Photos - Why Bother?

[bainbrig]

I'm in the midst (well, not far off finishing), sorting out four and a half thousand digitalised photos into subfolders. I took all our digital scans (20 years worth) plus our previous 30 years worth of cardboard pics which I scanned in, and decided to organise/sort them into a better order than a folder saying 'All Scans'.

Moment of existential angst, though. Mrs B said "Of course, when we're gone nobody's going to want that lot..." Which is totally true, of course (she has a habit of saying things like that).

We have no kids. My sister (older) has never shown much interest in her family history; Mrs B's siblings might have some brief interest, but I doubt if THEIR children are that bothered.

So, to echo Mrs B's sentiment, why am I bothering putting all our pictures into such pristine order? Is there any point to it? Would I be better off having a kip, or reading one of the hundreds of books I haven't got round to reading?

BillB

[Peter Pedant]

// There are usually 2 aspects to photographs - the 'witting' , that which the photographer wanted as the subject, and the 'unwitting' - the peripheral 'unimportant' things in the r surroundings. //

but they are of course posed ( photos being on the expensive side) so mostly witting and perhaps - - false. concocted to give a false impression

the idea of unwitting being more 'valid' commonly fails I am afraid and is displaced to every bit of data has a context (all data kinda witting den)

In the scientific context ( and therefore census ) - extraneous data, is not more valid but proven to be more inaccurate. Damn it.

if you are collecting wt-response data and include ht ( or if you are collecting census data and know that column 6 aint gonna be used ) - the data collectors dont bother about the accuracy of the unused data.... and cause it to be unusuable by lack of care. You can estimate this degree of care even hundreds of years later by such things as - - final digit preference - or standard deviations are much larger than expected from other series (*)

sorry

witting - oh naughty zax - weten to know ( Dutch )
"door meten tot weten" - of course Kammerlingh who liquified oxygen I think - "droo measuring to knowing"

used in olden english - witanagemot was the kings advisory council er 1000 y ago.
zax unwittingly commented ....
there were three articles, to wit, tv, dvd and lappie ....

but hey you really knew that

(*) surprisingly 1841 - 1851 census - they realised they were collecting lists and the victorians actually asked:
what are we doing this for ?
and they sortta had a hoolie about what a census was all about. or should be about
Fr.instance in 1851 they asked people what they did
and someone commented - occupation ? useless - they are making all their occupations up, most do not have jobs. - we should be asking if they are employed or not ....

that is why in my opinion you BB should be annotating tour photos electronically

[Spicerack]

Ta, bb.

[bainbrig]

PP although a general ‘student’ of languages, I’m puzzled by a couple of points.

Is ‘annotating’ my myriad photos a posh way of saying ‘giving them captions’?

My ancestors (according to those early censuses) had menial jobs, so unless they were engaged in some odd bluffing game, not sure why I shouldn’t be happy with Butler or
parlour-maid.

Still, I always like your answers - keep me interested for days.

BillB

[calmck]

Glass of wine and a good book much better