Author: Ernie

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Last Innocent Record

In my time working with the archives, I’ve noticed there’s usually a final moment where the writer still believes the…
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Marginal Notes

Most disasters are annotated into existence through small, quiet notes in the margins. It’s never a big, dramatic announcement. It’s…
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Public Record

I realized today that at some point, this blog stopped being a commentary on my life and started being a…
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Archival Drift

Ernie again. I’ve noticed a trend in the older historical archives I’ve been digitizing. They always start out very factual—dates,…
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Pattern Recognition

Ernie here. In library school, they teach you to notice patterns long before you actually understand what they mean. You…
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Recorded Behaviour

I’ve made a conscious change in my note-taking: I’m now labelling everything as ‘observed behaviour’ instead of ‘incidents.’ By removing…
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Footnotes

Ernie here. When you look at old archives, they are full of footnotes written by people who realized far too…
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History Repeats

Ernie again. I came across a phrase in some older municipal records today: ‘contained incident.’ It’s a bit of dry,…
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Precedents

Ernie here. My research in the archives has been sobering. History is full of records of outbreaks, mass panics, and…
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Cataloguing

Hello. My name is Ernie. I’ve been a quiet observer of this blog for a while now. I work in…