Tag: history
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DH and the (Social) Sciences
The topic of poster sessions came up a short time ago among some other history graduate students and I was surprised at the responses. While not outright hostile, I got the sense (perhaps incorrectly to be fair) that few were open to the idea of creating a poster themselves. This response was surprising to me…
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Defending Peer Review
The Aporetic: What strikes me about arguments in support of open peer review is that they are often premised on a utopian vision of our digital future and a dystopian view of our analog present. The utopianism is neither surprising nor problematic. Proponents of change are understandably enthusiastic. Once experiments are launched, some of this…
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A Few of My Favorite Things
With some fudging on how many items can be in a “top five”, here are my top six “top five” lists (in no particular order): 1. Top Five History Books (Listed in the order in which I read them) 1. Rats, Lice & History: The book that really made historical thinking click for me in…
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Can Micro be Macro?
Even though I am still trying to finish my MA thesis, I cannot help but think forward to finding a dissertation topic. Now I like my MA thesis topic, and I think there is still much I could do with it, but I want to really love my dissertation topic (I think you need to…
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My View on Historical Reenactments
I’ll just admit it up front: I’m not a big fan of historical reenactments. I always tend to look at them the way this Monty Python sketch portrays them. That being said, reenactments are not innately bad, just very hard to do well. In a pure sense, reenactments are another attempt at understanding the world…
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Civil War Reenactments
Here’s a good piece on Civil War Reenactments in Texas. It’s well timed too, since my Monday post will be on historical reenactments. The Texas Observer: Here in Texas, it’s becoming popular to celebrate the war as the opening salvo in the conservative campaign for states’ rights. Neo-Confederate organizations and pro-secessionists are among the leading…
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Humanities Blogs
Interesting list of the “50 Best” humanities blogs. The list includes many good non-academic blogs (from NPR, New York Times, The New Yorker, etc.), but does not recognize many historical blogs (though there are plenty of good ones).
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Spatial history and interdisciplinarity
Cliotropic: Humanities training is useful in capturing the texture and details of individual experiences, and I want to use mapping tools in an exploratory way to visualize things that I might see as trends. The kinds of analysis I’m interested in are more like how qualitative social scientists use interview-coding software to analyze their interviews…
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Citations and E-Books
Tushar Rae at the Chronicle: The inability to find passages limits scholarly research, academics complain, because they depend on citations not only to track down and analyze text, but also as a testament to the accuracy of their own work. Dan Cohen (via twitter): If the Kindle’s new “real page numbers” require a print edition…
Brian Sarnacki 