{"id":738,"date":"2016-10-10T13:42:58","date_gmt":"2016-10-10T20:42:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/?p=738"},"modified":"2016-10-10T13:43:20","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T20:43:20","slug":"review-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/2016\/10\/10\/review-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of the finding aid for the George Meyer Script files, 1990-2004"},"content":{"rendered":"

I examined the George Meyer Simpson Script files from 1990-2004. Within the finding aid, one may find a seventy-eight box collection of Meyer\u2019s works in which he produced for the comedy show, The Simpsons<\/em>. The boxes each contain several scripts, drafts, and annotations.<\/p>\n

The finders aid begins with a short narrative biography on Meyer, shortly detailing his college education and his climb to fame. The short narrative describes his undergraduate career at Harvard University, and his short-lived ambitions to enroll in medical school; hindered only by his own procrastination to actually — enroll. The biography then goes to describe several of his own “pet projects” such as the magazine that he published, which only contained three printed\u00a0issues. Later, it delves into Meyer’s careers writing for other shows such as David Letterman, and how he created some signature skits for the show and thus propelled his own success.<\/p>\n

Viewing the finding aid, it appears that the organization of materials is done somewhat… counter-intuitively. It took me a few moments to finally realize that the articles were organized alphabetically rather than chronologically, and I was confused as to why the box numbers were out of order. The finding aid would probably prove more useful if it were organized chronologically, therefore one researching Meyer and his work on\u00a0The Simpsons<\/em> could appreciate and examine his growth as a comedy writer and perhaps changes in style\/behavior. Organizing chronologically would also allow for one to analyze how Meyer evolved the characters throughout the series.<\/p>\n

Trying to understand\u00a0as to why one might organize the archive alphabetically, I reason that it might be ordered this way in order to assist researchers in finding specific scripts, but in actuality this is not completely necessary. One could simply search the title of the episode in Google and find the date that the episode was aired or recorded.<\/p>\n

The narrative that one might create\u00a0through the articles within this finding aid would specifically include Meyer’s time working for\u00a0The Simpsons.<\/em> It would leave out his legacy post\u00a0The Simpsons\u00a0<\/em>and his history prior to\u00a0The Simpsons\u00a0<\/em>as well. In addition, while it does include notes, many of his own inspirations for certain lines in the scripts may not appear because the finding aid and archive do not contain personal interviews. Overall, while it does give a complete list of artifacts, the scope is limited to simply the scripts and archives that it contains. Interestingly, however, the archive does contain a list of censor notes which could be useful to explore if one would like to research Meyer’s most crude examples of humor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I examined the George Meyer Simpson Script files from 1990-2004. Within the finding aid, one may find a seventy-eight box collection of Meyer\u2019s works in which he produced for the … Continue reading “Review of the finding aid for the George Meyer Script files, 1990-2004”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}