Regurgitated and Spewed

Today I transitioned out of straight writing for the exhibit and dabbled a little bit in more research and history aspects of huge exhibit. I'm still on trade, so likely will not branch out to any other sections of the exhibit in the next two days before my time is up. Today, since I finished the physical/artistic descriptions yesterday, I studied the history of trade, different types, and how certain commodities, like lapis lazuli, were transported from one place to another. I'm not sure where this will factor in, but it provides background information for the show. Now, I've done my fair share of research and paper writing, and thought myself fairly adept at combing through the internet for pertinent, and reliable, information. However, the problem that I ran into with types of trade was that it all wanted to focus on modern day trading and things like stock exchange, which isn't really want I'm interested in at all. In the end, I couldn't even find a source that would outline the differences of types of trading, like down-zither-line vs. direct, both of which I have a fairly sound idea of, let alone outline different and less common terms. All in all, decidedly rather frustrating and a bit of a time drain. In the end, I simply researched the history of lapis lazuli, and finding a few mentions of it traveling on the Silk Road (the only mentions of methods of trade I could find), also did some research on that. I'll probably continue tomorrow, but it was rather frustrating due to the lack of information. The internet is obviously a wonderful resource, but I often have a love hate relationship with it similar to this occasion. It's immensely difficult to find detailed information on even mildly obscure topics, and often all of the sites seem to have copied one another because each yields very little new information. For me, much of the internet is useful, but rarely have I found it capable of replacing the thoroughness of books in less well known areas, whether that be the Federal Writers' Project I the Great Depression for APUSH last year or lapis lazuli and ancient trade patterns today. 

Although looking for the background information today was interesting, it was a little bit more frustrating and disheartening than most of the work I had done so far. Obviously every job has its own less than pleasant aspects, that's only to be expected. However, I think that today only proved how important art is because it gives a first person peak into events, culture, and ideas in the past rather than relying on the regurgitated and spewed information that encounters many attempts to work with history today. Not to say history isn't lovely, I still adore it, but it does seem to lack a little bit of the flair of working with art, though first person documents might help and obviously I'm working with some very low level stuff here. Hopefully I'll have better luck next time.