 Okay, so I want to try a little experiment. Okay, how cute! Good evening and welcome to For Your Reference brought to you by your friendly neighborhood librarians at the University of Tennessee. I am Robin. I am Paris Blateline. And I'm Sarah Johnson. So Paris, I take your reaction to this to mean that you are a collector or at least a lover of beanie babies. Yeah, it's like you like kind of just took my soul from me. Beanie baby actually got on my birthday. My mom bought it home for me because she had to work all day. And so it was like my little birth, like my first little birthday gift. And it was like super cute. So they hold like a special place in my heart. I even have like plastic tags all over them. Even though I still play with them. So yeah. That's so nice, Paris. I also used to collect beanie babies. But apparently I was like a ruthless kid and just tore that tag right off there and just played with it like a normal toy. And we're just like nothing like that. It doesn't matter. I don't know what I was doing there. It's in the way. You just left all kinds of money on the table there, Sarah. I had some beanie babies. I didn't really collect them. I just got the ones I thought were cute, you know. I do kind of collect pins like these little buttons and stuff. I got some sticky here, for example. My wife and I do have, we do collect stuff. We have a lot of weird stuff in the backyard that we sort of dug up in landscaping changes over the years. And probably the best example is this creepy figure that Holly dug up out of the front yard. Oh my goodness. Nope. That's how people die. Now I'm out. Nope. I'm sorry. Is this thing still in your house? It's, yeah, it's actually in the backyard. It's sort of become part of the artwork right now and the yard art. I don't know if it was better or worse in situ. Like where Holly actually found it. I think we have a picture of that as well. I'm glad you didn't find it. I mean, it's all in Holly's. You can imagine coming across that though, just peeling back and then being like, oh, God, what is that? I wouldn't need to cover it back up and walk away. Nope. Didn't see it. All right. So tonight we're going way further back in history than beanie babies. But we are going to talk about figurines. And hopefully our special guest can give me some advice on whether to invite an exorcist or other such professional over to deal with our creepy statue. This is reviewer two. I would like to extend a warm welcome to our first guest tonight, who is a professor of religious studies at the University of Tennessee. Welcome to the show, Dr. Aaron Derby. Hi, Robin. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Good. You joked about the exorcist thing, but in Mesopotamia, some of the folks who are ritual specialists who use figurines are called up Kalu. And one translation of that is exorcist, just so you know. I like it. So tell us a little bit about you and your work. So I've been a professor at the University since 2011. I was a lecturer first, and then I was hired on the tenure track in religious studies. I am an archaeologist, but I'm also a specialist in ancient Hebrew literature. And I teach all sorts of classes for the department in early Judaism, Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, archaeology in the Bible. And then I teach a bunch of modern classes to like religion in the workplace. I'm also fun fact, the faculty director of undergraduate research and fellowships with Andrew Seidler over in student success. And they do a bunch of work with diversity and engagement. So I pop here and there all over the place across campus. And so you don't have a lot going on at all. No, I am so bored. Nothing going on. All right. Well, let's see if we can get somebody who actually has some stuff going on. In the role of a viewer to tonight, we have Dr. Theo Kokostonsky, distinguished lecturer in the Department of Classics at the University of Tennessee. Welcome. Hello. Thanks to you. Thank you for inviting me to be here. I'm so happy to have you. So it's your turn now. Tell us a little bit about you and why you do. Well, I actually came to the University of Tennessee at the same time as Aaron Darby in 2011. And I'm a distinguished lecturer here. Aaron and I actually met in Izmir, Turkey, like 15 years ago or something like that. So I also teach and I'm an archaeologist as well, but in the Classics Department. So I teach things like Greek and Latin and ancient literature and translation, Greek and Roman texts and things like that. But my love is actually the classical world in Greece. So that's where I study things like ritual practice and figurines and small shrines. And my specialty focuses on the period of like 700 to 200 BCE. So yeah, quite a bit in the distant past. All right. So I'm excited to listen to you to do your thing tonight. And the question you're going to be talking around is this, how do figurines challenge what we think we know about ancient religion and the lives of everyday people? So reminder to everybody out there, if you're in the audience and you have questions, you can drop them in the comments section on YouTube or Facebook. And we'll we can surface them during the Q&A. When my face reappears on the screen, Aaron and Theo, that is your cue to bring it in for a landing and we'll be about ready to start Q&A. Doctors, take it away. All right. Well, I'm going to get started here and ask Aaron before we get into the nitty gritty of scholarship. Can you tell me what's the point of figurines? I mean, why even bother studying these things? I mean, we already learned that they're kind of creepy at some time. So why study them? It's a good question of you. And I'll tell you that part of it plays into my anti-authoritarian personality. And the answer is in my field, I thought people were writing about figurines all the time, but doing it really poorly. And now my figurines are females. They are primarily heads with breasts and then a pillar body. And so that turns out invites a lot of speculation about what they're for, why they're in ancient Israel, people try and connect them to the Bible. That doesn't work particularly well. So I actually got interested in figurines because of all of the sometimes serious, sometimes ridiculous scholarly interpretations and popular interpretations of my little ladies. And some of the more ridiculous ones at one point, a very prominent archaeologist who will remain nameless excavated some figurines and took them to a gynecologist because he was worried they had sexually transmitted diseases because of the shape of the anatomy. So it varies from there how people respond to these. But I think our responses to the figurines tell us a lot more about ourselves than they sometimes tell us about the past. So I wanted to know, first of all, how do we get to the bottom of that problem? And then if we were trying to interpret something about the past, what could the figurines actually tell us? So I guess it grows out of my need to punch back a little bit at the scholarly world, especially some of the more comical interpretations of my corpus. What about you? Well, we have a different situation in the classical world or the Greek world. I'm kind of impressed that they even cared about them because for the longest time, no one cared at all about the figurines in the Greek world unless they were tenagraph figurines which are focused on fashion. And those were found in the 19th century and they influenced fashion. Those women have these beautiful hats and a fan and they're all decked out in clothes. But otherwise, people just ignored them. They were like, well, why study something that's mold made that's being repeated over and over again or something that's handmade? I mean, it's not the aesthetic because we have a big issue with the aesthetics and people being really interested in sculpture. So people really ignored them or just focused on them stylistically for so long. And it really wasn't until about 50 years ago that anyone really cared or was publishing on them in anything beyond just a sort of stylistic way. So we had a sort of situation where they were ignored for a long time. And I feel like I'm constantly being like figurines are really important. They're interesting. And I think at a basic level, when you have a figurine, they evoke a response because you'll see some figurines that I'll show. I'll have them shown that basically they show things of the daily life. They show people and whenever you have them out, people want to touch them. And so they evoke a response. And because they evoke a response, I think that they've ignored for a while in a way that I don't really understand, but I can say that they're being studied now. And I think we have totally opposite problems because you have a wealth of art objects from your period. And we have a paucity of art objects from my location and period. So people really like the idea that there is some sort of pictorial image coming from ancient Israel. It's not mentioned in the Bible. And so then there's a lot of speculation, whereas you all have so much material. I think it would be easy to prioritize stone or other kind or pottery rather than than the figurines. Yeah, that's kind of where we were at. But I have to say that there's a lot of us who are pushing them and talking about them now. So it's a little bit better for sure. It's a lot better. When I first met you and Izmir, I was an interloper. This was a conference entirely on classical corporate pretty much. And I was one of the lone sort of ancient Near Easternists learning about how folks in classical archaeology approach figurines. So yeah. Yeah. Well, welcome. We love you too. We'll welcome anyone who wants to study figurines now. But I think, Erin, let's actually focus on the question that they asked us to talk about. So how do figurines challenge what we think we know about ancient religion and the lives of everyday people? In my context, again, because there's this push and pull between the biblical record of what happened in ancient Israel and what archaeologists actually excavate, it challenges quite a lot of our suppositions that if your suppositions were based only on the biblical record. So if you assume that ancient Israelites didn't make any images at all, what do you do when everywhere you excavate in the eight through the six centuries BCE, you're excavating figurines. And I work on anthropomorphic human shaped figurines, but there are zoomorphic animal figurines as well. So if you read only the Bible, you may get this impression that you can't make any images whatsoever. But when you excavate regular people's houses, what you find is that there are images all over the place. And so that's one, I think, difference of perception. I also think this is something you work on too for you. For a long time, people approached the figurines when they talked about them just as images, rather than as the end result of a ritual that's much bigger than the figurine itself. And so using figurines to talk as much as we can, where we can, about the rituals in which figurines were used, I think gives you such a rich and more interesting picture of everyday religious activities. So mine are mostly in domestic units. And while it's really hard to go from where I excavated a fragment to reconstructing a ritual, what we do know from ritual texts in the ancient world in my periods are that figurine rituals were really complicated, that they involved all sorts of steps. Sometimes they involved even offerings that the figurines represented are often not the thing that you pray to. So in Mesopotamia, where you have ritual tablets with figurines, different type of figurine, but still the prayers are to the main purpose. The figurines are to the main deities of the pantheon and the figurines represent lower level and intermediary entities. So if, you know, because we don't have a lot of data in ancient Israel and you dig up this figurine, you may assume it's a prime goddess or it's the thing that a person was praying to, but the data from the Near East indicates that you can't make that assumption. It's very likely that that's some sort of apotropaeic or protective symbol. Maybe it's some sort of spiritual entity that is being used to exercise evil or sickness out of a house and guard against its return, which ultimately leads us to know that everyday people's lives that were ritual lives were just as complicated as our ritual lives, which I think we should have known to begin with. But when we look at the past, I think sometimes we draw a picture of it. That's too simple. Like we stand at this distance, right? And so we homogenize everything into a simple narrative. When we think about it, of course, it's not so simple. Definitely. I didn't realize that they had such a had a potential for such a different sort of role because ours are so much more all over the place. We have them in burials. We have them in houses. We have them at sanctuaries. We have them in stray finds. And we have them also in production centers. We have workshops that they survive. But then we also have them in workshops in shrines right next door where we can't even tell the lines of the shrine. So we have them as just they're integrated in the lives of the ancient Greeks in such a way that it's kind of overwhelming in some ways because when you find them, I usually say the way that we start to really talk about is when we see them in numbers. So you're talking about numbers that are much smaller than mine. But if I see one or two, I'm not usually that excited about it because it doesn't tell me that much. For me, it's about where we start to see concentrations and context of them. So for me seeing, in fact, when you find a large number of them, anywhere like at my shrine at Kokanoversee, which is a little shrine to the Nimpsay in Corinth, there's 250 that were in a deposit. And so 250 is like, okay, that tells us a little something. Let's talk about the types. But we're also talking about places like the Corretian Cave, which is a cave near Delphi that has over 50,000 figurines. Or if you go to the Sanctuary of Demir and Corret, which is a larger sanctuary in Corinth, which we have 24,000. So we see them much more in numbers. But at the same time, you can have some really interesting debates about an individual piece that's really interesting, like someone baking bread or what might look to be a small shrine representation burst. Yeah, so you can see here we've got some dancing figures and we have a standard standing female type who's holding a bird and a piece of fruit. And then we have like handmade figures, like birds and my favorite little mouse down there below. So you have these sort of figures that can be both very specific to a shrine, such as those dancing groups, which suggest to us Nimps, or they can be something so common, like that standing female figure that's in the background, that those figures are found all over the Greek world. And when I say the Greek world, I don't mean Greece. I mean all of the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. And that type is less evocative because it's standard and it's mold made. So dealing with those sort of issues, for me, it's about numbers sometimes, which is kind of funny because I'm not a numbers person. But if you start to see something again and again repeated, and there's a lot of them that we start to see as significant. But then you have to determine, are we looking at a workshop? Are we looking at a sanctuary? Why are they there? So that's kind of what we have to... It's about making sense of the choices that people are making. And that mass production piece is a clear distinction, right? Because my figurines, the stylistic features of them, they only appear within the polity of ancient Judah. So that's the Southern Kingdom, if you're thinking of biblical history. They don't appear outside of that much at all. Whereas the OU could have a demeter and curate from anywhere across the Greek world. And I think that's a really interesting distinction that our production industries operate and are organized slightly differently in the two periods. Definitely. I mean, I think... I just wanted to point one thing about those standing females. So every single polis, if they're making terracottas, has their own version of that. And they're both using it internally in their own city and also exporting it. So you can find not only a standing figure of your place, but an imported one elsewhere. So how do you deal with those kind of distinctions? Yeah, and we don't have... I mean, really, we don't have imported figurines much in Judah and we don't export them much out of Judah. So there's a whole set of questions that have to do with who's responsible for the production lines and is it controlled from the top down by the state? Or is the stylistic continuity at different cities but only within Judah somehow a grassroots movement? So we use all sorts of tools to do that. And I think you all use the same. We will take slices out of a figurine through a petrographic study and look at the makeup of the clay. And then that can tell us a little bit about where the clay came from and was it local or was it imported. But we have to get down to that level of analysis because we don't have figurine workshops that anyone's excavated. So we have to go from the objects and what we can learn about the objects in their clay and the tempering agents that were added to infer something about production. Whereas at Corinth you have quite the opposite situation. You have a wealth of information. Yeah, we have a Potter's Quarter where they're actually making the figurines and we have molds where we can actually put the figurines that we find back in the molds. So we have a full connection to the production site and then we can see them being used in the city itself. So what can you tell us about the figurines and what does it tell us about the people who are making them? Because we're kind of pushing to this like the craftsmen but also the consumers and the production and all of that. And so in my field again because my corpus is predominantly female, the presumption had been that they were made by women or only by women. That they were made kind of on an ad hoc basis in someone's home when something came up or that they were used only by women for concerns we somehow assumed would only be women's concerns. And what we find when we look at all the data is that we have actually full blown production industries that are complicated probably entire families are incorporated into the production of these things. And there's lots of complicated reasons we won't get into here for why we think that. Some of them have to do with the makeup of the clay and the similarities to other kinds of clay items we find in ancient Judah like pottery. So it's probably more complicated than simply aligning a style of a figurine to a gender of a maker or a gender of a user. We've got lots of ritual texts from the Near East that indicate that even if you did have a problem with infant mortality or death in the family that that would be a concern maybe the entire family engaged in including the woman, yes, but not only the woman. So it's really hard to go from a figurine to the population that used it and use only the iconography in my case to make that assumption. And partly because it's not in shrines we don't have inscriptions, they're in houses where all sorts of people live. Nuclear families live there sometimes seasonal laborers move in and they live there. Sometimes you've got a joint workspace where people from different houses get together and work there. I think that when you're talking about domestic deposition of figurines like Robbins crazy figurine in your yard they're mostly trash, right? So they've already been disposed of maybe once, twice, three times and you've got lots of people that live in the space whereas in your case you've got these awesome shrine deposits. They're pretty amazing, I have to say. I love them. So it's interesting because you're talking about this emphasis with women. We have a dominance of female figurines as well in the Greek world but there are often there's far more variety than I think that you guys have in your area. But I think one of the most interesting intriguing things about getting back to the people who are making them are the traces that they leave for us. And so for both my handmade and my mold made ones I have fingerprints and large fingerprints. So you can actually see the traces of the human that made them and you can see them recutting and reusing figurines simply because either it's easier or because that one's just really special. And so you have this sort of set that there's like this conservatism that they want to repeat things over and over again. And so that tells us a little bit about ritual practice in the Greek world which is there's sort of a standard you have to sort of do this and that it's this standard practice to give a figurine. But one of the things I think is really interesting about figurines generally at least in my world is how the range of types is present. And so we have things to tell us about what people are doing in their daily lives. Like there's images of people making bread sitting at an oven. There's pictures of them. There's a one of a man grating cheese. I mean how more domestic and great can you have with something like that. But then there's also whimsy. So it doesn't have to be all these serious standing females with that are being dedicated as sanctuaries. You also have things being dedicated and placed in graves. And my favorite are monkeys. So there's a whole series of monkeys doing silly things that are Corinthian that we have examples in Corinth from the workshops. And my favorite of course is one that's on the bottom which is a monkey holding a cloth over his head eating a piece of bread with the pestle in one hand as he's standing on a mortar that's tilted. I mean how much more whimsical can you get than that. At the same time they're also producing things like representations of shrines and these very standard figures. So I think that's kind of one of those really fun things that we have with the figurines. So tell us a little bit about personality. I think I mean whose idea was it. Let's do a monkey. Monkeys aren't in Greece. They don't live in Greece. Who was like I want to do a monkey doing these silly things. So I think that's kind of fun. You're also more accessible right too if you're not just interested in what elite people who have money to dedicate statues are doing. If you want to know what regular people or everyday people are doing figurines are a snapshot into our lives right. People who are maybe a little bit more along the lines of the average person watching the show or working at the university. And I think that's like if we write history without those people we've written you know 1% of history. You see there's just really not an option to ignore them. And I also like to think about how many people touched that figurine before it finally was deposited. I mean you think about the person who made it. Then you think about the person who bought it. And then you think about the person who deposited it. And then once it goes in the sanctuary you can't let it leave. So if someone has to move it what if it breaks but you can't leave you have to bury it. And then the person finds it. And then we fix it. And then we said I mean there's just so many hands that touch these things that it feels like you really are touching a bit of history whenever you're working with figurines. And some of my colleagues they'll be frustrated that so many of our figurines are in disposal context not in the context of use. So it's broken right. And then it's been used to to block up a wall or they've used it to like push ashes around in a little oven. But I also like to think about the afterlife of figurines after they're broken. Right. The little kids who might play with them in the courtyard or how you might reuse them to level the floor. Mine you know they didn't deposit them in a ritual pit and deactivate them. They're just the materia of everyday life and the biggest context in Jerusalem where I spend a lot of my time thinking about figurines are they're you know they're thrown in to like make construction fills and we find them in toilets after they're broken. They're just they're the landscape of kind of daily life and just because they maybe don't play the original role they had when they were made by the coroplast or when they were acquired by the ritual agents doesn't mean they had nothing to do after that point. Right. They continue all the way till like you said we excavate them today. Or Robin excavates or a figure a figure that's creepy mine are not that creepy. I'm telling you that. That's about. Okay so you haven't found any your figures aren't that creepy but for each of you do you have a sort of favorite thing like one favorite thing that you you've dug up or a favorite sort of dig you've been on. I mean one thing like not my own dig. Doesn't matter. Jeez that's a hard question right archaeologists we're pretty psyched out of our mind about pretty much everything. Right. Like the best thing to find is poop. If you can find an ancient latrine and you can test the soil you can learn so much about people and parasites and their daily habits and their lives so. You are special Aaron you are special. I was gonna say I like I like my mouse. I like my I like my terracotta mouse with the big ears. Yeah I think I'll see with my creepy statue. All I'm saying is you can't really tell it is fecal matter after so many years so you don't can't rule out that your creepy statue was in ancient people matter I'm just saying just saying. Well now that just makes it worse. No it does it's it's kind of making it worse. Well I will say is one of the most amazing things I think about being an archaeologist and studying these is I work at a place at Corinth and it's been excavated under excavation for over 100 years and so you go into the storerooms and not only do you get to see the material that's been excavated you also get to see the material and the written explanations and drawings of people who've been and study the material in the past so you're here like my heroes who are studying the material and so the the rewards of going in there and just seeing cabinets for me just drawer after drawer after drawer after drawer figurines that are unique and special is something that I enjoy and I think it's such a privilege that I have to be a scholar of this. Cool cool cool. So a question I've always I don't know that I've always had this question. I was born with this question. The thing I think about is you know how and you you sort of touched on it a little bit how do you you know you're at this at this dig and you're you're pulling all of these artifacts out of the ground. How do you keep are there certain methods or for keeping your own politics and identity and all of your own sort of stuff. I mean imperfect out of the interpretation. Yeah. I think maybe it's marked more by the effort doing so than it is our success in an absolute way. You know what what what is true is you dig what you find not what you were looking for and it doesn't matter what you thought was there. You are now responsible for preserving that for not just anyone who comes after you but anyone with any research question that comes after you. So essentially you have to document every single thing you excavate with the same level of care and detail and cultural sensitivity to the place where you're working as the primary object. So you know if Theo is interested in figurines and she's working in a site in Corinth and she excavates something that's like medieval. She's got just as much an obligation to care for that material as she does her primary research interest. So in archaeologists we're caretakers right and when an archaeology is destructive you can't go back and do it again when we excavate it it's gone. So there's a heaviness a weightiness to playing that role. And politics does get in involved too. I mean Corinth was the Nazis came into Corinth and during World War II and actually pulled out the crates where they had the figurines and other material that had been from the early excavations and used the wood for firewood. And so we're left then dealing with the material that was left behind and it was documented but we don't have the same level of documentation. And also choices were made when people were excavating about what to keep what not to keep what to record. So even though we're saying this is what you should do sometimes people didn't do it. And so you have that and then people there people sometimes make choices about what they're going to excavate and interpret it in different ways and things a lot with the classical world have been reused and appropriated in ways that are dangerous. And so yes you're right it's a problem but if you're you know trying to do your do your best and try to keep politics out of it it's always the best policy. And then there's museums too right Theo? I mean museums are also a political act whether or not you keep an object whether or not you show an object whether or not you make that object available to the general public. So a lot of my work I focused more on objects that have come just directly out of the ground but Theo deals a lot with museum collections and images and all museums are also political. It's true right. Definitely. So we are nearing the end of our time but I do have one quick question and this is for you Theo is there any sort of speculation in the scholarship about how monkeys ended up in great civil places? Well it's okay I can answer that well we actually do have monkeys in Mino and frescoes so in Thera or Akrotiri we have monkeys on the wall paintings and so it's not that they didn't know the monkeys it's just that there were no monkeys in Corinth as far as I we have any records for so it's not like they didn't know and they are traveling they're they're traveling there's a lot of connection between just the Mediterranean world. It's funny you asked that question because I actually looked it up because I was like if I mention monkeys I need to check this and so originally people thought that they were connected to the monkeys that the Greeks were seeing were from Egypt but it turns out that perhaps the Minoan monkeys were from India which are a type from India which suggests even further contact and exploration and exchange so that's I think that's what's going on is that someone saw a monkey was like they're hilarious I'm going to do a monkey and then they were like from then on they were like I love it I love it and I sometimes think they might stand in as like children you know as sort of like what are children kind of doing but their children aren't really in the iconographic record in the figurines in the same way that you might think so I think that might be it and they're really great with animals I mean we've got monkeys and dogs and birds and all sorts of fun things so that's my answer to you is that it's exchanged and what's going on so these people aren't isolated they're in contact with lots of other people in the Mediterranean and even across the you know across the the land as well cool well I um I get to sit here and chat with you all night but we have other things to get to I would like to thank you both so much for being here and now it's time for us to send you over to Paris Wayland with Check This Out Hey everyone Welcome to Check This Out segment my name is Paris Wayland and then the Media Literacy Librarian here at the University of Tennessee and the Check This Out segment for those of you who maybe might just be joining us is a segment where we focus on how to make sense of the topic at hand or something close to that and we use the resources provided by UT Libraries and authoritative sources for the public to pull from so today we're going to focus on we're going to talk about the importance of identifying and verifying sources because origin and context are important contributors to forming the bigger picture right so to give the viewers a unique perspective we have a public facing librarian I guess this episode is Brittany Norwood Brittany is a Commons Librarian and Hodges Librarian so she hangs out with most of us you most often see her working at the front desk or providing research assistance but she also works behind the scenes on different library programs like Woman in Horror which you might have seen at the end of October and Distress for Success which is coming up after Thanksgiving she's interested in helping students develop the skills and confidence to be information literate and in her spare time she often is crafting reading or watching movies so Brittany thank you for taking the time out to chat with me thank you for inviting me on Paris yeah so as we're preparing for the show when we were talking we discussed how you didn't really have like a academic background and religion or studying objects but I know for a fact you have a love for storytelling and you answer a lot of really odd research question is through the research assistance chat features so in fact you actually told me a story about a conspiracy theorist in their research on the centaur and for those of you who you don't know what I'm talking about there's an installation on the first floor of the library which is the centaur ballas and our centaur has a very interesting story that you can revisit in our first season a four-year reference episode two in the stories from the stack segment with Ingrid Ruffin but in that episode their interview chancellors professor Beauvais Lyons and they discussed the centaur ballas and he presents the question do centaurs exist to kind of create conversation around the blurred lines between reality and imagination but Beauvais specifically mentions many trappings of authenticity which he mentions in reference to some charts of potteries that are like surrounding the actual centaur so I think this conversation about authenticity in the story of like origin of an object kind of leases right into the story you shared with me so do you mind just kind of recapping the centaur conspirator's story and how it reminded you how important it is to check sources with the centaur story so this is something that happened actually earlier this year and I'm not going to lie it it kind of broke me a little bit so I'm at the front desk and patron walks up wanting to know more about the library in general so I'm handing them different literature that we have up front you know having a conversation with them about the library and suddenly they tell me and by the way that artifact you have downstairs is so amazing that you all have something that proves the existence of such a creature and my brain immediately stops and assesses the situation and thinks oh wait there's not actually you know a sign down there saying that this is fake this is made by somebody here at UTK and this person you know just saw the do you believe and a decently like made skeleton down there and connected the dots how do I rectify the situation without embarrassing them so I'm trying to be really nice and I'm saying oh no I'm I'm sorry sir you know there's not really signage down there that explains the story so much about this this is actually something that we made you know it shows a bit about what we are capable of creating it's a fake artifact and I swear this guy when he looks at me I I see the tinfoil hat come down over his eyes and I just I know that there's no salvaging this conversation at this point and he clasps his hands and lays them on the desk and he just looks at me like he is so sad that I don't know the truth and he goes well I read Greek mythology and I know that they find things over there so and once again at this point I I am broken there there is nothing to bring the conversation back on track anything I say at this point like it's going to go further and further absurd so I I hate to admit that I let him leave believing in Centaur still well the institution did it so you know it led him to question do Centaurs exist and so I guess that question is still floating out there so on the topic of authentic artifacts I think this is actually a great opportunity to have you tell us a little bit about scout and how can I kind of aid students in their research of our collection of primary resources yeah so scout is actually a really great resource first of all I'm not an expert on this particular search engine but I can definitely tell you some of the basics of it so scout will allow you to search what we have in special collections and also some in digital collections to see different artifacts that we have down there so it can be a bit tricky to use when you first get started with it and so it could be beneficial at first for you to go to one search actually go to the advanced search option and select special collections under search profile then you can search using keywords or titles and from there you can find you know the exact titles of items that you can then go to the scout database and search for some of those some of the identifying information that's been cataloged for them and once you're able to do that and you find the item and scout it'll bring up the items box number what collection it's a part of different things like that so that you can request the item be brought to you and alternatively you could go directly to scout and search for the items that we have in either special or digital collections you have the option to select if you want to and from there I find that keyword searching using like one specific term works pretty well and that will give you a lot of different source types like archival records themselves or links to entire collections so for example and when I was putting together the display for women in horror with the items that we had in special collections something that it was at first I just wanted to see if we had anything related to horror down there so that was my keyword and it brought up that we have Raimi's manuscript that became eventually the evil dead it led me to our pulp fiction collection different things like that and honestly if you are wanting to get to wanting to get to know more about scout I highly recommend getting in touch with the people who work in special collections they're excellent at their job they have a granular knowledge of the different artifacts that we have hidden back there that you know maybe your keyword searched it and bring up and also they're just really great people I completely agree with you yeah thanks for kind of walking us through that process as well and giving us an example is definitely very helpful for people to kind of have an example as we talk through things so speaking of primary resources I would definitely be remiss if I didn't bring that BTK's very own the Clown Museum of Natural History and Culture which has a wonderful collection specific to East Tennessee and has amazing exhibits both permanent and temporary so you all should check that out if you have a chance and if you're curious about material culture and how to kind of read an object consider visiting their website for supporting materials by the curator of academic programs Katie Malone Katie basically teaches students how to use primary sources in the form of material culture are or natural history specimens which basically means critically analyzing an object just as all of us should be seeking context for information that we are consuming right so bringing it back to your center story when you're helping students with questions around say conspiracy theories how do you kind of go about verifying the information that they've maybe provided if they provide information to you so honestly it depends on the context in which the person is asking this question so some people are interested in conspiracy theories more as information objects or a cultural phenomenon as opposed to engaging in truth seeking behaviors so the interaction when somebody comes and asks about a conspiracy theory it typically starts off with me learning more about why the researching this topic and in the context of what class or what assignment and honestly that's pretty par for the course for most research questions we get at research assistance and we want to know why you're researching this thing that way we can help guide you to the sources that you need but I do feel that it isn't especially important to get this information in this particular situation once I determine the why I try to address the question in kind so for people who are mostly interested in conspiracies as information objects I show them strategies they can use to find information about how the conspiracies were developed who might have started it things like that but if somebody appears to be truth seeking or they appear to be operating under some sort of or disinformation then I try to encourage them to let the literature be their guide or to speak with the subject expert now this can be a difficult process and sometimes you might not realize that a person is operating under the assumption that a piece of false information is true until you start trying to research the question yourself and then you hit either a wall where you can't find anything or you might hit a slew of varied credible sources that are debunking this person's argument that's definitely happened to me before when people have come to RA on topics that I'm not super familiar with and I find out in the process of trying to help them find stuff that they are very wrong and it's never it's it's a delicate situation you have to make sure that you're able to convey what's important in a way that is for lack of a better word relatable to the person after all if I present information in a way that the person won't accept then it can make them dig in deeper to what they're already are inclined to believe you never want to make a person feel stupid or uneducated you want to make sure that they understand that you know that this was a mistake and not everyone will listen to you even if you are as kind as possible but I felt that at least that we can do is try so I do try to watch how I approach the situation but circling back to the language of your original question I typically don't verify sources for people that's not often why they chat in I've had very very few people actually specifically questioning whether a source is credible or not and in those cases it's never been about a conspiracy theory people who do chat in with this truth-seeking behavior typically already believe their argument and they're wanting to find something validating that's what makes the sort of interaction so risky and tricky personally I feel like I'm doing the person a disservice if I don't explain to them that I've searched and we don't have credible literature on their topic and here's what they can do instead and when it comes to explaining how to actually consider source credibility I recommend people checking the researchers sources the researchers reputation and to see if any external factor like a funding source may have influenced how the research was presented and then engage in lateral reading which is probably one of the most important skills anyone can use in this day and age so lateral reading is the act of getting off of the page or the article you're examining and searching for that information elsewhere so say you're reading an article that's claiming the earth is flat and it lists five sources you don't need to just say well they've cited their sources and it was published in a peer reviewed journal so it must be good now instead go to a different search engine maybe one of our databases and start researching yourself to see what other people have found what they might have to say about this research and remember even peer reviewed sources can't be fallible that's why retractions exist and convey false information that can happen to people who publish with the best of intentions if you feel strongly about something someone out there is going to try to use that emotion to convince you that something you convince you of something untrue it doesn't mean that it's bad to care it just means we all need to separate ourselves from our own personal feelings when it's time to evaluate the facts so if you give yourself a period of healthy skepticism and sorry give yourself a period of healthy skepticism to draw your own conclusions and I always say it's worse if the thing that you feel strongly about and promoted ended up being false or misleading and or if something intended to trick you because then if you're sharing that information you're ultimately hurting your own argument yeah thank you for that very thorough answer and all those examples again I think they're very helpful so we stress information literacy and how important it is to critically assess the source of the information or the origin what resources does the library have that may be useful to someone researching say the origin of folktales or even quotes and I brought this question up specifically because when I work on chat every blue moon I get this question and always throws me off because you know my background's in like digital arts and like a lot of librarians background is in English and it feels like it comes so natural for them and I have to search for this you see I was psychology and sociology so I'm out of left field there but um yeah we do have several databases that talk about this sort of anthropology and that could be of interest to people we have various books in our collection that gather and analyze folktales urban legends conspiracy theories and so on but honestly one of my favorite sites for this is still snopes.com when we were chatting earlier I told you a bit about this but the reason why I feel so strongly about information that I see is because back when I was first starting high school like somebody shared a story with me about this really spooky spider and I was convinced the spider was real and it was going to find me and kill me and um snopes helped get me out of that mentality and I am still terrified of spiders but I know that this one doesn't exist because of them honestly I just thank God for snopes but um honestly I feel like it's an accessible introduction to your topic and it can help guide you to some of your first sources that can lay the foundation for your argument and outside of those resources always feel free to talk with us via chat or email your subject librarian these are all excellent routes for starting crafting this sort of search strategy especially if you're wanting to look into the origin of these stories yeah so um with so many fake news sources material papers and you know social media basically encouraging rapid sharing of information what do you think our viewers can do to build their information literacy skills other than you know listen in on our podcast honestly one of the best things you can do is test yourself find different quizzes or modules that colleges and libraries have published and take them attend free webinars you learn best when you have the chance to make mistakes and even fail so find an environment in which it's low stakes to do that if you're wanting help with finding something like this once again chat in use reachers assistance will help you find these things and outside of that start playing around with different search interfaces and learn a bit about algorithms and how authority is contextual and constructed when you start to understand that then you'll start to feel a bit more confident and being able to understand like what information literacy is and how we how we rate different sources of credible or not yeah absolutely great suggestions for our audience Brittany and thanks for sharing your experience with the resources that U2 that U2 Libraries provides for our community so that basically wraps up our check this out segment for today thank you so much for giving us your time and sharing how you approach information needs so thanks for hanging with us Brittany viewers as always thanks for listening in we hope that this conversation was informative and you feel empowered to question the media that you are consuming in any form and that's going to wrap up our session for today next we have stories from the stacks with Sarah Johnson evening everyone welcome to stories from the stacks tonight I'm going to highlight an item from our Betsy B. Creek more special collections department that goes hand in hand with our theme tonight which is exactly what Paris and Brittany were just talking about and you might be thinking oh cool let's keep learning about figurines and their place in history and information literacy well so maybe not exactly that I gotta pull you in somehow don't I gotta get you you excited but we are going to take a look at an item from our special collections which sounds very fancy doesn't it showcasing the religious lives of everyday people and how interpreting these materials is guesswork a lot of the time so it's still pretty similar to what we're discussing and we can make educated guesses and try to envision what it was like at the time but we don't truly know what was going on with any particular person and I I think I'm getting ahead of myself again I do that a lot because I just get really excited about all of this stuff so let's take it back special collections what is this this department acquires arranges preserves and promotes the use of rare and unique materials that supports the information instruction and research needs of the University of Tennessee community aka special collections is like one of the coolest places in the library but people like me should be thoroughly screened for how many times I've taken a tumble in public before being allowed into a place like this I'm joking a little bit anyone can visit special collections in fact we highly encourage it so we are going to take a look at a journal belonging to a British born artist Herbert Francis Williams Lyons that is a hefty name for you we're going to call him Herbert for short I really like these people who have the biggest names ever but Herbert it is so a little bit about good ol' Herbert he was born on January 19th, 1863 in Plymouth, England and he trained as an artist in Boston, Massachusetts in Paris, France and his art is expressed through mediums of oil paint watercolor and engravings in wood and he primarily depicts scenes in religion and mythology as well as land and seascapes and describes his subjects of his work as ethereal, spiritual, mystic and as well as material subjects kind of gives you a lay of land and in 1922 Herbert was in his late fifties and he decided to go on an international tour including Africa, America Asia, Australia and other various islands can you say bucket list like I'm doing that when I get 50 his international tour is the focal point of this journal and he entitled it album of sketches of the holy land which sounds way fancier than any journal I've ever kept and he begins this journal with a description detailing the spiritual journey he embarks on through his world exploration within the book are 63 pages of impressionistic sketches made with pencil and pen that illustrate scenes of biblical inspiration found from found from his tour of Palestine Jerusalem and Egypt many of these sketches are coupled with Bible verses or notes written in English Hebrew and Arabic and as you comb through the pages you'll see he has scenes of buildings and landscapes he's seen on his travels animals he's come across and portraits of everyday people and they're beautiful as you can see Herbert was an artist and all artists leave room for interpretation of their work it comes with the territory but I find that his personal journal full of everyday scenery and religious inspired sketches creates an opportunity to dive into his personal experiences which in turn leads us grasping at straws trying to know the true meaning behind it while not as influential as the use of figurines in ancient culture Goodall Herbert still has added value to the understanding of religious experiences of everyday people and in the instance of this particular journal a personal journal it is an ambiguity kind of the point though and like but that's okay so even though I do not study myself I do not study material culture or religious lives of people in history I can still be inspired by their commitment and their experiences as people and being mindful of the collective we is grounding and each person's experiences are very important and that kind of wraps up our little short stories from the stacks this time see you next time well that is it for another show and that's our final show of the fall semester and next week y'all is Thanksgiving how is that possible hello Turkey it's the start of the holiday season so we wish all of you out there a wonderful season of holidays whichever ones you celebrate and we look forward to seeing you again in 2022