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.
Here’s a thought that occurred to me this week. I’ve read hundreds of scholarly books and written one. But I’ve been in the classroom maybe a thousand hours so far, and I’ve seen other people in my department teach for maybe two hours, tops. The only exception is team teaching, which I’ve done once before and am doing again this semester. Planning a class and actually watching a colleague teach at length is really eye opening, and gives me all sorts of new ideas for teaching.
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:
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.”
Well, there’s your problem right there.
Nothing makes me feel better as a teacher than to see a bunch of students who took a course with me one semester take a different elective with me the next semester.
If you are a sysadmin interested in working in the DC-area, and if you value a free and open web (probably a safe bet if you are on Micro.blog), then the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is hiring.
But if you think that lighthouse poem is cute, here is one she wrote for one of her stories. 😵
A poem my daughter wrote as a birthday present for her grandmother.
Starting to think in a serious way about classes for the fall. Here’s what’s on deck:
It is comforting to know that if I ever run out of ideas, I can redo my old work and call it “live action.”
A fair number of people who aren’t my students or colleagues ask me for advice about digital history projects or what have you. I want to be helpful, but those conversations rarely seem to go anywhere and take up a lot of time. So I’ve started asking people to either send me something they’ve written or write up one page gathering their current thoughts before we talk. Most people I never hear from again. For those people who do it, our conversations are much more productive and don’t waste either party’s time. Not sure if this is a prickly old man thing to do or not, but I’m sticking with it.
Now that the Red Sox are losing to the Orioles we can officially call this a bad season.
Congratulations to GMU’s Jeri Wieringa, who completed her PhD today with her dissertation “A Gospel of Health and Salvation” on Seventh Day Adventists.