Living Small

Until the Cows Come Home

Yesterday morning started out like any other.  I arrived at work, checked my email, made a cup of tea, and opened up Windows Explorer to start working with the 1900 agricultural census.  When I got to the data about cattle, however, I realized I was in way over my head.  What was the difference between a bull one year or older and a two-year-old steer?  What could be meant by a cow used for "other purposes"?  Which kind do we eat?  I spent the rest of the morning with my Dictionary of Agricultural and Allied Terminology learning all about cattle. 

It turns out that there are basically four kinds of cattle (not including oxen, which haven't been counted by the census since 1890): male cattle are either steers or bulls and females are either heifers or cows.  Then they start getting broken down by age and reproductive capability.  All females under the age of two are heifers.  Once they reach two years of age, if they have calved twice, they become cows.  Cows (and heifers that have calved once) can be used for milk, but they can also be used for beef (those mysterious "other purposes").  All males under the age of one are steers.  After that age, if they have not been castrated, they become bulls; if they have been castrated, they remain steers.  Apparently all male cattle are used for beef (though bulls are also used for rodeos and, presumably, breeding).  The last distinction is that all cattle under the age of one year are calves, but calves can be either steer calves (boys) or heifer calves (girls). 

The way cattle have been counted by the census has changed over time.  At first, there were three categories: working oxen, milk cows, and other cattle.  Presumably, anything that hadn't calved and wasn't being used for labor would be an "other cattle."  In 1900, the USDA decided that it needed WAY more detail, so it counted separately calves; bulls one year and older; steers of age one, two, and three or more; heifers of age one and two; cows used for dairy and cows not used for dairy.  After that, the categories contracted to calves, steers and bulls, heifers, and dairy and beef cows.  Then in the 1950s, calves were no longer counted separately, so the category of steers and bulls included boy calves and the category of heifers included girl calves.  Finally, in 2002, the USDA returned to a three-category system: dairy cows, beef cows, and all other cattle (steers, bulls, and heifers).  What I don't know, of course, is why the government wanted more detail 100 years ago and needs less today.  I'm not sure I care enough to try to find out, but it is an interesting question.

File this under things I never thought I would need to know when I went to grad school in history!

Excitement

9:15 am and there has already been much more excitement than I was expecting at work today.  I really thought I would just come in, blog, work on maps for a few hours, and get sent home early.  But when I arrived a few minutes after 7, I couldn't log in to my computer!  I couldn't even get into the listing on the intranet that shows who is on vacation when to see if anyone from computer support would be in.  Fortunately, within an hour, there were computer supporters, and it turns out that the reason I couldn't log in was because they had decommissioned my computer and were giving me a new one!  So now I have a brand new computer that will hopefully do everything my old one did, only faster.  About five minutes after my new computer got set up, my boss came up looking for me to see if we could start working on a new research paper.  I guess we'll see about getting sent home early...

Gender Reassignment

For the past month or so at work, I have been working with the public-use microdata for the 1930 census, writing fun programs to run on it to identify people of various backgrounds and group them in different ways.  Only today, however, did I realize that my program was changing people's genders!  First, my program turned every person living with his or her father male, then it turned every person living with his or her mother female.  And I was wondering why it seemed like there were so many more girl children than boy children in 1930! 

Thinking About Maps

Another reason I haven't blogged as much or at length over the past few weeks is that I have been engrossed in a project at work.  I manage a set of county-level historical data for twelve states in the Great Plains, going back to about 1870.  The historical dimension of the dataset makes it a lot less straightforward than it might otherwise be because the counties that exist today were not necessarily the same ones that were enumerated in nineteenth-century Censuses (which is where the data originally comes from). 

When I was in grad school, the use of visual sources in historical research was very trendy, and maps are one such source.  One of the most intriguing things about maps is that they are largely fictional because they present the lines separating counties or even states and countries from one another as something real and permanent, when the truth is that they are often arbitrarily drawn and have changed over time.  To anyone who has lived through something like the Partition of India and Pakistan, or even the fall of the Soviet Union, this fact is probably pretty obvious.  I remember as a child, however, looking at my globe and thinking that the different colored countries that were on it had always been just as they were at that point.  When I got to college, took my first history class, and learned, for example, that the countries in Africa had existed for less than fifty years, it totally changed my worldview.

I am continually reminded of just how little we can know for sure, how elusive any concept of truth really is.  Thinking about something like the Census, there are obvious reasons why the data might not reflect the "truth" of the population: for example, the fact that not everyone clearly fits into a racial or occupational category, or even more basic, that some people simply refuse to fill out the form and be counted, or that some people might just give incorrect information.  But over the past couple of weeks, I have been working with data that should be even more straightforward than that, and finding "reality" just as elusive -- the measure of land area in each county changes from year to year, even when the boundaries don't change!  There could be any number of reasons why this might have been: perhaps it wasn't obvious where the boundaries were, so they were being measured from different places in different years; there were different ways of measuring land area over time; the land area itself could have changed as a result of the creation of reservoirs or shifting coastlines.  I guess at some point we must accept the fact that we can only know so much, and that some things will always be a mystery.

Making Trouble

So I'm fully moved in to my new cubicle at work, but still getting used to the new space.  I am now on the second floor, which has a separate kitchen from the one I used on the first floor.  At the same time that we moved, I also decided to switch from coffee (it was really decaf, but I still felt pretty wired after drinking it all day) to herbal tea, since the upstairs kitchen has a plug-in tea kettle.  On the countertop over the microwave, coffee maker, and tea kettle there are two signs warning that nothing else can run on the circuit where the coffee maker is plugged in, and that when the microwave is on, nothing else (meaning the tea kettle) can run on that circuit either, and that trying to run something else when the microwave is on would trip the circuit, which also controls the refrigerator.  I took this warning to heart until I saw someone else come in and use the microwave while I was boiling tea water.  Nothing happened.  So I decided that the tea kettle was the exception to the "don't run anything else while the microwave is on" rule, and proceeded to make tea whenever I felt like it, whether the microwave was on or not.  This worked fine for the first two days, then yesterday I made the critical mistake.  I came into the kitchen, barely noted that the microwave was on, and turned on the tea kettle.  Everything was fine for about a minute, and then I opened the fridge.  The light in the fridge came on for a second, and then went dark.  At the same time the microwave and tea kettle stopped.  I had done it -- the circuit was tripped.  I was super-embarrassed (especially because there was a new guy in the kitchen who thought he had been the one to break the circuit), but quickly found the facilities manager, who reset the circuit and gave me a stern warning about not boiling water while the microwave is on.  I guess that means no more multi-tasking in the kitchen!

Moving Day

Today my office is playing a huge game of musical chairs -- many of us are switching offices, so the HR people have worked out an elaborate schedule of who moves when so that there are never two people in the same place and nobody is office-less.  Or, in my case, cubicle-less.  I'm scheduled for 10am and I haven't actually done any packing yet (though I did get a box and put it together), so I should start doing that pretty soon.  Currently, I sit in an internal cubicle in the darkest part of the building.  This is probably petty, but it hasn't escaped my attention that I'm the only full-time employee in what may be the gloomiest bay of cubicles in the entire building.  So, I'm relieved to be moving up (literally -- to the second floor) where I will have a cubicle with a window.  In fact, I'm moving to the part of the building where David's current office is, and his group will be moving one bay east.  The other advantage to moving is that, after the move, I will be sitting with the people I work with, which will mean that I won't have to run upstairs every time I want to look at a Census volume or consult with the people who know more about the project than I do!  Okay -- off to pack my Dictionary of Agricultural and Allied Terminology and my SAS manuals.

Remote Shelving

Yesterday I needed to get ahold of the actual printed volumes of the 1969 Census of Agriculture.  Fortunately, our library has all of them, but they have recently moved them to remote shelving.  At first I was bummed -- it would take at least a day to have them transferred to the grad library, and, because they were catalogued by part number rather than by state, I didn't know how to get the two states I needed without ordering all 55 volumes (given that each of them is about twelve inches tall by ten inches wide by five inches thick, this would be no small feat). 

But then I remembered that our remote shelving facility really isn't that remote.  In fact, my office is about equidistant between the library and remote shelving, and I have actually been there many times.  In grad school I even spent the better part of a week in the remote shelving reading room, reading several years' worth of the Illustrated London News.  Furthermore, because it is a relatively small facility, you can request books from an actual person, rather than by submitting a form on the internet.  So I called them up, gave them the call number for the census and told them which states I needed and, when I arrived half an hour later, the volumes were there waiting for me.

I would have been there even sooner if I had remembered where the place was.  It is, in fact very close to my office, but I went several blocks out of my way because I was thinking it was on the other side of Main street.  What strikes me about the whole experience is that, even though my job uses some of the same skills I used in grad school (finding information in archival sources), my grad school experience feels very remote.  Even going to the library is a whole different activity now, which is probably why I couldn't remember where it was.  In grad school, I hated going to remote shelving; it was just another archive in the middle of nowhere (relative to the real library, which is in the middle of campus), with another cold, lonely reading room.  Yesterday, however, it was completely different, probably because I didn't have to spend much time there.  I arrived, got the census volumes I needed, xeroxed the relevant tables, and got out of there.  Nonetheless, being back there must have triggered something subconscious because last night I dreamed that my boss told me I had to go back to grad school!

Colliding Worlds

For about half of our nearly six-year relationship, David and I have worked in the same building and, yes, for the same department of the University.  We manage to avoid the weirdness of working together because we don't actually work together.  We have always been in different units within the department and we do totally different things -- I work with data and documentation and he coordinates an academic program.  In fact, our work is so different that neither of us really knows what the other does on a day-to-day basis.  I like it this way; it means that if we do see each other at work it is only social, and there is no competition between us, even for salaries or job titles because our jobs are just not comparable to one another.  In the past couple of months, however, each of us has had to ask the other for help on the job.  At first I was kind of embarrassed to have to ask my husband for help with my job, but then I realized that it was probably less embarrassing than having to ask other people.  And the same probably goes for him: he can ask me for help making a chart in Excel without feeling like an idiot because I don't know how to do it either, but between the two of us we can probably figure it out!

The Office

After David and I finished watching The OC (wow, it feels like months ago now), it took us a while to settle into another television show, but we have just finished the first two seasons of The Office (American version).  I had heard such great things about it for so long that I was afraid it wouldn't live up to my expectations, but it was really funny.  For those who haven't seen it, it is set in a regional office of a paper company and viewed through the lens of a documentary camera.  The manager of the office was promoted because he had been a great salesman, but he is a terrible manager, not knowing how to perform any of his own work and continually disrupting his employees' work with come-ons, racial slurs, and failed attempts to be a "fun boss." 

I usually like television shows that I can relate to in some way, and there are definitely elements of the show that I can identify with (like the office romance!), but I liked this show for all the ways I can't identify with it.  I love being able to laugh at it, knowing that my own work life is nothing like that, and I think it makes me appreciate my job even more than I already do.  And, as if I needed yet another reason to like my job, yesterday Kevin Boyle came to our office to talk with us about his book The Arc of Justice, a narrative history about residential segregation in Detroit and the murder trial of a black doctor who inadvertently killed a white man in 1925 while defending his house from a white mob.  It was a great book, Boyle was an excellent speaker, and it was so cool to be able to have this event right in the middle of the workday!

Statistical Significance

Yesterday was the final exam for the second half of my statistics class, which is now officially over.  I don't know what I'll do with myself and all my free time -- I kind of got used to spending two hours in class every day and having either reading or a homework assignment to do on evenings and weekends.  Actually, I do have an idea for how to occupy my time, but I'm still sad that the stats class is over.  I ended up liking it a lot better than I expected, especially the second half because the professor was much better (actually, he is a grad student, but will be a professor very soon).  Even the final was somewhat enjoyable.  We had been given an article to read about a week before, in which the authors used the same types of statistical analyses we had learned to determine which demographic and parent involvement factors were associated with high and low academic achievement for third-though-fifth graders, and the exam asked questions about the article.  The last question was whether or not we would support a school administrator who, having read the article and noticed that students who qualify for a free school lunch have lower achievement scores, decided to do away with the school lunch program because eating makes kids sleepy and then they can't focus.  I had never laughed during an exam before, but that question had all of us giggling.  Now that I have had a taste of statistics, I do hope that I will have a chance to learn more, though it will probably have to wait until next summer.