I’m building my own book scanner now. It’s basically a PVC rig that will hold two cameras on each side and allow for a book to be placed in the middle. Both covers will be at a 45 degree angle so each page can be photographed in high resolution without damaging the spine. I’m doing this so I can scan my antique mining catalogs into the public domain. I only have the frame set up, and will need to do quite a bit more work, but in the end the quality should be roughly equivalent to that of a professional scanner, minus the otherwise extremely expensive equipment.
I’ve never done a project like this before, so thank goodness somebody wrote the instructions up. Too bad that guy was Bri’ish, as everything is metric and some pieces aren’t available here in ‘Murica, but I’m pretty happy seeing the frame put together. I first saw this design back in December, so it’s exciting to realize that I’m actually building it now, and am already halfway there.
I know that history isn’t “cool”. Not many people seem to care about it. I could get far more approval and pats on the back if I chose to dedicate my time to certain other subjects. If I can be vulnerable without being whiny, I wish I had more approval. I wish more people thought something of me. It’s about that time of year again when people start posting pictures of all their travels and adventures. In small doses, it’s not so bad, but when dozens of people are posting, it’s a little harder. And I don’t want to put any of that down, it’s just difficult sometimes to look at my own life and to see the missing pieces, the struggles, sometimes even the sheer difficulty of getting in the car and going anywhere. This desire for approval drives many emotions inside of me. I mean, if you want approval, just do what everybody expects of you: love worship music. Buy a house. Buy a new car. Be a nature nut. Be adamantly right-wing or adamantly left-wing. Travel to all of the places. Etc. And none of those things is wrong in itself, there’s just that split inside of me: you don’t want to be someone you aren’t in the name of not conforming, but you don’t want to conform just for approval, either. It’s just easy sometimes to login to Facebook and feel like a loser by the time you logout.
There comes a time when you have to look yourself in the mirror and really ask yourself, “What truly matters to me?” Not what gives you approval, or social acceptance, or even prestige. What really matters to you. And it’s okay to join with people, it’s okay to be a part of things your friends enjoy, too, even if those things don’t mean as much to you. And you shouldn’t try to elevate your interests above others’, as if your interests were superior, which is a common reaction. I think it’s more a matter of accepting yourself, accepting that what you enjoy matters. And hopefully, it matters enough that you don’t need social acceptance to go with it, though I think we all understand that struggle. I’m still learning how best to navigate this. But what I do know for certain is that these subjects are close to my heart.
Now, to be fair, I don’t consider myself a “history buff” – I couldn’t care less about the Battle of Salamis, US Presidents, or the fall of the French monarchy. I think I’m just fascinated by other life-ways, a sort of infinite curiosity I have, and which experienced a serious boost way back in Cultural Anthropology 101. I’m interested in local histories, who lived where, and how they lived. I see a sherd of porcelain and can’t help but wonder what might have been.
It is a bit ironic to sometimes find the past more interesting than the present, considering the present is really just to be the past in the future. I mean, why get excited about old life ways when you can more thoroughly study current life ways? Well, there is a point to be made here (and I still desire some travel), but life in the past was also quite different, although it operated toward the same general objectives. It’s unusual and I don’t understand it, and I have questions about it that I want to answer. I have, however, long thought it would be fun to go around to different businesses and ask them who they are, what they do, how they came to be in the business, and what challenges they face. I have always seen stores and warehouses and wondered what sorts of things go on inside. I suspect my interest in history is just an outgrowth of my curiosity toward life in general; it just has the additional mystery of the lesser-known, and the advantage that it can, at times, be studied and enjoyed passively (as an introvert, ethnographic research has always terrified me).
I was pretty proud of scanning my first book into the public domain last year. I had purchased a spiral-bound photocopy printout of a very, very old book. I was able to take those pages and use an electronic scanner to organize them into a pdf, run ORC software on it to make the text searchable, and then upload it to the Internet Archive. It doesn’t have a ton of views, but the original has been used for all sorts of construction research that required old mining records. The book itself sells for $900-1500 on a good day, and I was able to avoid buying that by finding this facsimile copy for roughly $100 instead. I mean, uploading that was a great feeling, and now the whole world can access the contents of that book for free. Sweet!
And I thought to myself, “I could get used to this”.
I think I’ve written about this before, but I sometimes struggle working in software when my greater interests – “passions”, if you will – lie with history and archaeology. Anthropology, even. I want to feel confident, even expert with software, but I can’t fake that my interest in it only goes so far. I believe I can survive happily doing it, and it occasionally does entertain my desire to learn and understand how things work, but if I received a tax-free $1 million tomorrow, you’d better believe I’d quit my job to pursue different avenues. What I’d love to do is use my programming skills to build custom software for a history/archaeology organization or government agency. I even like the idea of building scanner technology to help others add their books to the public domain, but that would probably require me to learn lower-level programming, something I’m not yet willing to take on.
I don’t know that I could handle a master’s degree in any of these subjects. I’m impatient, I get easily distracted, I get bored with subjects after awhile, and I like my money. That’s my favorite part about software development. And maybe this is how it was meant to be. If I were a history professor, for example, I might think twice before buying a $100 antique book. But as a software developer, I don’t have to care. (As a cheap-ass, I do care a little bit, but I try to be realistic about this, too). I’ve already put around $150 into this scanner project, and I still don’t have to care. And this is nice, because I think I can make a bigger difference in the world doing this stuff then I can in academia, which I suspect I am poorly suited for.
I’d like to get back to some of my roots. Creating software is one thing, but I used to be pretty interested in using software, too. I created the image for this post by playing around with a filter in Gimp, and it reminds me how interested I used to be in design software. But I get to have the best of both worlds because I know how to program, so I could really do well when it comes to using technology for these subjects. Learning some basic photography or scanning techniques should probably be on my radar, and this could even play a role in cultural research, or some of my hopes to be involved with missionaries, even if just in a support role.
You’ve got to know what you really want out of life. I feel like the years are ticking away, and I want to make the most of them. I’m still learning, but I think it’s pretty clear that history is going to play a larger role going forward.