Whig Hill

need help

Can anyone recommend a good tax preparer/accountant in the Durham area?

Thanks

I just spent three days at the beach. Hey, Chris, you say, I thought you hated the beach? Well, I like it just fine when done on my own terms. And that’s how it went. Had a pretty good time and Lizzie really took to the boats. Spent a few nights in Ocracoke and a day on Portsmouth Island. When the Cedar Island Ferry broke down, we just turned around and drove north, visiting the OBX and Manteo, where I once worked and lived. The house I lived in is torn down in favor of a brand new school.

Like my colleague Andrew, I’ll be very vague in describing a disappointment. (Andrew, I'll fill you in later.) I went to a museum and had a very bad visitor experience. I was stalked and approached by a young costumed interpreter who told me the labels I was about to read were incorrect (owing to a rush to get the exhibit up, according to him). Then he proceeded to tell me the correct facts. Now, I couldn’t tell you if the labels were right because he got in the way, but more importantly, they were giant text panels with just plain weird colors. I wasn’t going to read them anyhow. But I can tell you that what he portrayed as the correct facts, were wrong from top to bottom.

It ain’t just bragging when I say I know a few things about the Civil War.

Anyhow, I want to say thanks to everyone who sent concerned emails or comments because of one of the posts below. Means a lot to me. Much of the worst of it has passed. Getting away, revising expectations, and focusing on other things to look forward to have all helped.

In the meantime, I’ve finished reading Bernard Bailyn’s Atlantic History: Concept and Contours, Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War (expect a review), and will be finishing John Demos’ Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America tonite. Strangely, I’ve got nothing in the cue. (queue?)

Well, now, I’ve been using del.icio.us for work lately but I thought I’d make up a personal page for stuff I’m reading online. Here it is. It will mostly be work related items, so I hope at least my colleagues will check out some of the links. (Let me know if this link works.)

Nothing too new on my dad. Talked to mom on Friday and he's in and out of the hospital, as usual. The current problem is the high iron levels and the efforts to get that out of his body. The pills for that cause a horrible rash, so they're trying a new machine that he straps to his body and works its magic through an IV tube through his stomach. We'll see.

And, as usual, some things I’m not telling you! 

Doing much better now,

thank you.

here goes...

Folks, it’s been a rough couple of weeks. But let me back up.

My depression has always been low-grade and mostly anxiety based. But in early March I began what I can only describe as a manic episode… I felt great, GREAT! I tell you. Everything seemed bright and hopeful. I had many friends and just wanted to tell every one of them about the good thing that is my life. I have no idea what triggered it, but I didn’t complain.

You see where this is going.

That evened out a bit, but now it’s slipping away fast. Not only do my friends and colleagues (seem to) disregard me, but also they go out of their way to kick me when I’m down. So I just want to be alone. In my bed, sleeping, so I don’t have to think about the fact that every opportunity I have to get something done is an opportunity (usually taken) for something bad to happen to me. My hopelessness increases daily. The only good thing about that is it’s a powerful incentive to disconnect from day-to-day things that cause me to despair. And let me tell you. When you are going through this, sleep ain’t really your friend.

On top of all that, I have a terrible cough.

I have this sensation that a sea change is happening in my life. The divorce being a big event, but only an event in the larger picture of the life I’ve made for myself since moving (back, ahem) to North Carolina. Certain strands are pulling away: friendships failing, aspirations miscarried.

I had hoped to reveal this happy news under better circumstances, but here goes. In August I will be going back to school. I’m enrolled in the Ph.D. program in American History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I’ll be keeping my job at Historic Sites, but will cut back to thirty hours a week. Fortunately, I will be allowed to move my office to Durham so that will help a great deal. (Breaking away from Raleigh gives me mixed feelings.)

I want to do this because I’ve always wanted to do this. Earn a Ph. D., that is. But I think I can narrow it down a bit.

The jobs I aspire to in the history museum world are all occupied by Ph.Ds. So, it’s partially a way to advance my career. Simple as that.

I want to write better, and develop the discipline and skills necessary to achieve that.

And I miss the academic environment. I love learning and I love thinking and I love being challenged by my peers.

This isn’t apparent in the real world, but in the academic world, right now is a very, very, good time to be a student of common whites and the Civil War. The field is fertile again. Unfortunately, Chandra Manning just published the book I was destined to write, but I’ll figure something out.

And, as usual, some things I not telling you.

Your input is welcome and appreciated, Part I

Proposal

I’m not talking about starting a blog, adopting a new technology, or catching a wave. My efforts are not about swatting at objects because they’re bright and shiny.

This is about change. About adapting to fundamental shifts in demographics and expectations. About addressing the vacuum of uncertainty facing history organizations. About thoroughly rethinking the relationship between our audiences and ourselves.

Problems

Public history institutions are facing a crisis. Despite the hopes of the last twenty years, efforts to create dynamic history experiences have simply failed to rebuild once high levels of attendance, membership and resources.  According to a conference of historic administrations and consultants in 2006, museums face a disconnect between self-identity (and mission) and changing visitor expectations of history organizations and a crippling lack of long-term planning (including an embarrassing deficiency of research data about our visitors).

Shifting demographics and expectations face the larger world. The key to understanding this change is not just the natural increase of the younger generations, but what the members of this generation expect from social, cultural, and political communities. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, authors of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, write about the future generation….

“Rather than being passive recipients of mass consumer culture, the Net Gen [born between 1977 and 1996] spend time searching, reading, scrutinizing, authenticating, collaborating, and organizing… The Internet makes life an ongoing, massive collaboration, and this generation loves it. They can’t imagine a life where citizens don’t have the tools to constantly think critically, exchange views, challenge, authenticate, verify, or debunk….

They are also a generation of scrutinizers. They are more skeptical of authority as they sift through information at the speed of light by themselves or with their network peers…”

Gary K. is a Durham blogger and historic preservationist and while I don’t know his age, he is trafficking in ethics of this generation. He noted his expectations and disappointment at interacting with local government.

“This posture, which seems to have infected government (and perhaps the public) at-large, obviously does not serve the best interests of the community - it serves governmental path-dependence and personal egos.

… My longstanding experience in dealing with the city over vacant/abandoned properties is one of encountering obfuscation, defensiveness, and externalization of blame. For ~6 years, while working with Preservation Durham, we tried to establish the most basic of relationships - information sharing - to no avail. Periodically, after something else got knocked down, there would be a meeting where we'd express disappointment, and they'd share earnest expressions of wanting to ‘work together.’ Nada.”

I suspect Gary’s experience is similar many interested people who look to institutions for a personal, collaborative, experience.

Finding solutions

Gary points to a promising solution that both the conference attendees and the authors of Wikinomics agree on: the formation of communities of interest where access, information, and authority are shared.

The ethic of sharing is usually made in reference to proprietary and commodifiable information such as lines of computer code, chemical equations, or engineering designs. In the history business, we do not deal in information that discreet. Instead, we work with memories, public and private. Yet, as any good historian should tell you, history is a product, a product of personal, political, bureaucratic, logistical, and interpretive decisions constantly being made.

Public engagement with our sites is critical to our future. I am not talking about simple membership in a support group, but widespread acknowledgement that the public and we are inexorably linked—our fates depend on our long-term position as part of public life and in the lives of the public. We need this relationship and we need it to be two-way. We need these communities. They will tell us:

How well we are doing. Attendance numbers are the key to the budget coffers, but they are a sham for telling us if we are succeeding in our work. They do not tell us anything about our audience, its motivations, its satisfaction levels, or its response to our work. Communities that we have a solid back-and-forth relationship with will tell us all these things. That information is still measurable and reportable, but it is much deeper and richer than the easy tallies from visitor logs.

What we should be doing and how to do it. A self-organized community will be a constituency that serves as a widely dispersed support group, focus group, collaborator and advocate.

Tapscott and Williams note, “In today’s information-soaked environment, writers and content creators need to find ways to permeate people’s consciousness. Giving away content and building loyal relationships are increasingly part of the arsenal creators use in the battle for people’s attention… when readers make that cognitive and emotional link it is no longer just discretionary activity.” 

In other words, develop a relationship with visitors so that their decision to visit us is not just a random choice.

Principles

The forthcoming generation of history consumers will not be passive recipients of our products. They will expect to be proactive in the creation and maintenance of history. And they will expect us to be equal partners in the task. Our future audience will expect the same from us that they are currently demanding of political, media, and cultural outlets: sharing, transparency, and trust.

We need to open our decision making process to the public and ourselves. The crowd has wisdom and the public will be interested and able to contribute to the ways we produce history. Sharing the reasons we make certain decisions in a friendly and conversational environment will help our communities to understand why we do what we do, and open channels for input on those decisions. Additionally, we have access to resources, whether artifacts, photographs, or physical properties. Opening and sharing that access will allow our public to engage with us, create with us (or themselves), and cause them to make strong emotional investments in our institutional goals.

Trust will be the basis of this relationship. If trust is not developed, the relationship will not happen. We need to be open and forthcoming about our decision making process and when that process, or its results, go awry. The modern public is highly attuned to--and turned off by--the language and obfuscation of advertisers and bureaucracy.  It is equally aware of, and rewarding to institutions that speak in honest and personal words.

Therefore, this institution will need to be committed to the principles mentioned above. And the relationship will need to be attended to by our organization with a sense of timeliness, relevance, and authenticity. 

Correspondence that once took days might now take minutes. Not because work and deliberation has increased its pace, but because technology has allowed communication to be a nearly instantaneous event. The public will expect from us timely responses to conversation as well as to acts of creation or criticism.

Because audience discrimination is so keen, we need to develop the habit of using an authentic voice. The authentic voice will make honest statements. The authentic voice will be ready for conversation. The authentic voice will be the voice of a person, not an institution. And the authentic voice will not be used to oversell, obfuscate, or toe a party line.

Authenticity is akin to relevance. Only in genuine and timely conversations will we able to divine the needs, desires, and interests of our audience and with those insights, we will be able to create historic experiences with deeper meaning, and respond to events in such a way as to make us a trusted resource. Our institution has spent a great deal of money on large-scale events only to be disappointed in the results. A greater attention to the relevancy of those events might have produced happier results.

To survive, we need these relationships and they need to flow both ways. They will not only be necessary to maintain our current audience, but to build a new audience among the forthcoming generations.

Platform

A place for conversation, collaboration, sharing, and transparency are necessary for the success of this project, and the platform is easy and inexpensive: the Internet.   

Though by no means the only solution to the problem of relationship building, the Internet can provide a variety of tools that allow conversation, access, and sharing to occur. Software programs and other applications increase the speed of communication, the ease of identifying peers, and the ability for communities to self-organize. Blogs, podcasts, video and audio sharing sites, wikis, tags, and public bookmarking sites are all channels for communication.

Yet their use alone is not a guarantee to effectiveness or success. They are just tools to implement an institution-wide policy of sharing, transparency, and trust.

To be continued.

I hope.

Is no place safe?

L. and I just found a copperhead snake on the street in front of our house. Jeez, snake, stay in the park at least.

Killin' is good therapy.

Oh, god, did I just say that aloud?

Well, now...

take a look at this coolness.

How cool is this?

I've always seen that little "view as slideshow" button on my Flickr page, but I didn't know you could actually, you know... view as a slideshow with it. Neat.