Lincoln Mullen’s internet weblog

Hello, Micro.blog. I’m starting to write a newsletter, and the first issue is titled “Love letter to the IndieWeb.” I thought you might be interested, and there is also a brief book review of A People’s History of Computing in that issue. More to come here.

Considering that I was a child in the nineties, you would think I would know something about Pokémon. But when my daughter explains it to me, it makes about as much sense as Irenaeus explaining Gnosticism: “this emanation begat this energy begat this Pokémon.”

I discounted everyone’s complaints about bugginess in recent Apple software. But in the past few days:

• Trying to send an iMessage to multiple recipients won’t work.
• Reminders is totally unusable thanks to iCloud syncing problems.
• Apps randomly won’t start, presumably because of system bugs

We recently released the website for RRCHNM’s American Religious Ecologies project. You can read about how we are creating new datasets for the study of American religion. We also have started blogging about the project. Here’s a post about the U.S. Census Bureau and religion.

When I decided to share my desktop’s screen to my laptop, I didn’t quite anticipate that it would share all the screens.

It’s a weird thing to type, to be sure.

Congratulations to the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond for receiving the AHA’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for their fantastic project, American Panorama: An Atlas of the United States History. You should check it out.

The 8 y.o., who has just started chess club, is poised to win her first game since she is up a queen in the end game. Except, she’s never been in this position before. So unless she can figure out how to checkmate on her own, we’re never going to get to go home. 😁

If you are trying to upgrade your LaTeX installation on a Saturday morning just so you can send in one document, you have made poor life choices.

Writing my abstract today for this symposium on “Religion in Place: Spaces | Borders | Bodies” which will be held at SLU next month. (“Writing my abstract” is code for “actually doing the required thinking at last.”) I’ll be talking about RRCHNM’s American Religious Ecologies project and whether it is possible to study historical religious space extensively (across regions and the nation) in ways that are analogous to how scholars have studied religions space intensively (usually in urban space).

To be fair, history is hard.

In honor of Labor Day, I give you these two images.

Grilling by headlamp.

Is it just me, or is it super weird that the Museum of the Bible would make a video about my research without even contacting me or letting me know?

Also I loved the line about how I “discovered that Samuel Tilden was running for president.” I expect to be cited.

It was a whirlwind first week of the semester. For two days I think I did literally nothing but talk to people. I used to think that was not a good use of my time. But I’ve come to realize that in many aspects my job is less about doing good work than about helping other people do good work. And when you get the feeling, as I did last week, that that might be happening, it’s very rewarding.

Here’s the syllabus (PDF) for American Scriptures, a class I teaching for the second time and co-teaching with John Turner.

RRCHNM has published the second issue of Current Research in Digital History, a journal that publishes short articles about DH work-in-progress. Here’s the issue.

This is the week where I write to a dozen people asking when their work will be done, and a dozen people write to me and ask when my work will be done.

Syllabus for a class I’m teaching this fall.

Length of time I used communication technology before being utterly exhausted with it:

• email: 15 years
• Twitter: 6 years
• Slack: 3 years

Any of you IndieWeb folk have a non-creepy alternative to Google Analytics?

What’s the name for this law of the internet?

All publishing venues sooner or later dispense productivity advice.

My two favorite peer review comments of all time are (1) that I am a “Catholic triumphalist” (if memory serves, I was a Baptist when I wrote that essay) and (2) that I have a “posture outside DH.”