Dina’s Big Bag 2

Compartment comportment

The bag has a very large number of compartments, big and small, internal and external. Not all compartments get used, though an open ‘pouch-like’ compartment is very useful to just slip things in and out (water or coke bottle, groceries bought while underway). The two main compartments are the ones mostly used: one for papers or the laptop, and the other for everything else. There isn’t really a system to the use of the other compartments, which sometimes leads to scrabbling about. The bag is for her personal use only, and doesn’t get used or accessed by others, though her partner has borrowed it on a few occasions. The bag has only private things in it, nothing that would be of use to anyone else.

Private, personal and sentimental

Dina doesn’t really carry personal grooming items, like make-up or hair brushes. She does at times carry some medicine and related technologies (visible on the picture).

A few items in the bag are of sentimental value. Mostly, these are inside Dina’s agenda: pasted photos, notes about meetings or events, small bits of paper. Notably, Dina showed little torn ads she had been collecting in the run up to moving to the Netherlands. These ads contain information about people looking for accommodation-people with whom Dina would have been in touch in the run up to subletting her apartment in Aarhus. This is a symbolic tie to the other place that is home for her, and the ads are a reminder of the preparations for departure but also of the need to care for what remains there. Dina’s agenda forms part of a series, since she systematically buys similar models every year and keeps old agendas. Another personal item that is in the bag is a delicate silver bracelet she received from her partner. It is somewhat more often in the bag since another visitor has joined Dina in her office. Dina takes off the bracelet because it is noisy when she is working at a keyboard-the bag keeps it safe and close to her.

Ernst’s bag 2

The contents

The picture of the contents of my bag becomes sharp exactly at the level where the blister pack with tablets are located; they are headache tablets mostly in the sense that their lurid colour is likely to trigger one. Surrounding it are all manner of no doubt commonplace technical paraphernalia for running the laptop: extension cord and transformer, a little remote for slideshow presentations (logically it doesn’t work with Powerpoint) and an adapter to connect the Mac to digital projectors. There is a cool 1Gb USB stick that is so small I mostly forget I am carrying it. Writing implements are things I have a close affinity with. There is a nice pen I got as a present from my girlfriend and which reminds me of the neat row of pens my father carefully kept in his suit-jackets. And there are also two pencils, containing 0.5 and 0.3 mm leads-I cannot think of many things more simply satisfying (and therefore exacting) than the smell of graphite and the feel of pencil stroking the surface of paper. In similar vein the calligrapher Gerrit Noordzij recognised in calligraphy (in translation) ‘god’s water washing over god’s fields’. Then there are business cards and the usual personal documents: passport, driver’s licence, car ownership and insurance documents, and a fancy gadget (looking like a calculator) used for ordering goods and banking online. The laptop itself is obviously there, a 17″ whopper that is wonderful to work with but very big and heavy to carry around. I don’t mind that, since it seems to me a laughably economical representation of the incredible amounts of stuff that can be stored on a drive, including in my case a home-grown database of all the articles and books I have read since starting my study of sociology in 1993 on a British Council scholarship. Today it contains 3025 entries. But there is also an endless stream of sign language movies used in past sign linguistic projects of one kind or another and a developer database containing all 24,000 educational achievement records for a national population of deaf pupils. But on it are also some 20 photo-albums, one among which now includes the photo of the contents of my bag.

And finally, there are my unfinished ‘projects’, the stuff made of words that can only in part be put in a bag-the heavier part of it fills my thoughts mostly without making much sense, which is why I need the external part that I can carry in a bag. Below an edited volume of essays by Isaiah Berlin, now out of print and purchased second-hand through Amazon, The Proper Study of Mankind (1998) is a book by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification (2006). The two books clearly interrelate in a way that matters to me. The texts are telling me something that straddles and conjoins all the projects I am working on, from educational tracking systems to corpus linguistics, and from e-philology to interventionist tactics in science and technology studies. One of these projects is represented in the pile of papers below the two books. That pile is a series of barckground reading, notes and drafts for an article that was running to version 8-at which point I made the almost sickening decision to start the whole thing over (hence probably the garish tablets). Below my pile of notes is a black A4 notebook in which, starting March 2005, I have recorded my personal notes of all the meetings I attend. It looks good inside, very tidy and each entry carefully dated, but in practice the notes reveal much about my own personal sense of the nature of meetings: I rarely find reason to return to the notes, but neither can I desist from the habit of taking the notebook into meetings and writing a further entry.

(back to the picture)

References

Berlin, I. (1998) The proper study of mankind: An anthology of essays. New York, USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Boltanski, L. and Thévenot, L. (2006) On justification: Economies of worth. Princeton, New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press.