Week Six, in which the grad student gets to the halfway point

     "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it Fred." -Super Chicken

      A quote from Jay Ward's 1968 cartoon series seems irrelevant in a blog that is supposed to be concentrating on scholarly pursuits but the point it makes is exactly one of the things I want to talk about this week. The point it makes is as graduate level historians we knew going into this field would keep us busy. Right now I am reading more books and articles than I ever have in my life. I am coordinating and scheduling interviews. I am keeping up on my work for the colonial class. I am interacting with family and trying not to be a phantom in their lives. It has kept me busier than a Lutheran at a Lutefiske bake-off. Trying to balance everything all at once seems ridiculous, and I will admit somethings are not being taken care of as well as they should, but what I am reading and the world I am coming into contact with is worth it.
     One of the concepts I am reading right now in Radio Utopia is about how radio functions within an educational role and how that information is then relayed to and understood by the listening audience. The other concept I am reading about is in Micheal Keith's book Radio Cultures and how marginalized groups use radio to overcome discrimination. What it all means is that there is more going on in radio than I had previously thought. It is a form of media, similar to the printed word forms or visual forms, that interacts with the public. Since this is a history program that I am involved with and it is interacting with the public therefore this is public history. As such there needs to be an understanding on what exactly is occurring when the four segments I am working on get aired. Information is constructed by the author in the form of a script for a segment. The information contained in that segment is then aired out over the radio waves to the audience. The audience then listens and makes meaning from the information. In essence it is a series of complex negotiations between the author/creator of the segment and the audience similar to the engagement that exists between  visitors and museum. What I am trying to get at here is to say that radio is a medium that can be and is used to disseminate historical research out to the public. How the public interacts with that presentation of research should be recognized by the author.

I quote often from this book. 

     I am reminded of Roy Rosenzweig's and David Thelen's canonical work The Presence of the Past in thinking about this interaction and engagement. Presence of the Past stated two main points; first the public engages with history in a personal manner and second the public has different amounts of trust to the different mediums of disseminating historical events. Movies and television programs rated at the bottom of the list. Radio being another form of media could be seen as belonging there as well. So does this mean that no one will trust the information I am putting in my segments? Well yes and no. Generally the public will have some level of mistrust but the program I am working for is part of the Florida Historical Society. In The Presence of the Past list Museums, and by default historical societies, rate at the top of the list. Somewhere there is a middle-ground to the level of trust between the segment and public then. How does this relate to my work you ask? By putting a more personal approach to the segments I can engage with the public in a manner more suitable to their engagement with the history presented. For instance instead of just getting an interview with the current owner of the Citrus Tower, Dr. Brotemarkle suggested that I obtain interviews with some of the people who live and work around the tower. This personalizes the tower as something that everyday people engage with on a constant basis. It gives a personalized meaning to a structure that I would categorize as an architectural artifact. But presenting it as such would be cold and too scholarly for the public. Utilizing both approaches gets the scholarly information out but allows the public to engage with the information in the personal way, which is how they negotiate historical meaning in the first place.
     So yeah, you could say I have been reading a lot of theoretical books in the past week. This is just a preview of what I will be putting into the final paper at the end of the semester. I just need to find the time. Sleep is so overrated.