My Factory of Extravagant Marvels

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1492 Spread across different European contexts, when we dig just a little bit, we can find many historical linguistic traces showing how diverse the language to speak about privacy can be. By attending to these historical traces, we can notice that exercises in theorizing, defining, or formally conceptualizing  privacy—especially those attempts anchored in a modern-day view of privacy and of the private—are bound to find more than a few similarities and affinities with the past. The ideas behind the concept of privacy were already manifested, historically, in the languages that people used and adapted to speak about their attempts and strategies at controlling access to themselves and to information about themselves. And there have always been a lot of cross-fertilization among the languages. Let me share with you some examples I've been thinking about. In contexts where English ...

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1402     Why do we talk about privacy using the word "privacy"? English is the lingua franca of academic knowledge. We use it as a tool to communicate with each other across linguistic borders. So one of the answers to this question is that we use the word "privacy" as a way to explain to each other---in an international context---not only historical events described in English that use this English word, but also events that use other vocabulary and other languages, and that we (as researchers) recognize as being related to what in English we call privacy. But listening to the History of English Podcast , I recently caught myself pondering a second way of thinking about this question: why this particular word? Or to put it in another way, how and when did the word "privacy" (and related words, like "private") appear in the English lexicon? A ...

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1344 If you are starting to dip your toes into the  sea of opportunities that automated text analysis gives you but were wondering where to start, take a look at Voyant Tools . This open source application lets you quickly gather some insights about texts you might be interested in. It's also very convenient to use, because it's directly available from your browser—you simply upload or copy and paste your text onto the tool, with no need to download or install software. I tested it out with a sample from a French text I am currently working with to see how it worked. My text is the first letter from the Lettres Portugaises , an epistolary novel from the second half of the 17th century, published by Claude Barbin, whose book trade is one of the topics of my research. One quick insight that became visible for me is the importance of properly configuring stop words when doing ...

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1229   Privacy involves the ability of regulating access to oneself: this is the working definition that I have been using in my historical research when I focus on bodily integrity, especially when my interest is a question of sexual, reproductive, or bodily privacy more in general. I am inspired by Margulis (1977 and 2003), whose contributions focus on sociological research questions, as well as on other authors' contingent definitions of privacy for purposes of research in other disciplines (for example: Hughes, 2012). For me, this working definition has been useful for historical studies because I need to attend to the fact that the concept of privacy, as we know today with its resonance as a human right, did not exist yet in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, the periods I focus on. Which does not at all mean that people then didn't need privacy! While it is rare for me...

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1215   This blog post is adapted from part of a paper I would have presented at the European Social Science History Conference 2020, which was postponed to 2021 due to the measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. I thought it would be a nice idea to share it with you here, rather than let it stay inside my proverbial drawer. This research is a small part of my larger effort to locate and contextualize concrete instances of religious advice about sexual privacy given to women throughout the seventeenth century in France. Here, I am looking into the use of the word “ privauté ” in two different versions of a very popular book, Introduction à la vie devote , by St. François de Sales. These two versions were published 76 years apart. I am comparing these two versions of the book to examine a shift in the usage for the word privauté. I am curious about how this shift affected langu...

 This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/987 In the Altona Case Team at PRIVACY, we are working with two versions of a late 18th century text by Johann Peter Willebrand. The text appears in French as Abrégé de la police, accompagné de réflexions sur l'accroissement des villes and in German as Innbegriff der Policey: nebst Betrachtungen über das Wachsthum der Städte . To make our lives easier,  our team thought that it would be a good idea to run the PDFs through OCR, to have searchable and editable texts that we could work with. However, we got huge differences in accuracy with different OCR tools. We started with the French version of the text, which we downloaded in PDF format from Google books. First, we tried Abbyy FineReader . This is a very good (proprietary) app to run OCR on scanned text written in modern languages , but when dealing with our early modern material, the results were far from acceptable. Ne...

 This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/921 Good health is the most basic condition for a person to live a thriving life and—as we have been witnessing for the last few weeks with the COVID-19 pandemic—countries desperately need their people to be healthy, too. Otherwise, society goes bonkers. Hence, the importance of public health measures to control and prevent the spread of disease. Le bonheur, et souverain bien de la vie consiste plus en la bonne santé qu'en tous les biens du Monde, puis qu'elle l'entretien et prolonge, et que sans icelle elle est déplaisante. (Andre le Gros, 1625) [Happiness, chief wellbeing of life, consists more in having good health than in having all goods of the world, since health maintains and prolongs life, and without health, life is unpleasant.] Last week, Anni discussed public health measures imposed during times of pandemic, which—though necessary for the greater good—can have...

 This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/750     Rembrandt van Rijn, Two African Men, 1661 (Source: Wikimedia Commons) In the 17th Century, there was a community of people of color living in Amsterdam. This community was linked to the maritime industry: black women established permanently in the city were married to black men who worked as sailors for the VOC and the WIC, the Dutch West and East India Companies. Mark Ponte , who has been studying this community's traces in the collection of notary deeds at the Amsterdam City Archives, explains: From the moment the Dutch became active in the Atlantic world, people of African descent came to Amsterdam. Their presence is evident from baptismal and marriage registers and from seventeenth-century notarial deeds. ( via Twitter ) The painting above, made by Rembrandt in 1661, most likely depicts two men who belonged to this community of afro-descendents, which was l...

 This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/395   La conduite des filles de joie à la Salpêtrière : le passage près de la porte Saint-Bernard Étienne Jeaurat (1699 - 1789) "Jurors do not and cannot detect remorse or any other emotion in anybody, ever. Neither can I and neither can you. And that's because emotions are not what we think they are." This straightforward statement introduces the TED talk You Aren't at the Mercy of your Emotions--Your Brain Creates Them , by Lisa Feldman Barrett, neuroscientist, psychologist, and professor at Northwestern University (and one of my nerdy heroes!) I first got to know Barrett's work back in 2017 when I read How Emotions Are Made (a book that covers the TED talk topics in more detail). I picked up her book after reading Patricia Churchland’s Braintrust and A.D. (Bud) Craig’s How do You Feel? . Having been captivated for years by the study of emotions—as an actor...

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/212     Greetings can be weird. When you are new in town, greetings can put you in awkward situations because of unknown tacit conventions of the new cultural environment. I was once at a party in Montréal and the topic of greetings came up, each of us outsiders reporting on awkward moments where greetings went wrong in the new town. I had been living in Québec for a while and had noticed that people would often greet each other by offering their left cheek for a kiss. I had also noticed that people who came to Montréal from elsewhere in Canada were more likely not to kiss as a greeting, but rather shake hands or just wave, sometimes hug. In my experience until then, coming from São Paulo, I had seen most people offer the right cheek for a kiss when greeting someone, which sort of trained me to also do the same, allowing for a seamless greeting experience of the cheeks f...

In this new job I have, we are studying Privacy from a historical point of view. Our job is to analyze primary sources (stuff we can find in archives, for a start) and see what they can tell us about heuristic zones of privacy. We are also equally interested in the linguistic development of words that start with priv*, or contém priv* in some part . I wonder if deprive counts? It seems to me that separation is part of the meaning. 

Yesterday I submitted to a journal an article based on a section of my PhD dissertation, which itself is about to be published (it will be out as soon as I manage to obtain all the authorisation forms that my university requires). This is driving me a little bananas! I've been looking forward to getting my research out to the world for a long time, and parts of it are already out there. But nonetheless, I am nervous that now people are actually gonna be able to read my stuff! The feeling I'm getting about this is similar to the feeling I had the first time Jon and I visited a sauna in Bad Saaraw in Germany -- one of those saunas were you must be naked. It is similar in so many ways: in both cases you feel exposed in your most intimate self, and you think everybody is analysing your utmost flaws, when in fact very few people are actually even noticing you at all.

One of the difficult things for me of being trained in academic work is that I became less able to simplify, take sides, be an activist. I became stuck on the idea that there is always another side to a story, there is always some detail untold, there is always more nuance to be had. I've arrived in Jerusalem--a place where I never really planned to even visit, let alone live in--one and a half months ago. This has been an amazing experience because throwing myself in this very, very foreign place (from my personal perspective) made me realize the foreignness of places that I find very, very familiar! In Jerusalem, I learned that you must be really, really careful when you try to find out what the "hidden" side of any story is, because that might lead you to be immediately categorized within a group that you don't really have anything to do with. Let me give you an example from my research project. I'm studying the ways that people from here (from all kinds ...

Writing a thesis is like being constipated Every chapter, a lot of effort And a tiny poop

A detective has to find evidence A prosecutor has to write up the case in a way that convinces The judge to take it up A detective has to present the evidence to the prosecutor in a way that convinces The prosecutor to write up the case in a way that convinces The judge to take it up The evidence has to present itself in a way that convinces The detective to present the evidence to the prosecutor in a way that convinces The prosecutor to write up the case in a way that convinces The judge to take it up How many of the above did you imagine as women? For me, the evidence.

The woman in the red hat also has red hair. The blue of her eyes spills over to the tips of her hair to keep her cool. The woman in the red hat also has a red heart; the strength of her heartbeat resounds, too, in her words to help her touch us. The woman in the red hat taught me a few defence moves, though she is not one for martial arts. She is looking for her bow and arrows, I think she is about to find them.

Surpresa boa é ao amanhecer o dia, ver uns amigos queridos de aventuras passadas acolherem-me com um sorriso de calor, carinho, humor e esquentarem meu coração. Sei que o dia vai ser de sol!

Jon : So, we both saw the same 4 talks [on Monday], and we each came away with an impression about the opening anecdotes of a speaker. For me, it was the speech by German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier: he opened his speech speaking about Rwanda's efforts at rebuilding and reconciliation, their efforts to "reconstitute" themselves, and also mentioned that Germany has been faced with the same task twice in recent history. I'm not entirely sure which two he was referring to; it may have been the rebuilding efforts after the two world wars, or was it rebuilding after WWII and re-unification? Let's just round it up to three for now. Steinmeier went on to speak about ways of promoting reason, peace, and stability in foreign countries, especially using cultural outreach. But the examples he chose in his introduction struck me because they are in fact perfect examples of two times Germany has been on the wrong side of history. In Rwanda, ...