Monday, May 13, 2019

Day 17. Jones's Georgia Stories

I had a great time starting to work through the stories in Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast by Charles Colcock Jones, Jr. More about Jones at Wikipedia.


The dialect is not as hard to read as I expected, and it is so much fun to see stories in there that are variations on stories Harris collected, but also stories not in Harris at all. Writing up the summaries was easy to do while I was reading, so I'll finish doing summaries for the stories in this book to keep up with my daily quota (I've trying to do around 20 or 25 each day), and the pick another book to read and enjoy... and summarize. I can definitely see transcribing some of these and standardizing the spelling like I've been doing with the Brer Rabbit stories, but I'll need to read the whole book first to decide which ones to choose (and I've finally come up with a good spelling strategy I think for Brer Rabbit; I'll write more about that tomorrow).

I've also been thinking more and more about the idea of playlists and the software that manages music like iTunes, etc. These stories are very much like songs: they come from books (albums), and sometimes you want to enjoy an album, but just as often, or even more often, you want to enjoy a playlist that you've made yourself, or a playlist someone else has made, or a "smart" playlist that autogenerates based on some kind of criteria that you have set. I would really like to have a database like that to allow people to remix these stories into playlists that they could read online, or that they could download and even print (like downloading music and even burning a CD).

Anyway, I will keep on pondering the possibilities while also seeing if I can get on a good schedule this week and meet my goals. Everything went really well today!


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