Monday - 5/23/2016 - 10 am -12 pm

Today was spent gathering background information on both the technology that this project involves as well as the man that it focuses on. I spent about the first hour going over the history of wire recorders and magnetic media in general. It was somewhat surprising, however, to find that pretty much all online sources for information were almost verbatim of one another. It seems like there are just a few sources for information that all these sites were picking from. I'll have to pick up at least one of those books particularly the Magnetic Recording Handbook by Marvin Camras. Camras, incidentally, invented many of the improvements that the wire recorder would go through in the 1940s as well as being considered the father of most type of magnetic media such as tape and even floppy disks.

The rest of the time today was devoted to reading up on David Boder himself, this actually included listening to an episode of This American Life from October 26, 2001 entitled "Mr. Boder Vanishes." This program had much to do with the rediscovery of his research and also of the recording that he did following the Holocaust. At first little importance was put on Boder's work and by the time people realized the importance the recordings had mostly vanished. I actually want to do a little digging and see where we got the collection from (or at the very least the recordings, especially if they are the originals).