Stories from Summer Vacation: Emily Roehl in the Digital Stacks

This week's story from summer vacation comes to us from Ph.D. student Emily Roehl, who is beating the heat in Austin by resting in the shade of very tall stacks of books.In addition to working as a Public Services Intern at the Harry Ransom Center this summer, I am finishing my preparations for oral exams. What this means is that when I am done retrieving books and manuscripts for patrons in the reading room each day, I hop on over to the PCL or Fine Arts Library to do the same thing for myself. There's nothing like plopping down at a big, clean desk with a stack of books and a sore arm and getting down to work. But I'll be honest--I could do without the sore arm, so I like to keep my books on campus and avoid the long, hot walk home with pounds and pounds of paper. So instead of stacking up my books on my desk so I can look at them fondly, I put them all here: in a Tumblr site that uses the Otlet's Shelf theme to organize links from Amazon. It's nice to be able to see all my books in one place, and I can add tags to organize the titles by theme. I haven't yet mastered the art of Zotero or Omeka, which are other great digital archiving tools, but I love my Tumblr and would recommend the Otlet's Shelf theme to anyone who would like to organize their own stacks of books online (and save themselves a sore arm).

Stories from Summer Vacation: Andrew Friedenthal's Summer of Teaching and Comic-Con

Here's how AMS Ph.D. student Andrew Friedenthal will be keeping busy this summer:Aside from teaching the AMS 310 "Introduction to American Studies Course" this summer, focusing on the importance and history of popular culture in US history, I'm going to be attending the annual ground zero for upcoming popular culture - San Diego Comic-Con.  Rather than dressing up as Batman or Iron Man, though, I'll be in a suit and tie, as I'm presenting a part of my dissertation at an academic conference there!  The annual Comics Arts Conference runs congruent to Comic-Con every year, and is the top annual conference for comics studies, since it allows for academics and culture-makers to forge a joint conversation about the history and future of comics and popular culture in general.  I'll probably find time to switch into an Avengers t-shirt, though.

Stories from Summer Vacation: Tynisha Scott Researches and Relaxes

We're kicking off our Summer 2013 feature, Stories from Summer Vacation, with Ph.D. student Tynisha Scott's discussion of her very busy summer...Like many students, I've spent the first few weeks following the end of a long semester catching up on television and making up for lost sleep.My roommate’s cats have rewarded my actions with cuddles, preventing me from feeling bad about relaxing on most days.However, I haven’t been a complete bum. I graduated with my masters in Women’s and Gender Studies mid-May.And I have completely reorganized my living space to maximize on my productivity this summer. My mini break is coming to an end, however, because I’ll be brushing up on my Spanish and serving as a teaching assistant for Introduction to American Studies. Though I’m excited about both activities (I’m giving a guest lecture on animated cartoons and race!), I am bummed that I will miss spending time with my niece and nephew here:Or here:Still, my plans for the summer will be invigorating as they will involve:

• knitting scarves for said niece and nephew since they requested them over a month ago
• starting a weekly writing group with some peers
• researching archives in Houston and Austin to discover more information about the former’s red light district at the turn of the twentieth century
• completing my MA thesis reading list (fingers crossed)
• working on a journal submission
• perfecting a few dishes (including roast chicken and pot roast)
• lounging by a pool as often as possible
• catching up Dexter (both the book and television series)
• finishing In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
• not brooding over the season finale of Game of Thrones and its likely absence until next year
• getting a new tattoo

Out of all these plans, the most exciting is the archive trips. Not only because they’ll be fruitful for my research, but also because my mom will join me on the Houston visits. She’s been working on our family tree and history for the past five years and is very familiar with several of the archives I’ll need to visit upon my return to the Bayou City. It really is a treat to receive guided help from both the archive librarians and my mom. Her enthusiasm for my project just reminds me that we’re never alone on our journey, no matter how isolated we may feel.

Stories from Summer Vacation: A View from the Desk of Katherine Kelly

This story comes our way from the desk of doctoral student Katherine Kelly:

Hello from my desk! This July I'm taking a month away from my job at the Longhorn Network for a fabulous rendezvous with my doctoral dissertation on home organization. The view here is really nice: I see coffee cups, frantic and unintelligible post-it notes, and piles of books that seemed important at one point, but that I have now forgotten why I even checked out of the library, left behind in my writing like so many fallen soldiers. I can't go back for you, secondary sources!! Your chapter has already been written!!The ability to have a month off to work on my project is extremely lucky--by mid-August I will be back at a job that I really enjoy, but that keeps my attention divided (the scales are tipped back again because they pay me; the dissertation, on the other hand, makes me pay and pay again). During this time, I've been able to conduct a number of interviews with professional organizers, who have all been very gracious and whose shared experiences will make my work a lot better. I'm really grateful for their time, and for the uninterrupted time here at my desk, and, incidentally, for the exercise ball chair I just bought to sit on, which has really been an unexpected boon in all this.In my spare time I'm training for an Olympic-distance triathlon I'm doing with another Ph.D. candidate (Anthropology) on Labor Day. There's not much to say about that except it's very sweaty and I will probably finish.