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.
Thank you to all three of you for the welcome and helpful advice!!! I'm really happy to participate.
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.
They are copy-pastable transcribed text - there are also a few letters with English translations, it really depends on the historical figure. There are editor's notes for most letters (Voltaire's editor is English), explaining context or differences between manuscripts. They also note which libraries the original letters are kept in, if it is known. And they note where the letters were sent from, the age of the sender and recipient at the time the letter was sent, etc. The sample content (httpd://www.e-enlightenment.com/info/content/content_samples.html) is a decent enough example of what the database is like. Voltaire is definitely the figure with the most comprehensive correspondence, since there's an entire project/foundation (http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/) dedicated to him.
I'm not sure if it's worth such an expensive subscription, but it does have a really intuitive search system. I can easily find every instance of Voltaire complaining about "Luc" to a wide range of correspondents, especially during the Seven Years War ;)
Is there a letter from Voltaire to Madame Denis from 1750 that contains the following passage?
Yes! On the 13th of October 1750, Voltaire sent the following letter (there is a French original, and English translation which I will quote, which is slightly different from your version):
"I have been handed over, my dear, with all due formalities, to the King of Prussia. The marriage is accomplished: will it be happy? I do not know in the least: yet I cannot prevent myself saying, Yes. After coquetting for so many years, marriage was the necessary end. My heart beat hard even at the altar."
What university are you attending, if I may ask?
The University of Oxford. I can download old books if they are available at the Bodleian Libraries, but I'm not sure if they'll be available - it's not very good for old books in general. That said, there is a lot of contemporary research.
Also, how's your French?
Unfortunately, even worse than anybody else here, I suspect. I've never been educated in French - I did a Spanish GCSE haha. I've been practicing German on Duolingo, and have been considering starting French as well, but that's about it really.
I'm great with computers and bad with people.
If only I was good with computers! I was mostly successful socialising as a child - though only with boys, and not with other girls - secondary school is where things really fell apart. As a teenager, I was alright with spending my time alone, but now as a university student I've noticed my social skills have become extremely stunted. I have literally no friends at Oxford and I rarely see or hear from secondary school friends haha.
Damn! I thought I was logged in - sorry for the anon message.
In terms of my biomedical interests, I'm mostly neuroscience/experimental psychology oriented, though I don't know enough to talk with any kind of confidence yet. I might be doing a research project about how motivation modulates working memory? I'm also attending lectures about pharmacology, though the knowledge for that goes in one ear out the other on account of my terrible concentration. Otherwise, things are going okay.
Edited (To address another part of a comment.) 2020-02-25 12:35 (UTC)
Damn! I thought I was logged in - sorry for the anon message.
No worries, it's happened to all of us. It was happening so often to selenak for a while there that we started blaming Prussian cyber agents from the beyond!
In terms of my biomedical interests, I'm mostly neuroscience/experimental psychology oriented
That's cool! I know just enough neuroscience to throw in some jargon when talking about trauma psychology, no more. It's super interesting, though, and I keep trying to add to my knowledge a little bit here and there. (It will help when my own concentration is back, for sure. Sympathies to you.)
You probably are aware of this if you organized according to mildred's comments, but I started another post. (I usually start one when I notice the comment count getting near to or above 300, which is when we've noticed it starts to get hard to navigate. Though I think we've got a rhythm now where each separate thought gets a different thread, which is really helping the navigation process.)
I also found socializing at university rather difficult, especially at first (I don't know where you are exactly in your degree?) and my university wasn't nearly as big as yours! One of the things that worked for me was finding a couple of extracurriculars I enjoyed and had some social component (in my case, orchestra/choir/music and church) -- I should imagine that Oxford has some sort of History society that would welcome you :)
Of course I don't want to discourage you from hanging out with us -- we would love for you to hang out here and find stuff for us! But it's also nice to find people in RL who share interests, and university is a place where a lot of people with disparate and academic interests are all jammed up together, which makes it a bit easier sometimes. :)
I'm also not great with people, but at a certain point, like mildred, I started treating it like a research project rather than one of those things one is just expected to pick up. Though unlike mildred, I didn't do a deep dive into anthropology, but mostly treat it like a learning algorithm where observations (of both other people and myself) lead to formulating scripts that function better or worse at dealing with certain situations, and updating the network with new information given the observation results :) I still occasionally make some rookie mistakes, but less than I used to :)
ETA: mildred responded to your anonymous comment below; not sure if you have seen it, because you probably get emailed about direct replies to gambitten but not to anonymous replies?
but mostly treat it like a learning algorithm where observations (of both other people and myself) lead to formulating scripts that function better or worse at dealing with certain situations, and updating the network with new information given the observation results :)
That's way more practical than what I did, which was keep the same social skills but collect a lot more theoretical knowledge that I largely refuse to apply. :P But then I'm odd in that I see my low level of socialization as a feature rather than a bug.
I usually start one when I notice the comment count getting near to or above 300
It amuses me that we have two consecutive posts that ended up with exactly 380 comments.
Though I think we've got a rhythm now where each separate thought gets a different thread, which is really helping the navigation process.)
Thank goodness for that! I also like that we eventually settled on keeping thread subjects relevant. That helps too. (Props to selenak for starting that!)
ETA: mildred responded to your anonymous comment below; not sure if you have seen it, because you probably get emailed about direct replies to gambitten but not to anonymous replies?
Ooh, good call! If you don't subscribe to the post, you won't get notified for things like that.
Discussions progress pretty quickly! I'll barely be able to keep up lol
I'm about half way through my degree at this point. I tried quite hard to make friends in my first year and I joined a few societies, but connections didn't really result? I'm alright with staying by myself now; it's more reliable than being frustrated or anxious trying to make new connections at university, which won't last for very long.
I did see that reply! I try to read the whole threads.
I'm not sure if it's worth such an expensive subscription, but it does have a really intuitive search system. I can easily find every instance of Voltaire complaining about "Luc" to a wide range of correspondents, especially during the Seven Years War ;)
Ooh, that's encouraging. I wouldn't pay for an year's subscription, but one or two months might be worth it, especially when I'm back at work.
Reminder for cahn in case it's useful: Luc is Voltaire's monkey and therefore also what he calls Fritz when he's annoyed at him (and vice versa, calls Luc Frédéric II).
And yeah, he was super annoyed at Fritz during the Seven Years' War, so annoyed that he had to write to him ALL THE TIME, so Fritz could bitch to Catt and Mitchell and sundry about how Voltaire was just the absolute scum of the earth, while devouring the letters with his eyes and exclaiming, "He hasn't forgotten me!" :P
You know. Just another day on board the Fritz/Voltaire ship.
Yes! On the 13th of October 1750, Voltaire sent the following letter (there is a French original, and English translation which I will quote, which is slightly different from your version):
OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH. THANK YOU FOREVER.
The University of Oxford.
Fancy! I'll keep that in mind when using WorldCat and the like.
Unfortunately, even worse than anybody else here, I suspect. I've never been educated in French - I did a Spanish GCSE haha.
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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.
Re: Can... Can I join?
(Anonymous) 2020-02-25 12:23 pm (UTC)(link)They are copy-pastable transcribed text - there are also a few letters with English translations, it really depends on the historical figure. There are editor's notes for most letters (Voltaire's editor is English), explaining context or differences between manuscripts. They also note which libraries the original letters are kept in, if it is known. And they note where the letters were sent from, the age of the sender and recipient at the time the letter was sent, etc. The sample content (httpd://www.e-enlightenment.com/info/content/content_samples.html) is a decent enough example of what the database is like. Voltaire is definitely the figure with the most comprehensive correspondence, since there's an entire project/foundation (http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/) dedicated to him.
I'm not sure if it's worth such an expensive subscription, but it does have a really intuitive search system. I can easily find every instance of Voltaire complaining about "Luc" to a wide range of correspondents, especially during the Seven Years War ;)
Yes! On the 13th of October 1750, Voltaire sent the following letter (there is a French original, and English translation which I will quote, which is slightly different from your version):
The University of Oxford. I can download old books if they are available at the Bodleian Libraries, but I'm not sure if they'll be available - it's not very good for old books in general. That said, there is a lot of contemporary research.
Unfortunately, even worse than anybody else here, I suspect. I've never been educated in French - I did a Spanish GCSE haha. I've been practicing German on Duolingo, and have been considering starting French as well, but that's about it really.
If only I was good with computers! I was mostly successful socialising as a child - though only with boys, and not with other girls - secondary school is where things really fell apart. As a teenager, I was alright with spending my time alone, but now as a university student I've noticed my social skills have become extremely stunted. I have literally no friends at Oxford and I rarely see or hear from secondary school friends haha.
I'll be popping in occasionally, then!
Re: Can... Can I join?
In terms of my biomedical interests, I'm mostly neuroscience/experimental psychology oriented, though I don't know enough to talk with any kind of confidence yet. I might be doing a research project about how motivation modulates working memory? I'm also attending lectures about pharmacology, though the knowledge for that goes in one ear out the other on account of my terrible concentration. Otherwise, things are going okay.
Re: Can... Can I join?
No worries, it's happened to all of us. It was happening so often to
In terms of my biomedical interests, I'm mostly neuroscience/experimental psychology oriented
That's cool! I know just enough neuroscience to throw in some jargon when talking about trauma psychology, no more. It's super interesting, though, and I keep trying to add to my knowledge a little bit here and there. (It will help when my own concentration is back, for sure. Sympathies to you.)
Re: Can... Can I join?
You probably are aware of this if you organized according to mildred's comments, but I started another post. (I usually start one when I notice the comment count getting near to or above 300, which is when we've noticed it starts to get hard to navigate. Though I think we've got a rhythm now where each separate thought gets a different thread, which is really helping the navigation process.)
I also found socializing at university rather difficult, especially at first (I don't know where you are exactly in your degree?) and my university wasn't nearly as big as yours! One of the things that worked for me was finding a couple of extracurriculars I enjoyed and had some social component (in my case, orchestra/choir/music and church) -- I should imagine that Oxford has some sort of History society that would welcome you :)
Of course I don't want to discourage you from hanging out with us -- we would love for you to hang out here
and find stuff for us! But it's also nice to find people in RL who share interests, and university is a place where a lot of people with disparate and academic interests are all jammed up together, which makes it a bit easier sometimes. :)I'm also not great with people, but at a certain point, like mildred, I started treating it like a research project rather than one of those things one is just expected to pick up. Though unlike mildred, I didn't do a deep dive into anthropology, but mostly treat it like a learning algorithm where observations (of both other people and myself) lead to formulating scripts that function better or worse at dealing with certain situations, and updating the network with new information given the observation results :) I still occasionally make some rookie mistakes, but less than I used to :)
ETA: mildred responded to your anonymous comment below; not sure if you have seen it, because you probably get emailed about direct replies to gambitten but not to anonymous replies?
Re: Can... Can I join?
That's way more practical than what I did, which was keep the same social skills but collect a lot more theoretical knowledge that I largely refuse to apply. :P But then I'm odd in that I see my low level of socialization as a feature rather than a bug.
I usually start one when I notice the comment count getting near to or above 300
It amuses me that we have two consecutive posts that ended up with exactly 380 comments.
Though I think we've got a rhythm now where each separate thought gets a different thread, which is really helping the navigation process.)
Thank goodness for that! I also like that we eventually settled on keeping thread subjects relevant. That helps too. (Props to
ETA: mildred responded to your anonymous comment below; not sure if you have seen it, because you probably get emailed about direct replies to gambitten but not to anonymous replies?
Ooh, good call! If you don't subscribe to the post, you won't get notified for things like that.
Re: Can... Can I join?
I'm about half way through my degree at this point. I tried quite hard to make friends in my first year and I joined a few societies, but connections didn't really result? I'm alright with staying by myself now; it's more reliable than being frustrated or anxious trying to make new connections at university, which won't last for very long.
I did see that reply! I try to read the whole threads.
Re: Can... Can I join?
Discussions do move pretty fast, haha. I think we're all operating at the limits of our ability to keep up. :)
Re: Can... Can I join?
That is totally fair! And we are really enjoying your company :D
Re: Can... Can I join?
Ooh, that's encouraging. I wouldn't pay for an year's subscription, but one or two months might be worth it, especially when I'm back at work.
Reminder for
And yeah, he was super annoyed at Fritz during the Seven Years' War, so annoyed that he had to write to him ALL THE TIME, so Fritz could bitch to Catt and Mitchell and sundry about how Voltaire was just the absolute scum of the earth, while devouring the letters with his eyes and exclaiming, "He hasn't forgotten me!" :P
You know. Just another day on board the Fritz/Voltaire ship.
Yes! On the 13th of October 1750, Voltaire sent the following letter (there is a French original, and English translation which I will quote, which is slightly different from your version):
OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH. THANK YOU FOREVER.
The University of Oxford.
Fancy! I'll keep that in mind when using WorldCat and the like.
Unfortunately, even worse than anybody else here, I suspect. I've never been educated in French - I did a Spanish GCSE haha.
Join the club of non-French speakers, then. :)
I'll be popping in occasionally, then!
Yay!