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GradHacker
I have been thinking more about entering graduate school this year, perhaps because I am technically a new student (new to the Ph.D. program). Whatever the reason, though, one of the best resources for any new or existing graduate student is the blog GradHacker. Modeled after ProfHacker, GradHacker covers virtually every aspect of life as…
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The Medium is the Massage
[This post is a reading reflection written for UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar. This week the reading was The Medium is the Massage] The pictures, unusual layouts, and other visual irregularities of The Medium is the Massage seek to shock the reader. In a book focused on examining the importance of new media, adhering to the…
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My New Year’s Resolutions
I have always been a big fan of making lists, though I rarely ever complete a list that looks more than a few days into the future. However, after I finished my MA I decided to push myself to actually work towards longer term goals. I sat down and listed a few goals in a…
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The Humanities, the Laboratory and “Culturomics”
[This post is the first of many reading reflections written for UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar. I will be posting my reflections each week. Jason Heppler and William Thomas will also be blogging about the class. This week the readings were Reinventing Knowledge and “As We May Think.”] Predicting the future is, unsurprisingly, difficult. Writing in…
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Return of the Blog
After nearly two blog post-less months, I have finally gotten my act together. The MA graduation celebration is finally ending and it’s a return to the normal rhythm of the semester. This semester, that rhythm includes blog posts on Friday (and Thursday, but more on that further down). To keep the blog fresh, I have…
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Conclusion
The following is an excerpt from a draft of the conclusion to my thesis. If anyone is interested in reading more I’d be happy to provide additional text as well. The water scandal came to a rather quiet end. In February 1906, the prosecuting attorneys dropped the charges against former mayor George Perry nearly two…
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Thesis Intro
The following is an excerpt from a draft of the introduction to my thesis. If anyone is interested in reading more I’d be happy to provide additional text as well. Drawing its name from the Grand River’s rapids near which the city was founded, Grand Rapids’ rise was somewhat fortuitous. Grand Rapids occupied a regional…
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Spatializing GR
I am currently coming down the home stretch for my MA thesis and it has been keeping me quite busy. My thesis work actually made me miss a blog post last week (I am sure people were heartbroken). This week as a sort of compromise with myself I am posting an excerpt. Granted, this is…
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Publishing the Dissertation
The Chronicle: But what if publishing dissertation excerpts in a journal actually reduces the viability of a young scholar’s book manuscript? Digital technology is changing the world of information from day to day, and it’s altering the relationship between journals and books—and perhaps more important, the stability of that relationship. Journals are now essentially free…