Working towards a mailing

We've set a target of Sunday, March 2 for the bulk mailing. I've sent another email to Jim Hogle to follow up on our meeting. He offered to ask The Registrar himself for lists of alums, pay for the mailing, put us in touch with two people knowledgeable about Co-op history, and turn up Dudley employee records (tutors, masters, administrators, etc.) I'll wait to hear how much of this he can follow through on.

The plan is to call Cara Angelopolus and Lauren Brodsky at HAA today to see about mailing labels and mass emailing, respectively. Again, they won't give us open access to data until we're a Shared Interest Group (earliest could be October 2008), but they're willing to produce one-time batches of mailing addresses, which we can then back enter into our spreadsheets like Frisbay did 10 years ago. It would be wonderful to get all @post email addresses, (which we might be able to do by hand using the @post directory and an alum's username and password,) but if HAA can send the email from behind closed doors, we'll at least harvest accurate email address of those who respond, which could yield a significant amount of data.

Mmm, data.

Yesterday, i met with a History of Science TF, Jeremiah James, who is Co-op-minded, (applied to be a tutor many years ago!) and who is willing to help me tackle the general historical project that is our archive. Historical methods, ways of interpreting... this has basically become my thesis. And i'm thrilled to commit to learning as much as possible about my dear Co-op. Sweet. He'll come over for dinner next week to talk and see our materials, and he's actually my TF, so i'll have regular face-to-face contact with him. Seems like a wonderful and brilliant guy. Oh! In one fell swoop, i began talking with Jeremiah about this, got great advice for a paper from the professor of the class Jeremiah TFs for, and then got introduced to Everett Mendelsohn, History of Science Professor Emeritus, former Dudley House Master, and a also wonderful, interesting, and interested (in our Reunion) person! I've set up a meeting with him for next week. What a day.

Also, between yesterday and today, i scrounged up all the Communication Stewards' contact sheets i could find, for the purpose of expanding the "Semester Master" list. Meaning: i back-entered all the Co-oper data from the lists into a spreadsheet. I got the follwing done: Fall97-Spring00, Fall01-Spring03, Spring04-Spring08. Intend to do the rest using the paper records Frisbay found in the Harvard Archive 10 years ago, and by supplementing with whatever else i can find. This should suffice for about 2/3 of all years. (Some of the Frisbay paper records seem to be missing...) As i said in the email this morning to Jim Hogle, (now CC'ing Rich Cozzens, SJ Klein, Alex Kaufman, Frisbay, and Amelia Kaplan,) i'm rather confident that we at least have a near-complete list of at least names, probably above 90%. The uncertainty lies in not knowing exactly what holes Frisbay was not able to fill. But i'll have a better idea of this soon enough. (The Semester List is ambitious, also looking at house-rooms-lived-in and graduation year. From this, too, we'll obviously get complete data on semesters-in-Co-op)

I'll post again after calling HAA today.