11 Jan
2023
11 Jan
'23
6:21 p.m.
As someone who *ran* a card sorter for IBM as my summer job working
through college,
I'm simultaneously laughing and shuddering.
My cards are the standard white kind -
except for the ones I wrote or rejiggered, they're on cream colored stock
Beckets are blue paper and double-progressions are green. Chestnuts
are light brown.
A pink highlighter stripe across the top means the two women have
action together (remember the days when that was heady?)
A blue stripe means the two men interact specifically. Yellow means
you escape your foursome somehow. Shadows get a grey pencil stripe.
Orange is particularly aerobic. Purple is proper.
Top left hand corner hand corner has a custom acronym - EFE means
"easy for experts", LNBD = "late night brain dead", FC = "feels
cool"
but is actually simple.
Top right hand corner lists specific moves I prob. want to avoid doing
twice in a row - heys, down the center four-in-line.
The progression type is centered on the top edge.
If I fan them correctly, I can check everything at once.
Dances I do a lot are tattered.
Dances I do rarely are more pristine.
"Roll In the Hey" has a coffee stain.
"The Snow Dance" is missing a chunk I tore off to give someone my phone number.
"Baby Rose" was rolled up and used as an impromptu hot-pad for a stove
handle and doesn't stay flat.
Dances I learned prior to 1994 are in ballpoint.
After that it's finepoint felt tip.
Anything after 2018 when I started needing reading glasses is in thicker gauge.
I'm only on my second freezer-weight Ziploc bag, ever, and really proud of that.
:)
A
On 1/11/23, Joe Harrington via Contra Callers
<contracallers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
The short version of this post is, how should I
organize my dances? But,
I'm sure if I ask that, the thread will have 100 replies and lots of
confusion. My search of the list archives and web were surprisingly spotty
on this question, with lots of anecdotes and no summary or comparison. And
I'm not just asking for myself. While I've got a whopping 15 evenings of
dance calling under my belt, I'm being called on to train some students to
call for our college club, and they're asking the same question.
So, I'm looking for one or more summaries from those wiser than I (ok, low
bar!) of the kinds of systems for cards. This might better be asked as,
what are the different approaches to programming dances, and what
organizing systems make each of those easier?
In a workshop of his last summer, Bob Isaacs related his system of colored
cards for easy, hard, bouncy, flowy, sweetheart, and divorce-reconcile
dances (I think those were the categories). Call easy dances first, call a
sweetheart right after the break when they're most likely to dance with the
person they came with. Save hard for festivals. Give them variety.
But, I've wanted more categories, and what about finding the bouncy
sweethearts? I'm really busy, so the idea of re-copying a hundred or more
cards to make a new system doesn't thrill me, if I don't like my initial
system. Maybe I'll get a database system to select dances with, and then
have a set of alphabetized printed cards for the actual calling, though
what if I'm wrong and need to change my program, as has already happened a
few times when a ton of newbies shows up? I'm interested in hearing about
anything particularly clever or efficient, especially if it doesn't involve
a computer or tablet.
A comparison of the different computer systems would also be welcome. I'm
aware of programs by Will Loving and Colin Hume. I asked on one Facebook
group for a comparison of these but got no response. Is the Caller's Box
up to real-time dance selection at an event? That presumes wi-fi, of
course, or at least cell signal.
I'll toss in one amusing and possibly workable paper system, for a
dedicated and extremely nerdy caller, which might be me...
I heard recently (I believe from Angela DeCarlis) of a mechanical sorting
system based on the Jacquard loom concept that became the Hollerith punched
card system. I've never seen it in use. Does anyone do this?
Figure out the ten or so characteristics you might want to sort on. For
example, easy, medium, hard, bouncy, flowy, separates partners, sweetheart
(keeps partners together), etc. Take a stack of cards and drill holes near
the bottom edge, one per characteristic (you can drill a stack of cards if
you sandwich them between wood and clamp them). Now, on a given card,
punch out the rest of the paper between the hole and the edge of the card
for each hole the card DOESN'T match. So, for an easy dance, you'd punch
out the rest of the paper for the medium and hard holes (among others), but
leave the easy hole intact. If you make a mistake, just fold a piece of
tape over the gap above the hole to close the gap.
Now, when you want to look at your easy, flowy, sweetheart dances, flip the
stack so the holes are up, push a pencil or knitting needle through the
"easy" hole and lift. Then, in the ones you pulled, push through the flowy
hole and lift, and finally for that set poke through the sweetheart hole
and lift. Those are the easy, flowy, sweetheart dances. If you want the
medium or hard dances that are bouncy and that separate partners, you pull
first the medium and then the hard dances, combine them, and then pull the
bouncies from that set and the separators from that third pull. And so on.
Good hole alignment and clean punching would matter, I think. If you are a
real dance sorting fanatic, you could get like 30 holes around the card
edges, but that would limit the writing space.
I predict this will be all the rage, post-apocalypse...at least until we
run out of cards. ;-)
--jh--
Joe Harrington
Organizer, Greater Orlando Contra Dance
Faculty Advisor, Contra Knights, the UCF contra dancing club
contraknights.org
FB, Ig: Contra Knights
contradancerjoe(a)gmail.com