For several semesters now I’ve made writing blog posts in response to each week’s content a central assignment for my graduate and upper division undergraduate courses. The assignment essentially requires students to write either a prompted or unprompted (depending on what I want to get across that week) response to readings, lectures, discussion, etc....
Read more »
For several semesters now I’ve made writing blog posts in response to each week’s content a central assignment for my graduate and upper division undergraduate courses. The assignment essentially requires students to write either a prompted...
Read more »
I’m giving a little talk to my departmental colleagues on Monday at our departmental “retreat”. It’s about my journey into using wordpress to host my course sites, how I do it, why, etc. At the end, I’m offering to run a w...
Read more »
I started this post in July of last year and never finished it. Looking back on the piece I thought I might pick it back up, as it highlights the good/bad predicament that the web and forms of digital research present to the historian of places “...
Read more »
Today was the big unveiling of Anthologize, a wordpress plugin developed by the NEH-Funded “One Week | One Tool” digital barnraising at the Center for History and the New Media. What does it do? It allows you to export a blog in book f...
Read more »
I wrote recently about a case of bestiality brought against poor, unfortunate Geronimo Berveran, a 15 year old kid accused having sex with an unbroken mare (yegua). Luckily for both of them, their case was overturned on appeal and the horse was spared ...
Read more »
I’ve been struggling recently with how I want to encode the transcriptions of the very many digital facsimiles of my documents. I decided even before I wanted to construct a digital project with my current work that I wanted to move away from rtf...
Read more »
Over the course of the past year, I’ve been developing my second project with an eye towards digital curation. The project will analyze the roll of state surveillance of sexuality in the modernization of Spain’s Empire under the Bourbon Kin...
Read more »
Whenever I’ve heard the question, what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, responses inevitably cluster around some specific form of cognitive capacity: tool-making and using, abstract thought, that ability to transcend temporal...
Read more »
WordPress 3.0 was officially released for download today. I’ve written recently about my experiences playing around with the beta and rc releases over the past month or so. WP 3.0 really is a major upgrade filled all kinds of new — or at le...
Read more »
Summers are nice for academics because it gives us a chance to work hard on research and other projects that seem to getcrowded out by service, teaching, writing conference papers, and the like during the academic year. One of my goals for this summe...
Read more »
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on this blog directly related to my own research on 18th- and 19th-century Quito. With help from a graduate research assistant, I’m finally getting around to transcribing more of the jail visitas (censuses) that I collected last summer at the ANE. My assistant is right now...
Read more »
This has been a banner year for ash spew. My guess is that we will see a short term global temperature dip as a result of all of the recent activity. Cue climate change denialists… Now. Volcán Pacaya near Guatemala City and Volcán Tungurahua returned to active eruption this past week. Pacaya apparently emitted...
Read more »
When I finally leafed through it, I was both impressed by the depth and importance of the library's Latin American holdings, and shamed that I had no idea what all was there until after I had moved on from graduate school in Albuquerque. ... The collection, according to its description , includes:...
Read more »
I took the plunge this Spring semester and started hosting my own installations of wordpress to run courses, using dreamhost. At the time I decided to do this, dreamhost was running a special in which a year’s hosting cost me all of $10.00! I mapped my main professional domain, chadblack.net, to dreamhost from using...
Read more »
Sessions I attended covered such topics as designing digital humanities/digital history curriculum for undergrads and grads, issues surrounding the conception of large and small scale digital projects, text mining small textual corpora, constructing a series of asynchronous, free online courses for mid-career humanities professionals who want to get digital skills, the limitations of TEI...
Read more »
A few weeks ago I posted this screenshot of transcribing documents using DEVONthink’s sorter and Lightzone. I’ve been working the past week or so on “transcribing” some jail census material from the 1780s that doesn’t lend itself to the sorter, and used this setup instead: I need tables for these documents. I simply split the...
Read more »
I’m sitting on the plane in the air travelling from Knoxville to Mexico City via Dallas. I’m very excited about this because, though I’ve been studying, teaching, and writing about Latin America for more than 15 years, I’ve actually never been to Mexico. The occasion for the trip is the annual meeting of the...
Read more »
In neglecting this blog for, really, a couple months, I let pass mention that Devon-Technologies officially released DEVONthink 2.0 at the end of February. I’m still in love with DT, which I’ve written about on a number of occasions in the past. I should probably write a long piece detailing how the new DTPO...
Read more »
If you were to construct from scratch a certificate program in digital history, what would you insist should be included? Of late, I’ve been putting in some time proselytizing my departmental colleagues on the desirability of developing some sort of program for our graduate students that will give them skills to practice history in...
Read more »
