A culture is a group of people who believe in the same basic beliefs, faith, and ways that they live.

The language, types of sports that are most popular, etc. all make up a culture. Many different things make up culture. Art, beliefs, values and the way a community lives in general makes up its culture. Their education, way of communication and technology can also define a culture. Stare at a computer screen for no less than 8 straight hours. One-by-one, review documents you barely understand, largely removed from their original context, that supposedly relate to a lawsuit you've been given a terse briefing about. Try to figure out which documents are "relevant," based on vague criteria. Click your mouse several thousand times in the process. Repeat the next day for however long is necessary to get through all the documents - days, weeks, months. Then, start on the next case.

Sorry to be depressing, but this is a large part of the life of many junior associates at law firms. Lucky ones won't have to do a ton of doc review, but unlucky ones may wind up doing nothing but. Not every job can be made to sound interesting. posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 9:26 PM on May 6, 2009

Have a day. No, really. Just live through a day. It doesn't have anything special, just a normal oring day. Now, that evening think back on your day. What one moment stood out to you? Was it a nice cloud, or the sound of a bird? Maybe it was a feeling that you can't even find a word for. Think on this event. Mull it over until you can recall every nanosecond of this event and are sure you will be able to share it with others in a way that they will be able to feel exactly like you did at the precise moment.

Now go grab some paints, or metal, or clay or pick up your camera or other recording equipment and recreate that moment. Agonize over every detail. Blood, tears and sweat are optional, self-doubt and frustration are not. Place your creation in a public space and talk to people who stop and look at your creation. See what they feel. Revise your creation, then bring it back out in public. Repeat process until you have perfectly recreated that moment for at least one other person. Glow like a motherf*cking star, because you, my illustrious friend, are now an artist.

Now take that same object, and place a price on it. This will hurt. A lot. Now convince anyone to buy this creation for the marked price. Dicker, bargain and beg. This will hurt even more. Did someone buy it? Now you are a working artist. posted by 1f2frfbf at 8:04 AM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]

At work: for most of the day, correspond and converse with authors, publicists, copyeditors, sales managers, production staff, and colleagues about nitpicky little things like what the photo credit is for a picture in the insert, whether your boss is available to meet at Book Expo America, if you have copies on hand of a book that was published five years ago, whether or not an author's contract should contain an option clause, why an author can't have a jacket with orange type, etc., etc. Keep the authors on deadline.

Attend meetings to discuss book proposals and manuscripts that have been read recently. Give your two cents on a novel the London office really likes (you didn't like it; the London office is going ahead with it anyway). Bring up a novel you really like, ask for folks to read it. Once it's been decided to pursue a book, spend lots of time on the phone with agents to negotiate terms for a contract. Go to weekly production meetings to be hounded for bits of the book as they come in. As publication nears, go to meetings to launch books to the publicity and marketing departments, and present them to the sales staff.

Remind authors about their deadlines.

Write five versions of promotional copy for each book: in house sales sheets, copy for the catalog that goes to booksellers, an audio description that will be put on a CD for sales reps, descriptive copy for the book jacket flaps, and, once the book is in paperback, copy for the back cover.

Did I mention you should keep authors on top of their deadlines?

Once the authors finally turn in their manuscripts (and it's always after the deadline), reformat their manuscripts to take out whatever fancy formatting they've put in, add

page numbers (they never remember them), and combine the individual word documents they've created for each chapter into one document for the book. Give this to the managing editor, who will give it to the copyeditor.

At home, outside the 45+ hours you spend at the office each week: edit books. Read proposals and manuscripts to bring up in the editorial meeting. (This is usually what people think of when they talk about being an editor; it's the best part, but never gets done at the office.)

That's what it's like to be a book editor who's just starting out. posted by ocherdraco at 12:41 PM on May 8, 2009

Computer programming. Imagine if you have to design and then build a series of machines, some simple and some built on simple machines and some built on machines built on simple machines. Once built, they can be easily duplicated and reused (and usually are) thousands and thousands of times. Now, calling upon all your accumulated experience and intuition, build the machine such that it is correct where "correct" is defined by somebody else, usually someone who makes more money than you do. Along the way, build the machine such that it maximizes at once elegance, performance, and safety. Spend a lot of other time communicating with other builders and documenting so future builders can continue or maintain your work.

If I were to introduce somebody to computer programming, I would probably spend a lot of time with them one-on-one because no book is ever going to beat out a (handsome, charming) human and, when you set out, a lot of it is pointing out how a computer works. Most people know large bits of how computers work, but there are always holes to fill in. (I still have some holes. We all have holes. Holes holes holes.)

A good introductory programming language is Python. A bad introductory programming language is Java (hello, computer science departments around the world). After Python, probably Java. And then cover C, a Lisp, and an ML. After that, programmers are hopefully strong enough to learn languages by themselves.

So programming boils down to good teachers and a strong sense of curiosity and practice. Being handsome and charming also helps. Picking up a computer science degree will fill in a bunch of theory holes that you couldn't fill in otherwise.

> Look around you.

Look ... around you. (Sorry.) posted by shadytrees at 6:09 PM on May 8, 2009

There's a lot that could be done for photojournalism but I think this might be one of the easiest ways to approximate the emotions and difficulty of photographing horrible situations and tragic events. Wait until you're in a really heated, emotional fight with a member of your family or a loved one, best if there are tears. Now, when the anger is at its height, pick up your camera and take a picture that conveys the emotions of the person you're arguing with but which doesn't convey your own emotion. Make sure you're in a dark room, because lighting is never perfect. And, if you can, get other people (whose interest aligns with the person you're arguing with) to jostle you around while you're taking the picture. Ideally, it will be extremely difficult for you to take a properly exposed, in focus picture, and you will feel like the worst, most callous person in the world.

This isn't perfect, though. There are a lot of rewarding feelings that come from the work, but those usually happen after you're done actually taking pictures. But, I think the above would work to replicate a lot of what comes flooding in when photographing house fires for the local paper or photographing angry protesters in an unstable society. Of course, in those you're usually photographing strangers, but many photographers have a great deal of compassion to those whose situation they're covering (hence the family connection in the above example).

On the other hand, suppose you want to experience what it's like to do long-term documentary photography. Go to a neighborhood in your city where you've never been. Find the most interesting house, and knock on the door. Chat for a little bit, and then ask if you can take pictures of them waking up and preparing breakfast each day for the next week. You might need to stay the night at their house to be there bright and early. Figure out a way to do that. If they're skeptical, pick another house in the

same neighborhood and figure out a way to meet a gregarious third person who likely knows the person inside the house. Earn that third person's trust and have them introduce you to the person in the house and create a relationship between the three of you that involves you taking pictures of the house person waking up and eating breakfast each morning for a week. Also, it's best if you pick someone who will choke on the 4th day of breakfast, so you can simulate the nature of what happens when what seems to you like one story turns into a completely different story. This will also simulate the need to identify subjects for stories that will draw out aspects of the story that you never realized were part of the story.

In this case, your story about breakfast, which was probably going to be really boring anyway, turns into a story about the difficulties of the US healthcare system. You need to realize that this is the more important story and the one that you were really interested in photographing, even though it only seems like your subject choked on a piece of bread and wants to reschedule the breakfast shooting for when the subject is out of the hospital. Then you need to convince the subject to sign the appropriate documents to let you photograph them in the hospital and then you need to convince the hospital pr person that, yes, that's all you really need to do to be able to photograph in the hospital. And then something else that you didn't expect will happen.... And then something else. And then your car will get towed. And somewhere in there you need to figure out how and when to take pictures that address your new story.

Oh, and, then when you think you're done taking pictures, or during the week you're taking the pictures. Find 10 or 100 people on the street and ask them to buy your pictures. Hopefully they will all ignore you. Every once in a great while someone will stop and look and give you some money. Even less frequently, when you are at a restaurant on date, one of these people will call you and ask you to go take pictures of somebody eating dinner ("Shoot it just like your breakfast story. I loved those pictures!") and they need the pictures by tomorrow. They will pay you money for these pictures in a month or two. This is what it's like to try to get your pictures published in a magazine. posted by msbrauer at 7:08 PM on May 8, 2009 [2 favorites]

Splitters and lumpers are not confined to biology. Imagine for a second you don't have the Linnaean taxonomy and you are starting from scratch. Yay! Great fun right? ! Yeah definitely.

Now imagine you are applying a classification system like that to stuff in your workplace. So, you might want to decide how you're going to break everything down by subject as in Dewey or you may be required to break things down by function. You will identify a number of activites that come together so the function is performed. Then you will identify transactions or products of these activities.

So you have to start investigating all the things your business does and how all those things relate to each other. You will do some research on the business, read annual plans and strategies, annual reports, relevant legislation and even foundational documents. You will spend a lot of time talking to people in your organisation and asking them what they do, how they work, what kind of structure of information might make their job better.

In my case I work for an agency that has client files for the whole of government. Gee, well that's about 4000 things (I'm from a small country) to organise so let's think how we start.

So what do we do? We audit. Hmm, okay, well what makes one audit different from another? Well the structure of the organisation we're auditing, it might be something as small as a mowing trust for a group of schools in a rural area who pool together to pay for lawn mowing services or it may be a huge ministry such as the Ministry of Health, so we have different sets of instructions for audits of different types of government bodies. Right, so how many different sets of instructions? 24 Great let's start there. What else can you tell me about each type? ....

Doesn't have to be something as dull as accounting, could be a classifcation system for a laboratory or a rodeo. The joy of it is you will have the ability to analyse a business and pick up specialist knowledge as you go.

By the end of the process, you will understand your business well and will be able to construct something that will make sense to the people in your organisation. You have to consider how your classification will work in an electronic and physical environment, whether it will affect, say, your accounts department or your external clients. You have to balance out the competing needs of various teams and produce something that makes everyone happy (which is near impossible but don't ever let that put you off).

Next question you ask is "So what do we need to keep and for how long?" That's the face-off between the hoarders and the chucker, way more acrimonious than any debate about homo habilis.

That's what you would do if you were a records manager. posted by BAKERSFIELD! at 5:06 AM on May 9, 2009

Pick a religious event or location in your area. Do research, make sure they're OK with you showing up, dress appropriately.

Go in. Sit at the back (if seating is available), and take note--mentally only!!--of everything you see. Decor. Languages heard. Diction. Wardrobe of the people. Politics of who sits where. If you speak the language of the liturgy (if applicable), try to memorize the order of the liturgy and any interesting quirks in terms of word choice, etc. If there are any bookshelves visible, try to memorize the titles. Notice if touch or fire or some element is repeated, and guess as to why. Engage in idle chatter with the participants, to try to make them feel comfortable, so you can get an "emic" (insider's) view of the service. Then get into your car or bus and begin writing down everything.

Then go again and again and again. Start interviewing people. Learn the language, if applicable. If the religious tradition you're studying could be seen as being "in diaspora" (Judaism most popularly, but recently North American and European Jainism and Hinduism have been put into this category), and the people suggest you go to a certain location to get a sense of how it "really is," do so, if only to get a sense of why they would consider the tradition in that place to be 'authentic' as opposed to their 'diluted' form.* Try to develop a sense of the scope of how people from the same religious tradition, in the same congregation, will see the same ritual acts differently.

Keep on doing this for multiple years.

I'm a student studying religious studies, with a fieldwork-oriented perspective, which comes from having profs who all focus on sociology and anthropology.

*One of my profs did just that, and went to north India to study Jain monastic communities. posted by flibbertigibbet at 7:03 PM on May 10, 2009

Oh, and I forgot to even mention the typical aspects of academia, like writing paper, applying for jobs and grants, and if you have a job, dealing with institutional responsibilities. posted by flibbertigibbet at 7:04 PM on May 10, 2009

Pick one of your relatives - it could be someone living or dead, but ideally, someone who is older than you. Begin cataloguing the events of this person's life, gathering as much data as possible. You may want to divide the person's life into 5-year or 10-year chunks, and set up a matrix or table with the 5-year increments down one side or running across the top. Along the other axis, you might create headings like "Biographical," "Local," "National," "Global," "Technology," "Pop culture," "Legal," "Contemporary acccounts," etc. Try to think of all the categories of historical information that could illuminate this person's life.

Fill in your grid. Under "biographical," put in the dates and basic details of this person's birth, important events, moves, marriages, military service, immigration, schooling, experience - whatever they went through. Under "legal" you would put mentions of the person that appear in the legal record with documentation - marriage license, deed transfers, discharge papers. Your grid will have lots of holes that you don't know about - but you will know where they are. Conduct research to fill in your grid. You will need to use general information sources for national and global events, local sources (like newspaper archives and county court records) for local and legal information, magazines and newspapers and maybe TV and radio for pop culture information, journals/letters/diaries from people with some sort of connection for the contemporary accounts of experiences related to your life. Document all the sources from which you are pulling information for your grid. Keep copies of the legal documents, articles, research papers, diaries, accounts, etc. A binder system becomes really helpful here. When the grid is basically full, think about what your goals are in sharing this information. You could create a webpage, slideshow or multimedia interactive, or make a physical exhibit - either a formal exhibit with framed documents and object cases, or a re-created environment, or sequential immersive experience. Alternatively, you could write a book or stage an event. Identify the most important and significant themes or elements in the person's biography. Was it their lifelong commitment to justice? Their business acumen? Their pioneering character in breaking through barriers? Their inventions? Their dedication to family? Boil the themes down to 3-5 main, strong points. Look, especially, for themes that illuminate the conditions of a historical time period and for humanities themes that themes which have some universality. Be sure you are giving your viewers a reason to care beyond the fact that this person was in your family. Connect to emotions as well as intellect. Every now and then, step back and view the story you are building and ask "So what? Why should anybody care? And be sure your narrative answers those questions. Choose the mode of interpretation and present your information. Depending on the mode, you may need to do some fabrication - building exhibit elements like object stands, theatrical-style sets, electronic interactives, or cases. OR you may need to write a script and record an audio presentation. Or you may need to create a storyboard spelling out the stages a visitor will go through in experiencing the story you're telling.