My thoughts today are about my publications. Johannes Stampf has asked me to make a video about Life and Eternity. He thinks it is more appropriate coming from me as the English speaker.
Now I’ve started my vlogs and telling you what I think videos. I hope that does not undermine the promo video which I plan to make once I get an appropriate link to the published book.
I went to LinkedIn and started adding some of my publications. But you know, publications means books you wrote. Well I have not written my book yet. This blog is the start of my personal story.
The books I’m talking about are conference proceedings or a multilingual dictionary I formatted or the books I edited after they had been translated from German to English.
“In those days”, in the last century, when I was secretary of Professors World Peace Academy (PWPA) in Australia, I loved my work organizing the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Peace Conference in Kooralbyn Valley. It was a lot of work and an amazing accomplishment. We had politicians, doctors, academics, scientists and religious people all giving their own perspective on how to create peace. It was so inspiring for me and amazing to see these various people who would not normally exchange even a word with each other, to actually listen to and then exchange about their various approaches to peace. We took the Confucianist approach from the individual to the family to the society to the nation to the world.
In those days, we had no internet, no google. I don’t even remember who filmed as I was the chief camera operator in those days. I first started filming when PWPA held its first conference in Sydney in 1983. At that time I was studying sociology in Hobart at the University of Tasmania. The year before I was a pioneer missionary in Wollongong, NSW. During my pioneering in Wollongong I did a course on video filming.
In those days, we had three quarter inch video tapes and three separate units connected with cables to be able to record.
I was asked to come up to Sydney from Hobart to film the conference in 1983. A year later I was organizing the next conference and publishing the proceedings of that first one from Canberra. We transcribed the video tapes with a Dictaphone. It was the beginning of the computer age. Our computer had a single floppy disc. We had to put in the DOS operating system, then the word program and then the files storage disc. It was a lot of hard work. I finally printed the proceedings on a daisy wheel printer/typewriter.
Now when I look at the book I’m sorry I didn’t know that I could have had the printer change the font. To me today it looks like a typewritten document. Well it was. It has my name nowhere in it, nor the names of my assistants who also laboured hours with the Dictaphone and computer input.
I’m thinking of scanning the document and sharing it. Of course I put a copyright clause in the front. The only editor named is Professor John Frodsham who was the president of PWPA at that time. He also gave the opening and closing remarks.
Just now when I searched for the title: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Peace, I’m surprised to find that he had his opening speech published. Yet we did not even think to get an ISBN number. I kept the original files for a while, but in 1986 I left Australia and many other things behind me.
Years later I met someone who ended up clearing all my paperwork out of the Canberra office. She was so happy to meet me and thought I must be a professor of some sort after dealing with all my correspondence and papers.
No, I call myself the “foot-folk” in my vlog today. It’s not just the assistants that get forgotten. The mamas and women and secretaries are usually not named or remembered. Unless we make a point of telling you what we really did.