The Social Life of Inkstones Read Along: Introduction

[forestofglory]

Welcome to the first post of our read a long of The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko! For this post we are reading the introduction.

Since this the introduction to the book, I thought it might be nice for us to introduce ourselves, so here are some optional discussion questions:

1. What do you hope to get out of reading this book? What do you hope to get out of the read a long format?

2. What is your experience reading academic history books? (No experience necessary of course, but it's helpful for me to know for planning purposes)

3. What is your experience using an inkstone or writing languages that historically where written with inkstones?

4. In the introduction what did you find interesting and/or exciting?

Comments

[cortue]

I've not heard of the concept of public history before. Looking it up on wikipedia it seems to be people working in history outside of academia. So was your degree on studying the practice of history curation of history outside of university or a preparation to work in one of those fields?

[theladyscribe]

It was a mixture of both - I took several classes in the theory of public history, which is a combination of historical curation outside academia and how to present history to the public (which go hand-in-hand, especially when thinking about the front-facing and back-office spaces of museums, archives, and historic sites), but I also took hands-on classes (my favorites were the archives class and the oral history class). Unfortunately, jobs are hard to come by, so I don't actually work in the field, but I love talking about history and all the different ways it gets presented to the public!

[cortue]

That's such a neat field! I was reading recently about an archivist who has to decide what to keep and how to document it, especially in modern times where there can be such an excess of stuff. It did make me curious about how the guidelines of such things are developed.