Cell phones and the gelman library.

Right now I am listening to some typical GWU undergraddie talk away. She is mad at her boyfriend because he broke her digital camera. Evidently they have a date this evening for Valentine's Day. She is so peeved because she wanted to "remember this night" with pictures. Now this is plan is ruined because her boy-toy has abused his borrowing privileges and messed up the camera. At least three separate people have stared at her, stopped typing or doing whatever it is they were doing to not to subtly convey that this one should stop talking.

Not an original post I realize. But what is with people? I know many GWU undergraddies are inane but this girl makes me wonder about the virtues of reproduction..

Musings about archival work and megapixels

For some time I have stubbornly held to my ways. Though I sometimes stick with notebook and pencil, more often I have used my computer so that I could just take notes while working with materials. While taking notes seemed to force me to work, read and plow through, I have always noticed so many people busy clicking away as they took digital pictures of the letters, notes, and whatever else constituted the special collection under examination. I found this odd. I also found it something to envy since I was not cool enough to have a digital camera that would permit me such on the spot copying. Well, this past Xmas my Father purchased a digital camera for me that has 7 megapixels. I really have no idea what a megapixel is--it in fact sounds like a cool movie theatre I would go to if I lived on the Skywalker Ranch. But whatever a megapixel is it allows me to take pictures of documents with text, not be very good at taking pictures, hell not even understand taking pictures and then when I transfer to a computer I can actually focus in and read this stuff. Even better, I still managed to discriminate. I did not just take a snapshot of everything--what I feared I might do if I went this route. I have decided I like megapixels.