CHARLIE BENNETT: Hey, podcast listeners.
It's Charlie here.
This episode of Lost in the Stacks
is packed with stuff, so much, in fact,
that I had to cut big chunks out of it
before it could fit into our normal hour-long radio time
slot on WREK Atlanta.
But you, the podcast-listening crew,
are getting all those chunks I cut out.
The episode is maybe six or seven minutes longer
than its broadcast version.
I hope you like it.
[MUSIC - FAITH NO MORE, "EVIDENCE"]
WENDY HAGENMAIER: I just want to tell you
that your writing about evidence--
it's part of what inspired me to go to library
school because I had come from thinking
about collections as this emotional space, the space
where it's about culture, and it's about personal connection
and acquisition of meaning.
But I had never thought about this evidence
aspect and the power.
And it just opened up all these other pathways,
thinking about this.
So thank you for that.
SNOWDEN BECKER: You are welcome.
Thank you.
I mean, what a gift to hear that I
influenced the choices that somebody made in their lives.
And I hope it was a good decision for you.
You're doing great work where you are.
So I hope it's not one that you regret.
(SINGING) Evidence.
Evidence.
[MUSIC - TELEVISION, "FRICTION"]
CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta.
And this is Lost in the Stacks of the Research Library
Rock'n'Roll radio show.
I'm Charlie Bennett in the virtual studio
with the whole gang, Marlee Givens, Wendy Hagenmaier,
and Fred Rascoe.
Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme
and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk.
Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it.
MARLEE GIVENS: That's right, Charlie.
And this episode is called "Punctum."
FRED RASCOE: "Punkdom"?
P-U-N-K-D-O-M?
MARLEE GIVENS: Almost.
It's actually P-U-N-C-T-U-M, Punctum, or "punctum."
It's a concept from the philosopher Roland
Barthes, who came up in our interview for the show.
CHARLIE BENNETT: In my notes, this show
was about bricks in the library.
MARLEE GIVENS: Oh, it is, but it's about much more than that.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: Is it about "punk-dom"
dumb as in P-U-N-K-D-O-M?
MARLEE GIVENS: Maybe.
No spoilers.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, OK.
Well, I do know that our guest today
is Archives and Collections Consultant Snowden Becker, who
came our way via tweet about bricks in the library.
MARLEE GIVENS: Mhm.
FRED RASCOE: And our songs today are
about finding the extraordinary within the ordinary,
crime at the edge of the cultural envelope,
and bricks, obviously.
Items in archives gain meaning in many ways,
like, for instance, their context or their provenance.
But they especially gain meaning in appreciating their details.
So let's start with "Details" by First Beige,
right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[MUSIC - FIRST BEIGE, "DETAILS"]
WENDY HAGENMAIER: You just heard details by First Beige.
This is Lost in the Stacks, and today, we're
talking to Archives and Collections Consultant Snowden
Becker.
We invited her to talk with us on the show because of a tweet
that Marlee encountered at the beginning of this year.
MARLEE GIVENS: Snowden had tweeted about,
quote, "Bricks of historic significance," unquote.
And she invited people to tweet about bricks
in their libraries, archives, museums,
or special collections.
And the responses were delightful.
So I had to ask her what she remembered
about that tweet and its replies.
SNOWDEN BECKER: I remember having asked that in maybe
5% jest and 95% seriousness.
I was genuinely curious about who else had
bricks in their collections.
Having worked in a variety of institutions
that had very mixed materials in their holdings, some of which
are utterly inscrutable unless you know the context.
And I think that kind of thing really
speaks to the unique appeal and unique challenges of archives,
that there's a lot of stuff in archives that just doesn't have
any meaning out of context.
But archives exist to provide that context,
and to convey that context and to maintain
that context for a future, and to enable
people to put the larger histories together
with that appropriate depth.
MARLEE GIVENS: Was there a specific brick
that inspired your question?
SNOWDEN BECKER: There was one, and I
should be able to remember it off the top of my head.
I don't have the thread in front of me.
But I do remember seeing a brick and somebody saying, like,
oh, yeah, duh, we have this dumb brick in our collection.
And I'm thinking, there's probably a lot of those.
A lot of us have a single random object
that's the bane of our existence in the collection that,
like, why do we have this?
Ugh.
We have it because it's significant and important
to somebody.
But it's huge.
It's dirty.
It's heavy.
We can't move it without Big Joe, the little pallet
jack, or other encumbrances.
I first encountered this in my professional life
when I worked for the Japanese-American National
Museum.
And amongst the items in the collection there are one
of the tar paper barracks that people were incarcerated
in during World War II, the 110,000-plus Americans,
many of them citizens, many of them children,
many of them prevented from becoming citizens by the Asian
exclusion laws that were on the books until well after World
War II.
And overcome over even a presidential veto,
the idea of material objects having a real significance.
Among the things that we had in that collection
were a rusty bed spring that, again, looks
like junk until you look at it closely and hear
the accounts of people who were incarcerated,
who say things like, oh, yeah, we
would use the bed springs from the crappy cots
from the War Relocation Authority
in these very drafty, frigid, cardboard shacks
to carve beautiful objects out of the incredibly
tough mesquite wood, which was the only thing around
for miles.
And so that rusty piece of junk, you
look at the sharpened end of it, and you realize
that this is not garbage.
It is evidence of how human beings will,
when placed in adverse circumstances,
go to tremendous lengths to make beautiful objects
that the creative impulse, the artistic impulse,
and the impulse to give expression
to the beautiful sides of one's soul, are ever present.
The museum collection at the Japanese-American National
Museum is packed with items like that,
little things scrounged together that were
made into gifts and tokens of appreciation for the people
on the outside, who were helping in whatever ways they could,
or the people on the inside, who wanted to continue traditions
of gift exchange or seasonal celebrations that
might normally have been celebrated with decorations
of fresh flowers or elaborate costumes.
These fragile remnants are the things that survive.
And again, they're the kind of thing
that could easily be mistaken for garbage if you don't
know the stories behind them.
MARLEE GIVENS: A brick would not be considered
a beautiful object, but I think that there were some bricks
that people tweeted back to you that had
some artistic value perhaps.
But what were some of the bricks that stood out
for you in those replies?
SNOWDEN BECKER: I'm going to circle back to and take issue
with the question of a brick not being
able to be a beautiful object.
There are beautiful bricks out there,
some of which we got pictures of in that response thread.
The most poignant exemplar, I think,
was a brick that was part of a university archive collection
that had been part of one of the original buildings
on the campus and had been fabricated
by an enslaved person and was part
of the history, the complex history, of that institution
as an antebellum institution in the United States,
where the very foundational work of building the structures
and creating those halls of learning
was done by enslaved people.
And that brick had the fingerprints
of its maker embedded into it.
The marks of manufacture, I think,
are one of the things that are incredibly
beautiful about these objects and incredibly significant.
I loved that institution had and recognized
the significance of that small mark of manumission.
I also think that corporate archives get short shrift
when it comes to the beauty and the variety of what they hold,
one reason for which is because it's
very hard for corporate archives to be open.
There's trade secrets that they protect.
There's proprietary materials, technology, and information.
So a manufacturer of bricks has all
of the bricks that they made, samples of all the bricks
and finishes.
Those can be incredibly beautiful.
If you think about the McKim, Mean, and White buildings
in New York City that are the classic brownstones.
And block-long brick buildings with the white finish
speaks to a golden age in New York
City at a time of rapidly changing industrial innovation
and new coatings, techniques, fabrication methods.
That was a time of tremendous technological advancement
and the employment of science towards beautification.
In the 1880s and 1890s, that's when
we have the invention of the color mauve--
Perkins and his use of tar extracts and coal tar extracts
and the invention of aniline dyes.
All of that stuff is super, super interesting.
And so I love archival collections
and industrial collections for that beauty and the sort
of encapsulation of experimentation
that can be in a little vial of dust or powder
or a drawer full of masonry samples.
If you are ever on a campus that has a materials engineering
program, visiting that library and visiting the sample books
and paging through things is fascinating and gorgeous,
as is if you're at a textile factory.
I'm acquainted with somebody who used
to be the corporate archivist for a major leather goods
company.
And she talked about how designers
would come in and take the historic samples
off the shelves and turn them inside out, these handbags,
and look at how the lining was put together and be like,
in all seriousness, can I take this apart?
And they would say, no, you can't, but we
have the schematics.
We have the pattern pieces.
We can show you the pieces.
You don't have to take this to pieces.
So a brick can be a beautiful object in that respect as well.
It can be something that is an exemplar and a showcase
for finishes and techniques that have
been arrived at with the investment of hundreds
of human labor hours.
CHARLIE BENNETT: We'll be back with more
from Snowden Becker about objects
and their auras after a music set.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: File this set under TA432.W37.
[MUSIC - PIERS, "CARVING UP BRICKS"]
[MUSIC - "THE WHITE STRIPES," BROKEN BRICKS"]
CHARLIE BENNETT: You just heard "Broken Bricks"
by The White Stripes.
Before that, "Bricks" by Real Humans.
And "Carving Up Bricks" by Piers started that set.
Those were songs about, well, yeah, bricks, but also
different ways to appreciate bricks.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
FRED RASCOE: This is Lost in the Stacks,
and we are talking to Snowden Becker, an archivist
and consultant, about the ways that seemingly mundane objects
take on new significance when they are acquired
by a cultural institution.
MARLEE GIVENS: So what are some other examples
that you have come across of ordinary objects that--
well, let's just say they become extraordinary
when they enter a collection?
SNOWDEN BECKER: Well, I think what you're talking about here,
if I may wax pedantic for a moment,
is what Roland Barthes described in his essay "Camera Lucida"
as the punctum.
He was speaking specifically in terms
of photographs, which he described as the living
image of a dead thing.
And I think that that's exactly what you're talking about,
that moment when a dead thing comes to life for us,
where we get struck in the heart--
that stabbing feeling almost of understanding
the significance of something.
That happens for so many things.
And for me-- and I've already forgotten
what your question really was because I was all
caught up and be like, oh, I get the cite Barthes.
That's so exciting.
[LAUGHS]
FRED RASCOE: Well, it was, like, the brick, right,
with the fingerprint?
And I experience that, too.
You hold something that's--
somebody else held a few decades ago or a few hundred years ago.
The connection that you feel when you see something
like a fingerprint on something.
Realize, oh, somebody else held this.
SNOWDEN BECKER: It's a wormhole, right?
It's a connection across time, space, identity.
One of the ways in which I experienced it--
I am a co-founder of an event called Home Movie Day, which
is celebrated annually.
And it's a "bring your own film festival," where
film archivists and local communities
invite people to come and bring their home movies,
get them off the shelves and out of the shoe boxes,
and view them often on equipment that they no longer have access
to, whether that's a VCR, free VHS
tapes of your wedding in the 1990s,
or an 8-millimeter projector for your grandparents' home movies
they shot in the '20s and '30s.
I got a big, like a "face-ful" of punctum at the Home Movie
Day event in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, where somebody--
I think it was 2006 maybe--
2005, 2006-- where one of the participants brought Super 8
footage that his parents had shot of their boat journey from
Bremen, Germany to the United States when they emigrated
in the early 1970s--
1971.
They had some footage that was very typical of an immigrant's
journey and an arrival in New York Harbor of Liberty Island
and the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan,
including the Twin Towers under construction.
They were about 3/4 and 2/3 built at that time.
So the Twin Towers are partially standing in this footage.
And an entire room full of people watching this material
reared back in their seats and went,
oh, because for all of us in that room, the last time
we had seen the towers, they looked like that.
They weren't fully standing.
But they were coming down, not going up.
And that is material that, before 9/11, 2001,
would have been extraordinarily banal.
It would have been extremely ordinary to see
that footage and that viewpoint of lower Manhattan.
But to all of us in the room who shared a cultural experience,
an experience of trauma, that was so inextricably related
to that image of those buildings in that state,
that formerly banal image is never going to be the same.
And because of when we were seeing it
and how we were seeing it, we had a much different and deeper
visceral reaction to that image.
And I think that there--
any given item that we encounter in the world
can accrue that knowledge, that sort of numinosity, that power,
depending on the journey that it takes to get to us
or the time and place at which we are encountering it.
So a brick with a fingerprint of an enslaved person, who
was making it to build an institution that hundreds
of years later or many decades later,
would be coming to reckon with its own difficult past
of enslavement and complicity in the American heritage that
is so complicated at a moment-- and for us seeing that now,
at a moment when intellectual institutions are embattled when
they are trying to teach and grapple
with this history, the vilification of critical race
theory and the idea that you're not allowed to talk
about these things, or you must present
these things with caution lest you make people experience
that punctum, that emotional charge,
the moment where history becomes reality to you,
that you understand in some small way what it must have
been like, that little peek through the crack
in space and time.
It's one of the best things, I think,
about working in an archive, is getting to experience that,
getting to see other people experiencing that,
guiding folks to that moment, and sitting with them
in what can be a painful encounter with the past.
It's a real privilege.
FRED RASCOE: I have maybe what's an inevitable question.
Is the visceral reaction to the old home movies, the old video
archives, the same when the original
was recorded digitally, when you can't pull that VCR out
of an old box or the old reel of 8-millimeter film out
of some old box?
What changes about your reaction to it?
SNOWDEN BECKER: It's absolutely the same.
I mean, just ask anybody who has kept an old cell
phone because it has a voicemail message from somebody who
has no longer--
is no longer living on it.
Ask anybody who has had a digital camera stolen
from their car and put up signs around their neighborhood
saying, I just want the pictures that
were on that video camera or that digital camera back.
There was a flyer in my neighborhood a couple of years
ago where it was just like, that video camera, that camcorder,
had the footage of my son's first steps on it,
and I would do--
you can keep the camera.
I just want the memory card back.
I will trade you a fresh memory card just to get that back.
So that's a wafer of silicon.
But it is every bit as powerful as--
it smashes you in the heart just as heavily
as any brick or any piece of film can do.
I think that the punctum platform agnostic
and medium non-specific.
MARLEE GIVENS: And now you all know
why this episode is called "Punctum" instead
of "Bricks in the Library."
CHARLIE BENNETT: Marlee, I'm sorry that I doubted you.
MARLEE GIVENS: That's OK, Charlie.
FRED RASCOE: You're listening to Lost in the Stacks,
and we'll be back with more from Snowden Becker
on the left side of the album.
[MUSIC - MORPHINE, "COME ALONG"]
JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, this is Jad Abumrad from Radiolab,
and you are listening to Lost in the Stacks,
the one-and-only Research Library Rock'n'Roll radio show
here on WREK in Atlanta.
[MUSIC - MORPHINE, "COME ALONG"]
MARLEE GIVENS: This is Lost in the Stacks,
and today's show is called "Punctum."
We talked earlier about how our guest, Snowden Becker,
tweeted a request for stories about bricks in archival
and museum collections.
And the internet delivered.
Here is one of those stories, Lost in the Stack style.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JEFFREY MAKALA: My name is Jeffrey McCalla.
I'm the Associate Director for Special Collections
and Archives and University Archivist
in the Furman University libraries in Greenville, South
Carolina.
Our University was founded in 1826.
And we moved around the state of South Carolina over the years
on five different campuses, ending up
where we are presently, in A large campus just north
of Greenville in the 1950s.
We have in our archives four bricks
from a campus in Winnsboro, South Carolina, which
is about 20 miles north of the state capital, Columbia.
The model of this campus organization
was that every student and faculty member would contribute
two hours of manual labor six days
a week as part of the sort of grand utopian experiments
that were going around the country in the 1830s and '40s.
We somehow got a notion of that and decided
to create this live-work campus.
It didn't work.
After three years, the students rebelled,
and the experiment was over.
These young men, fairly affluent men,
who were training to be preachers and teachers,
did not want to contribute manual labor
to the organization and the well being of the community.
Furman had a deficit and a problem on its hands--
what to do.
They hired in enslaved labor from the surrounding
plantations and landowners to work the farm, the plantation,
during this time.
And so we have receipts in the archives that
show the document, this hiring in of labor
to grow cotton and corn and harvest it
and bring it to market for profit.
This is 1837 to 1851.
The three bricks that I'm looking at right now,
that are in our reading room, have
been fashioned into bookends with the marker on them
that says, Furman Institute, Winnsboro, South Carolina.
And the one that I posted to Instagram,
it's from the brick building of the classroom
or the dormitory-- we don't know which--
at the Winnsboro campus.
Pressed into the surface of the largest flat side
of the brick are sixth round indentations,
and they perfectly match up to the middle finger, ring finger,
and index finger of an adult. This
is human hands forming or pulling
this brick out of a mold into a kiln
to fire it or [inaudible] and out again,
when it was still soft.
And so this brick is a very tangible reminder
and a totem, really, of our university's history--
small liberal arts university going back almost 200 years
now--
that its founding, its financial footing,
and, indeed, most of its 19th century existence
was predicated on the uncompensated labor
of enslaved people and the profits that
rose out of the slave economy in South Carolina
from enslavers who supported, founded,
and sustained the university over those years.
This brick is one part of Furman's story
and Furman's history.
But it takes you directly back to the makers
and the uncompensated sustainers of the university.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
File this set under TR 642.B3713.
[MUSIC - THE MISFITS, "STATIC AGE"]
[MUSIC - RINGO STARR, "PHOTOGRAPH"]
FRED RASCOE: You just heard "Photograph"
by Ringo Starr and, before that, "Static Age" by The Misfits,
songs about how a detail in a photo or video
can really just reach out and grab you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
WENDY HAGENMAIER: Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks.
Today's episode is called "Punctum,"
a concept explored in "Camera Lucida"
by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes,
who was cited by our guest for the episode, archivist
and consultant Snowden Becker.
MARLEE GIVENS: We're talking about the ways
that objects can acquire significance
or a new dimension of meaning.
We started with bricks and archives,
but let's explore another kind of meaning
and another kind of material, criminal evidence.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Snowden has written on this subject,
and we asked her to compare adding something
to the archives and adding something
to an evidence locker.
SNOWDEN BECKER: It's surprisingly similar.
There's a process by which all of these material
objects and recordings or objects that hold meaning
go through.
I have an unfinished dissertation
about archival aspects of evidence management
practice in law enforcement.
I'm proud of it even though I'm ABD.
I got to work with a law enforcement agency in Central
Texas and shadowed the crime scene investigators
and the property room managers.
And I got to see firsthand the process by which stuff
becomes evidence because stuff isn't inherently evidentiary.
And there is a process of appraisal
that takes place, through which, as in an archive--
we appraise collections, and we process them--
a CSI in a law enforcement agency processes it.
And that's the word they use.
They process material property for things like fingerprints
or for DNA evidence or for chemical composition.
So if somebody searches your car, if a law enforcement
official searches your car and retrieves
a baggie of white powder from the backseat,
that is just property until it has been processed
and chemically analyzed and identified
as an illegal substance like cocaine or methamphetamine
or whatever your drug of choice might be.
We use a lot of the same language,
and we take our stuff through a lot of the same processes--
labeling, identifying, preserving a chain of custody
or provenance.
Those processes are all identical within law
enforcement agencies and archives.
And if you look at the property room of a local law enforcement
agency, what you have is a trauma archive
for that community.
You have records of people's worst days.
And the kinds of records that they have,
it's not dependent on the material objects either.
It can simply be the paperwork that
causes that recognition or that moment of visceral feeling
that the--
and some of them are celebratory.
I was filing evidence sheets, and the case numbers
are assigned sequentially.
And they have a temporal component.
So there's 1991.00001, is the first crime that
takes place or the first 911 call that
gets placed on the first day of the new year.
So guess what that is?
Illegal fireworks.
You know, New Year's Eve.
It's midnight.
Fireworks start popping off.
Neighbors call police.
Boom.
You have a piece of paper that speaks
to our culture or our history in a really unique way
in the nature of transgressions that get documented.
I also saw a very--
just sort of a novel on a page.
Again, a very regimented form about the seizure
of stolen goods from a pawn shop.
The name of the victim and the name of the suspect--
same last name, both female--
female-presenting given names.
The victim was in her 50s, and the suspect was in her 20s.
And the list of items seized in connection with this case
was just a few pieces of cheap jewelry.
And so that, to me, tells a story
of a daughter who has stolen her mother's jewelry
and pawned it for drug money.
So there are these little novels inherent in every single piece
of packaged evidence.
That is these stories are told within the boundaries
of a very formalized data-collection instrument,
like a form, a chain-of-custody slip.
They are reified through processes that are consistent
and done according to guidelines that are promulgated
by state or federal agencies.
They are subject to rigorous examination in the courtroom.
But it all comes down to the stuff.
And the stuff in a property room is
what makes it a haunted place.
You can look at the very mundane Rubbermaid, roughneck,
big, gray, plastic garbage pan--
garbage pail that's full of implements that have
been used in violent acts--
little paper tags on them that say, homicide or assaults.
And it's a rake or a ho or a shovel.
There's also-- this is a little less heavy,
but there's also just a giant tub
full of really hideous bongs.
People be smoking some weed out of very, very
ugly paraphernalia.
So--
FRED RASCO: That was police report 00420, right?
SNOWDEN BECKER: Exactly.
Exactly.
A lot of those on 4/20.
[INAUDIBLE] I just--
I had to laugh when I just looked in that bin,
and there's just so many (IMITATING STEREOTYPICAL
MARIJUANA SMOKER) really hideous bongs, dude.
We're, like, doing rips out of just giant goblin heads.
Yeah, that is hilarious.
And it paints a portrait of a community and of the history
of how we criminalize conduct.
There are archives of LGBTQ history
that include arrest forms for cross-dressing, people
who were arrested for wearing the wrong number
of the wrong kinds of clothes.
And, you know, I like to think about Eddie Izzard
and how they talked about how they're not women's clothes.
They're mine.
I bought them.
How we have created and characterized
social transgression, how we've criminalized
certain kinds of behavior-- that is all archived in the property
room in a way that it's really recorded
in very few other places because criminality,
transgression, bad behavior tends
not to be found in the traditional archive,
the heritage institution.
We tend to celebrate the great and the good,
people who obeyed the rules or broke them in a way
that society found acceptable.
We tend to find the lives of lower-class people,
lower-income people, marginalized communities
in the property room in a way that they're not
represented in a city archives or a historical society
collection.
And I think that that overrepresentation
in one place and underrepresentation or another
is something that we as a community,
as a professional community, are seeking to reconcile for things
like remedial collection and identifying invisible materials
in our collections.
And those things can take the form of bricks
with fingerprints on them.
Or they can take the form of paperwork or just documenting
the absences, the records that we don't have and should.
MARLEE GIVENS: You've been listening
to our interview with Archives and Collections
Consultant Snowden Becker about bricks, shacks, home movies,
and other commonplace objects that take on a new significance
when we bring them into our libraries, archives,
and museums.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: File this set under HV 8073.B43.
[MUSIC - CRIME, "CRIME WAVE"]
(SINGING) We belong to the crime wave.
[MUSIC - JODY GRIND, "BEHIND THE EIGHT BALL"]
MARLEE GIVENS: You just heard "Behind the Eight Ball"
by the Jody Grind and, before that, "Crime Wave" by Crime,
songs about, well, crime and things
right on the edge of crime.
[MUSIC - TELEVISION, "FRICTION"]
CHARLIE BENNETT: Before we get to the end of the show,
let's have another brick story.
This one is from Jody Thompson.
Jody is the head of the Archives, Records Management,
and Digital Curation Department.
And she serves as the library's preservation manager.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MAN: Yeah, yeah, that was a nice jam.
JODY THOMPSON: I selected a red clay brick of the Knowles
building that once stood on campus, where
the current Student Success Center and the West Stands
of Bobby Don Stadium are.
The brick is about 11 inches wide, 5 inches tall,
and about 3 inches deep.
There are real no distinguishing characteristics
other than a small plaque on the front of the brick that reads,
quote, "Knowles Building, 1897 through 1992,
Tradition, The Foundation of our Future," end quote.
My favorite thing about the brick
really isn't the brick itself but more
of what it once made up, which was the Knowles Dormitory.
In the archives, we have documents and photographs
of the Knowles dormitory.
The architects were Bruce and Morgan,
who also designed Tech Tower.
Knowles Dormitory was completed in September 1897
and had 36 rooms, a gymnasium, showers,
and a dining room for the all-male student population
at Georgia Tech at the time.
We have photographs from the early 20th century
of the interior rooms, such as student rooms.
This really gives the researcher an idea of how students lived
and what the rooms look like during that time.
We also have documents stated that after one
year of the dorms opening, the building
was already overcrowded.
Originally, the rooms were designed for two students.
But by 1898, there were three students per room.
By the mid-20th century, the building was used as offices
and then finally demolished in 1992.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's episode of Lost in the Stacks
is called "Punctum," which is an idea that
came up during our interview with Snowden Becker.
Originally, it meant the moment when a detail from a photograph
seems to jump out and connect in a deeply
personal way with the viewer.
We're taking that and running with the larger idea
that ordinary objects acquired by a cultural institution
seem to transform and take on new meaning
when they become part of a collection.
It's almost like a reverse material umph.
OK, but we're talking about punctum.
Have any of you, show team, experienced that moment,
where the object you were looking at
seemed to connect with you personally,
in a way you weren't expecting?
WENDY HAGENMAIER: The first thing
that popped into my head--
it's actually not about me.
So I'm kind of cheating.
But I've observed other people experiencing this, I think,
in an interesting way.
So in our retroTECH Lab in the library,
we have a bunch of older technologies--
older computers, slide rules, cool cameras.
We also have some flip phones from the early 2000s, which
seem super mundane and like, why would we take up space
with these?
But a few years ago--
I'm not sure if it would be the same now because things change
so fast, but undergrads would come in and merely
weep seeing these flip phones because they reminded them
of when they were toddlers or whatever, little kids holding
their parents' phone, and having memories
of being really little.
And it just shot them right back there.
And it was just fascinating to observe because I did not
share the same experience.
MARLEE GIVENS: That is so sweet.
I recently had a birthday, and my sister, to celebrate this,
sent me a scan of some baby pictures of mine.
This is a picture that I have seen many, many times.
It's my two parents.
And my dad is holding me, and I'm probably
just a few weeks old.
And for the first time, I was just like, oh, my god,
they look so tired, because I have a kid of my own.
And I'm like, oh.
All I can think about is what those first few weeks
were like for me and just seeing that in their faces now.
CHARLIE BENNETT: All right, this is a slightly sad one.
But today is the anniversary of my father's death.
And when Dad died, Mom gave me a lot of stuff.
And one of the things I pulled out of all of that stuff
was an old magazine from April 8, 1966, the mass-produced TIME
magazine, a weekly news mag.
But the title of the magazine is "Is God Dead?"
And I had this moment holding it when I realized,
my dad bought this when he was very young.
He would eventually become a seminarian.
And this magazine probably inspired a bunch
of feelings and thoughts in him that I would never quite
be able to understand.
But that magazine, which is a disposable piece of pop media,
is something completely different
because of who bought it and when
it arrived in my quote, unquote, "collection."
FRED RASCOE: Mine also reminds me of a death of a loved one.
Just last weekend, I was going through my grandfather's
foreign coin collection.
It's come to me over the years.
My grandfather died in 1987.
I was just unscrewing the old medicine bottles
that he kept the coins in.
The coins were labeled in his handwriting France, Germany--
wherever the coins were from.
And I realized that it was probably the only thing
that I had--
the only example of his handwriting that I have,
maybe that exists anywhere from someone who died in 1987.
And I just pictured him at the kitchen table,
probably labeling these bottles and saving these coins.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Well, this show started with bricks,
and it ended much more intensely.
So I don't even know if I want to roll the credits.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
WENDY HAGENMAIER: Let's do it anyway.
FRED RASCOE: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration
between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library,
written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, Marlee
Givens, and Wendy Hagenmaier.
MARLEE GIVENS: Today's show was edited and assembled
by Charlie under the weight of significance and meaning.
CHARLIE BENNETT: It was a lot.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: Legal counsel and a dog-eared copy
of "Camera Lucida" were provided by the Burrus Intellectual
Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Special Thanks to Snowden
for joining us today, to all the people
who replied to that tweet and made it into something.
And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you
for listening.
MARLEE GIVENS: You can find us online at LostInTheStacks.org,
and you can subscribe to our podcast
pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week's show
is an archives takeover, which happens sometimes
on Lost in the Stacks.
FRED RASCOE: It's time for our last song today.
And, you know, it's Friday afternoon.
It's almost the end of summer.
Let's just play a party song.
CHARLIE BENNETT: I don't know, Fred.
A party song at the end of this episode?
Trying to keep with the music theme?
Can you do it?
FRED RASCOE: Yeah, [INAUDIBLE] a little bit.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: Do you mean a party song about bricks?
MARLEE GIVENS: There's only one that I can think of.
FRED RASCOE: Hmm, me too.
Let's get the weekend started right with "Brick House"
by the Commodores, right here on Lost in the Stacks.
Have a great weekend, everybody.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Wait.
WENDY HAGENMAIER: Y'all know that "Brick House"
isn't actually about bricks, right?
[MUSIC - THE COMMODRES, "BRICK HOUSE"]