, if you want to keep up with the discussion and haven't already discovered this feature, you can click on the little bell icon at the bottom of the post, above the comments, next to the heart icon and the envelope icon, and you can subscribe to the post so that you get notifications whenever anyone comments, even if they're not replying to a comment by you (you should get notifications of direct replies to you automatically). You can also get elect to get notifications whenever
Let me know if you need more precise instructions on how to do any of this. I'm not good at concise, but I'm good at precise (I'll never be a great writer of fiction, but my technical documentation at work always gets praise).
My memory isn't very good currently and I don't have a lot of confidence in my ability to really dig deep psychologically into the minds of the 18th century cast
Not a problem! A huge part of the reason we've been so productive is that everybody contributes something different. My concentration is currently shot for health reasons, so I have trouble reading connected text, but I'm A+ at looking things up and finding things, as long as I don't have to read more than a paragraph at a time. I am thus Royal Librarian, as well as Detective.
I like to think of it as: if
We would be delighted with anything you can provide. Since you have a university affiliation, you may, if you wish, elect to take the place of or supplement the Royal Patron, a friend of mine not in this fandom who's willing to use his university access to download old books that are public domain but for some reason require institutional affiliation to access. If not for him, we wouldn't have gotten our hands on Lehndorff!
What university are you attending, if I may ask?
Also, how's your French? That's currently our weak point. We have a native German speaker, but all three of us have just 2-3 years of French learned in school long ago and not kept up very well. We've been limping by with our ability to read maybe one page at a time, slowly, plus my ability to write code to churn French texts through the Google Translate API to produce bilingual translations, so that we can skim for what we're interested in and refer to the French where more precision is needed.
on account of my people skills being rather lacking,
Funnily enough, I have no people skills and was always seriously delayed in understanding people relative to my age peers. I've approached understanding humans like an anthropologist, and I read up on psychology and cognitive science and evolutionary biology until a few things started to make sense. Since my main interest is in trauma psychology (it's so relevant to evolutionary biology, which is an interest of mine!), that background has been super helpful in understanding what makes all these traumatized historical figures tick. But hilariously, I still have no actual skills when it comes to interacting with people in real life. :P I'm great with computers and bad with people.
So welcome! Please write a decent bit about whatever interests you and ask us all the questions you can think of! Questions keep the conversation moving, don't be embarrassed about not knowing things.