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It’s a Process
Somewhat recently, I had a professor tell me to think of the (academic) job market as a three to five year process. I continued smiling but immediately thought about how terrible the (academic) job market is. In part, because it actually is a multi-year process. You dip your toe in as an ABD and apply…
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It’s what you do that matters
Earlier in the week during the Humanities Without Walls workshop, we spent a whole day learning how to “pitch” ourselves. This kind of self-promotion often makes academics uneasy as “selling” yourself can feel awfully close to selling out. The fact is (as many people pointed out) academics constantly pitch themselves and their work in application…
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Brian Without Walls
For the next three weeks, I’m participating in the Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Workshop on alternative academic careers. We just completed day two and I wanted to blog a few of my initial thoughts: I’ve noticed that the “without walls” metaphor is a great one for this workshop. Not only are we discussing doing the…
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The Complete n00b’s Guide to Gephi
Because my last tutorial, The Complete n00b’s Guide to Mapping in R, received a positive response, I decided to create another beginner’s guide to visualizing data. For this edition, I’ve chosen Gephi, an excellent and simple tool to do social network analysis. This tutorial is meant to get you started quickly and provide the basics…
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Forever Student Syndrome
Graduate student life has many upsides. You largely make your own schedule. You can do most of your work from any location. And you still get student discounts at the movies. But you do not want to be a graduate student forever. The life of the mind is an alluring idea, but at some point…
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What makes your city famous?
Last weekend, I was watching Clueless and looked up Pismo Beach, California on Wikipedia after Cher spearheads the disaster relief efforts for that city. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Pismo Beach claims to be the “Clam Capital of the World.” My dissertation examines the identities of cities claiming to be the “Capital of…
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Constructing Furniture City
Last year, I had a wonderful opportunity to be one of the initial fellows of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities’s Digital Scholarship Incubator. I pitched an ambitious agenda during which I would create many varied visualizations all of which would evaluate the industrial ability of certain cities during the Gilded Age and…
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Cost of #AHA2015
I’ll be up front about the fact that I stole the idea for a survey on the costs of the 2015 AHA annual meeting as well as the questions from Rebecca Schuman’s survey for the 2015 MLA Conference. Unfortunately, my influence on social media and in the AHA are quite small, so I got a…
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Quantifying Prestige
As with any scholarly project, in my dissertation on the development of small cities during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era I need to explain why it matters. I argue these cities are worth the time and effort of a dissertation because they provide a different narrative of urbanization and industrialization. Key to this alternative…
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“The Biggest City of Its Size in this Country”
At the beginning of the semester, I finished my dissertation prospectus. My committee told me to drastically cut the number of case studies with which I had begun (among many other good suggestions), lightening the workload while keeping the core idea. With the semester over, I’m going to try to recommit to discussing my research…
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Brian Sarnacki 