Research update, week of Nov 12, 2o18

So, what am I working on these days?

Last week I finished extracting the people & communities (and a few other entires here and there) from the Utopia & Utopians: An Historical Dictionary (Trahair) and The A to Z of Utopianism (Morris & Kross) into my Heurist database. This took me about a month. It included:

• Making pages for the people 
• Making pages for the communities
• Making pages for the philosophies/religions, organizations, etc
• Making pages for the sources
• Creating & constantly tweaking the templates for each page, creating fields for the information I wanted to record, moving the info around the pages, making fields that connect to other pages and thus building relationships between them.
• Copy/pasting the blurbs form each of the (e)books into the correct pages
• Filling out the basic fields, including all the ones in relationships with other pages. 
• Often but not always copying the pertinent lines from the dictionary blurbs into the correct field sections (i.e. “Early life” or “marriage” or “community life,” etc)

I’m pleased with how many pages I have in there now (318 communities, 411 people, 118 philosophies/religions, etc) and I ran my first network connection graphing… thing… to see how all these were connected (as this was a major reason I chose this software for my research)— and was surprised at how many entires had no connections at all, so then I spent a day or few last week going back through and checking for/adding connections— plenty more work to do there, particularly in future research in general, but I assume some from the copy/pasted blurbs that I haven’t gone through properly yet, too. 

Monday I had a combined 5 hours of bus/train/lyft commenting to get to a doctor’s appointment, and I took the book Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia. I was trying not to mark it up too much, but I was unsuccessful. The marking is excessive— just so many things to add to the Fruitlands, Amos Bronson Alcott & Charles Lane pages, but also to the pages of so many people he’s has been in connection with so far, and I’m barely into chapter 2! 

The internet is currently still down at my house and I’m actually very much looking forward to getting it back largely so I can add some of this new information to the pages for these folks, most of who I already had, but not all! This is an actual paper book, so let’s hope I am able to moderate myself so I don’t spend a year just retyping nearly the whole thing! It’s hard to know what I’ll want to know later at this stage of my research, though, as I’m still very much in the information-collection phase, with only vague ideas of what I want to write about in the future, so I'm basically saving everything that could maybe even possibly be useful in the future.

Speaking of, maybe I should write some of that out to help me start figuring out where I’ll want to go with all this first. 

So. Topics I’m interested in writing about at the moment:

• Women in Utopia. Individuals in particular. For how women’s-rights-centric so many of these Utopian communities were, it’s interesting just how heavily male the well known of this group skews. Certainly Marie Stevens Howland, who I started researching in particular earlier this year, before deciding to expand my research at this stage so I could have more context for her life. Charlotte Perkins Gilman as well, though she’s not really a part of this crowd— she lived in a communal home in NYC as a teenager and LOATHED it, but Its actually her work in the cooperative housekeeping movement that lead me into researching these utopian communities too. To a small extent I almost consider my utopian research as background to my future work on the cooperative housekeeping movement (of the past, and how we  should bring it back in the present/future). 
• I’ve come across quite a few women in my research so far that there seems to be nothing (or next to it) done on them, and I would really love to flesh out some of their lives as well. 1. I want to get more of these interesting women on wikipedia, with good pages! 2. I’d like to write papers about them, get their name out to the wider Utopian Studies/American history communities 3. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could turn them into a book? Maybe if I can find some coherent strings between a few of them I could make a group biography (which I love to read) or few. 

• Alcander Longley. I keep finding him mentioned all around, and he started 5 communities (all which failed rather quickly) in Missouri, but I haven’t found much work done on him specifically somehow. 
• Before he started his communities he seems to have lived in/visited a few. Seems like a good story there! The reader could experience the different communities through his eyes and see how they influenced him and then watch as he kept trying, and failing, to make his own successful communities. 
• A.J. Macdonald. I haven’t looked into this yet, but I’d be interested to see how much work has been done on him. As someone who travelled to most of the still-known communities and met all the big names, he could be a great subject for a book project…
• Josiah Warren & Modern Times. There has certainly been work done on him, but no modern work aimed at a general audience. I have some friends who consider themselves anarchists so I think it’d be interesting to share the story of the “first American anarchist” with them. 
• Josiah the person is very interesting. A quiet, introverted inventor, musician and publisher who lived at New Harmony and knew Robert Owen, only to turn Anarchist instead and make the nation’s first anarchist paper and a string of the first anarchist communities, utilizing his concepts of Equitable Commerce and the Time Store (which might be of interest to those who are involved with Time Banking these days, as well). Plus he’s connected with the always colorful Stephen Pearl Andrews.
• The Women’s Commonwealth- I was shocked to find this only when combing through the utopian dictionaries. An community of women who largely all left their husbands and raised their children communally seems like a pretty notable thing, so how had I not come across it before? I just did a quick google scholar search and there are certainly some writings about it, but they’re all pretty dated. Perhaps I can bring them back into the modern Utopia discussions! They weren’t, as far as I know now, trying to make a template for the rest of society to follow as is my current definition of utopian societies, but the gender dynamics might be important enough to override that and make it worth bringing back into the discussion. 
• Urban Utopian communities. Most were rural, and most failed because no one knew what they were doing (among other reasons, especially fire), but there were at least a few Urban experiments that didn’t rely on agriculture (like Unity House). What are the stories there? What worked/didn’t work? This could be of particular relevance to folks in modern co-housing communities. 

Now that I have the basis of my research database done (though plenty of work is needed to tidy up the pages!) I feel like I have a few options as what to do next. 

1. Go through and tidy up the pages A-Z. Make sure the right quotes from the abstracts are in the right text boxes, make sure all the connections are there— make it generally “presentable” (though I have no intention of sharing it with anyone else anytime soon, but I do intend on using these pages to create (or flesh out) the wiki pages for those that don’t have them (or robust pages) yet. Tidying up the pages would help with that a lot
1. After that I could actually start editing their Wiki pages. It’d be good writing practice for me, but I don’t currently know how to do all the wiki-specific coding, so that would take some time to learn, I imagine, and I’m not sure the easiest way to do that at the moment. 
2. Add the info from the Fruitlands book, and tidy up those pages as I go. 
1. I could then go back through and add the notes I took while reading books on Marie Stevens Howland (I still haven’t finished that one), Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Josiah Warren as well. But I’ll have to hunt those things down, as that was about 8 months and 3(!) houses ago (it’s been a rather hard year). 
2. OR I could then just double down on reading this book & extracting all the info and work on these related pages specifically, so as to stay on a specific topic for a while. I could then focus my readings on the People/Places/Things/Ideas related to that for a while. 
3. OR… I could finish doing the thing which I had somehow forgotten I am already in the middle of doing right now (weekends confuse me, apparently), which is to continue going through John Humphrey Noyes’s book (which is mostly work of A.J. MacDonald) and extracting the info of all the communities there into the database. 

Whoops, I can’t believe I forgot I was already doing that! SMH. Ah well. It probably won’t take but a few days, and then I’ll be at this point, anyway. 

So, what should my next steps be? (I’m writing it out in order to figure it out) Perhaps this:

1. Finish extracting the info from the Noyes book (History of American Socialisms)
2. Extract the info I’ve read in the Fruitlands book already, but perhaps leave it for now as a “I’m going somewhere and I need a book to read” book.
3. Read this paper I just downloaded on my phone & extract the info: “The Woman’s Commonwealth: A Study in the Coalescence of Social Forms”
4. Contact the writer of the 2008 Masters Thesis @ MSU, “The Communist and the Altruist: Alcander Longley’s Newspapers and Communities” and ask if I could have a copy. 

And then I can go from there!