Monday, August 29, 2016
7:37 PM |
Archiving and Preservation
This [
"The Race to Save the Films We Love"] is a fantastic, if sobering, article by Manohla Dargis for
The New York Times on film archiving and preservation. The article tackles for the most part the race to save old silent American films, a significant percentage of which are now gone or lost -- often destroyed by their own creators who never found value in storing them. That rejoinder is also something the article touches on, and provokes a look at our very own present circumstances. What are the things you are throwing away now that might in fact have historical value in the future?
The article reads: "The studios can afford to safeguard their new and old titles, but an estimated 75 percent of movies in American theaters are made by independents. A few years ago, the Library of Congress and the academy released 'Digital Dilemma 2,' a report on the digital preservation issues facing independent filmmakers and nonprofit audiovisual archives. 'Most of the filmmakers surveyed for this report have given little thought to what happens to their work once it is completed,' the study found. Most were also not aware of 'the perishable nature of digital content.'”
My own awakening regarding the value of archiving happened in 2013 during a consolidated research to chronicle the history of the culture and the arts in Silliman University. We found the subject sorely unchronicled, with many of the relevant documents and materials lost, thrown away, or destroyed. It became for the most part a chronicling of oral history, because that was what was left -- although we were also aware that many of the principals have died. (We interviewed Eddie Romero only a few months before he passed away.) The one bright spot in our search was the archival collection of Rudy Juan who made an effort to collect every single program of university shows since 1975. In a sense, a well-organised "pack rat" saved us and gave us invaluable material for our research. In my current research on Negros Oriental literature, I am dismayed to find out for example that the entire collection of The Sillimanian from the 1930s -- a decade that saw the editorships of Edilberto K. Tiempo and Ricardo Demetillo -- is missing, perhaps destroyed by World War II. I shudder at the idea of what we've lost.
Labels: archiving, film, history, life, research
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Sunday, September 13, 2015
1:43 PM |
Una Palabra a Tiempo
I'm currently researching and writing a history of Sillimanian literature, which is going to be my portal for a bigger study on Oriental Negrense literature. It has been a largely unstudied aspect of regional writing, for some reason. This is a piece from 1907, for example, from a page of
The Silliman Truth -- which in the 1900s served not just as a campus paper but also as a community newspaper [the first in the province] and as a Protestant missionary publication. This page contains what I think is an unsigned short story in Spanish titled "Una Palabra a Tiempo" [Short Time], probably the first short story published in this province.
The Silliman Truth, however, was first published in 1903, predating
The Filipino Student Magazine by two years. (That magazine is supposedly the first publication in English by Filipinos). Alas, we don't have copies of the Silliman Truth from that year anymore, but if we do come across any -- and if it contains any literary work in the new colonial language -- we can effectively rewrite the history of Philippine literature in English.
Labels: dumaguete, fiction, history, negros, philippine literature, research, silliman, spanish literature
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Sunday, August 16, 2015
I managed to fully cover only two years in my research today. But what fruitful years they were! 1
947-1948, I am beginning to think, were the years that literary culture in Silliman really began flexing its muscle. Claro R. Ceniza, more than any other young writer of that time in Dumaguete, was the consummate campus poet, churning one poem after another, rivalled only by Teofilo Marasigan who wrote a vast amount of poetry in Filipino, and German Montenegro, who did the same in Spanish. Edilberto Tiempo was already in Iowa since 1946, and Edith Tiempo [who wrote the popular "Vignette" column in
The Sillimanian] would soon follow. As of 1947, she was still publishing poems of Romantic nature, like "Song of the Druid Maid," which first saw print in the 14 February 1947 issue of
The Sillimanian. In 1947, Rodrigo T. Feria [who came to Silliman with Dolores Stephens Feria] was also installed as the new adviser of the campus paper, and he effectively scrambled the old ways of doing campus and city journalism, leading to some upheavals that made 1948 a peculiar year -- there was no official editorial staff for the paper, which led to the Journalism class taking over its functions, with a revolving set of editors for almost every issue published that year. Aida Rivera [Ford] first made her presence felt in 1948, the same year Miss Silliman [then known as Miss Popularity] was founded. Also that same year, Cesar J. Amigo's “Who Live in the Night” [which was first published in
Sunday Times Magazine] was considered by
Manila Chronicle's
This Week Magazine as one of the best stories of 1948. Rivera and Amigo became the first editors of Sands & Coral, the new literary folio, which everyone described as a "quiet campus affair" that for some reason took the national literary scene by storm. That first issue somehow made quite a stir in Manila, leading to some prominent writers hailing it as Silliman's definite contribution to Philippine letters. NVM Gonzalez even wrote the staff, congratulating them on "a job well done." Ricaredo Demetillo started contributing poetry as well, and one of the campus literary finds was a certain Mamerto M. Espina, whose story “Matchsticks for the Suicide Squad” impressed everyone with its masterful prose.
Labels: dumaguete, history, journalism, negros, philippine literature, research, silliman, writers, writing
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Friday, October 02, 2009
2:56 PM |
BC 25 Model Papers
For my research writing classes: please download the following as guides to your final paper composition:
APA Model Paper and
MLA Model Paper. The files are in PDF, and are stored in my FileDen account. Just click on the links and download as instructed.
Labels: class, research
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