The Irishman = Casino + Forrest Gump + The Shootist

End of the semester: time to put up the sign my daughter made for me.

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.”

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:

• American Scriptures (team taught with John Turner)
• Programming for Historians
• Digital History Practicum
• Black Digital Humanities (grad readings course)

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.

Anyone who thinks the internet is an immaterial abstraction has never had to work on the internet in a data center.

In a turnabout of events, the 7 y.o. says we can’t go out to lunch yet because she is the one who is busy writing.

Two hours to write the script in Go, which then takes two hours to run. Could have written the script in R in an hour, but then it would have taken two days to run.

Does anyone else mistakenly type terminal commands in iMessage threads to their loved ones?

Have to agree with the Washington Post that the Museum of the Bible’s “sound shell” is pretty cool.

Susan Schulten explains how maps were made during the Paris Peace process in the aftermath of WWI.

My colleagues and I are working on digitizing the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies. Or—I should say—redigitizing. It appears likely that the Census Bureau used Hollerith punch cards for tabulation, so in some sense the census was digitized at the time, not to say, born digital.

The most productive I’ve been as a writer was while writing dissertation and also watching my then 2 y.o. I’d write in the morning, then we’d have lunch, go to the park, and take a nap together on the couch. Hoping to re-create some of that this summer with the now 7 y.o.

What are you citizens of the free republic of Micro.blog using for an RSS reader these days? I’ve been using Feedly tamed by an ad blocker, and it’s only ok.

Here is what some colleagues at RRCHNM and I will be working on next.

It’s amusing to read all these articles about how you have to minify your markup and transpile your JavaScript to improve page speed, when all you really need to do to make your webpage load fast is not serve 100 ads and trackers.

The 3y.o. is pedantic about grammar and word choice and not shy about correcting anyone, but then, his parents and big sister have been correcting him his whole life. Infuriatingly, when he corrects me he is usually right.

Why is it that every humanities use of maps begins with a disclaimer that maps can tell lies? Is it the case that words are always used honestly?

Called Hover. They picked up right away, and in two minutes I had the answer to my problem and it was fixed. (I still don’t understand DNS though.)

In a twist on the usual “write my own blog engine before I write a blog post” story, I’m playing around with writing my own newsletter web app. This is not as insane as it sounds, even though I’m not at all sure I will actually start a newsletter or that anyone would read it. My main motivation is to learn Django really well, and this is a well-defined starter project. Besides, have you seen the prices for newsletter services?

I really like the Spotify playlists for the characters on Halt and Catch Fire, like this one for John Bosworth or this one for Joe MacMillan. Seems like a clever thing to do for a period piece.

For unfathomable reasons, when you submit final grades they are listed as A, A+, A-, because you know, letter grades should be listed alphabetically.

For the past few years, colleagues at RRCHNM and I have been making maps of election returns to the first nineteen Congresses. Here is the final release of Mapping Early American Elections, along with a blog post explaining the release.

The 7 y.o. was amazed I had (and would wear) a shirt that is older than her.

Software I used to love but now loathe:

• Jekyll
• Slack

Software likely to head in that direction:

• Docker

If you get the data model right, all the rest of the programming is so much easier. Get it wrong, and …

Making a Doodle poll. Q: What have I become? A: A middle manager.

It’s my eleventh wedding anniversary and the last day of classes. Also, got tenured today.

If you are on an Indie web platform like Micro.blog, then by definition you will be interested in @dancohen talking about copyright and “The Web at 30” on the What’s New podcast. Here is a clip.

There is a bug in Ruby (only on the Mac) that puts “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” into practice.

NYU Press has added an open-access section called Open Square. I’m glad to see more academic publishers releasing open-access work, and NYU Press in particular since they have been knocking it out of the park in American religious history and religious studies.

I read @ayjay’s newsletter, then I read The Typewriter Revolution, and now I am looking for a green IBM Selectric II like my grandfather had in his office.

A tribute to my departed colleague Marion Deshmukh (1945–2019), who was a professor in my department for 45 years.

The chart on “quality of question” vs “strength of evidence” in Roger Peng’s blog post about the goals of data science works pretty well for humanities questions too.

We are all tacitly agreeing not to ask one another to do anything new between now and the end of the semester, right?

For a few months I’ve listened almost entirely to music and not podcasts. I am returning to podcasts again, and it’s a good chance to prune podcasts that weren’t listening to.

Current status.

My rules for giving talks.

1. Make the audience—not yourself—look smart.
2. Entertain, then educate.
3. End early.

A gift from my emeritus colleague at lunch yesterday.

My phone number is still from my home town, where I haven’t lived since 2006 and where I don’t know anyone any longer. Rootlessness is symbolized by the fact that any phone call I get from area code 978 is guaranteed to be a scam.

I played chess with the 7 y.o. yesterday. After she captured both my bishops, she said, “No more bishops for you. Now you’re the Protestants and I’m the Roman Catholics.”* I don’t know where she learned that.

* She pronounced the word Pro-TEST-ants. Also, I hope she knows that her own Anglican tradition has bishops. Time to talk about the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral.

Almost all airports make Dulles look bad, but the Indianapolis airport in particular makes Dulles look like a national embarrassment.

At the Metro on a laptop tethered to a cell phone, SSHing into the workstation into my office, then SSHing into university’s high performance cluster. In part to check on my batch jobs, but mostly to see if it could be done.

How many monitors does a person need? Answer: Just one more.

Looking forward to having ten historians representing eight projects come this Friday to RRCHNM’s workshops on Model Articles for Digital History, in connection with the Journal of Social History.

How a team of researchers is “Detecting Footnotes in 32 million pages of ECCO.” That’s published in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, which has really been knocking it out of the park recently.

The workshop on quantitative history that Chad Gaffield and Ian Milligan hosted this past week at the Fields Institute was probably the most pleasant and productive academic event I’ve been to. It felt like a key moment in the field of computational history.

There are lies, damn lies, and text messages from United saying they “value your time.”

Amazon is serving me ads that say “Make this your holiest Lent." So I guess targeted advertising isn’t all bad? 🤔

My colleague Mills Kelly on his work tracing the history of the Appalachian Trail, starting here in Virginia.

Now that my department’s two job searches are over I feel like I can get this semester and my life back in order. [Checks calendar and sees that he is taking two trips and hosting two events in the next four weeks.] 🤦‍♂️

Some of my colleagues are deeply gifted at commenting on draft work, and I always feel inadequate to return the favor when I comment on theirs.

Gimlet Media didn’t make podcasting, but they certainly helped popularize it. Now with their acquisition by Spotify, they will help paywall it. It’s a shame, but it is also a trajectory which was predictable from the first episodes of the Startup podcast. Like so many internet companies, the tie to venture capital meant that it wasn’t enough to make money, even serious money, as Gimlet obviously did. It had to make VC-sized returns and be acquired for a VC-sized payout.

Emma Green reviewing Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise:

Fifty-five years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and 154 years after the end of slavery, it is true that racial dynamics are different in America, and within the American church. Still, the patterns of history, and the tug of moderation, remain the same. That’s where this book offers value: Tisby is the rare writer on race who could have impact in rooms where progressive consensus cannot be assumed.

Both Happy Feet and Smallfoot have the same religious plot elements—plot elements that could have been written by a high schooler who has discovered Tom Paine and who likes to rail against “priestcraft” on Reddit.

Nashville Union and American, 11 May 1875.

Went looking for the PDF of my book which had gone missing. It was in the directory “Desktop > ZZZ to file > Unlikely to read” where it belongs.

Had my customary start of the semester spat with the copy machine. If copiers were the dominant machine of my era, my reputation as the guy in the department who can’t work the technology and refuses to learn would be legendary.

Syllabus for “Computational History.”

Semi-annual shoutout to Caleb McDaniel’s Generic Syllabus Maker.

Draft syllabus for Global History of Christianity.

Incredible that a five hundred page reader in the history of Christianity can contain exactly two pages on Pentecostalism.

Robin Jensen’s new history of The Cross is an addition to my syllabus this semester. It’s my attempt to give the class more focus by adding a common theme across the centuries, while also extending the class into areas like art that aren’t my strength. It’s always an open question how well a new book will teach.

People, let me plead with you: your academic event does not need to be longer than one day. Unless you are an international scholarly society, in which case you can have a day and a half.

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” should have been my auto-reply when trying to schedule all the things this semester.

Grant submitted. That makes three this academic year so far.

I’ve only been using Notion for about a week, but my cautious, reserved opinion is that it is #$@&% incredible. It seems to be the perfect combination of wiki, plain text, lightweight database, web/Mac/iOS app, and privacy and sharing that I’ve wanted for a long time. I generally don’t want to trust anyone to keep my data available, but the export options seem legit, and even the subscription price can be viewed as a way to make sure the platform sticks around. We’ll see.

At ASCH in Chicago, I was on a panel with Shirley Mullen, whom I had never met. After a few minutes talking we learned that we were related through my great-grandfather, Stillman Mullen. I also learned that the association my great-grandfather was a part of in Aroostook County, Maine—the Reformed Baptist Alliance—had that name not because it was theologically Reformed, but because they were Arminians reforming their fellow Baptists’ Calvinism. Go figure. This fits with the family Arminianism passed down via my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father—all Baptist pastors.

True, fixing up my blog page was definitely not the most important thing I had to do today. But arguably tinkering with websites is in my job description.

Just as numismatics is a well-defined field, in future millennia archeologists will be able to date their finds precisely based on monitor cables.

This is hard to explain, but I had a keyboard/monitor plugged into a computer running Ubuntu, and now they are plugged into a computer running MacOS, and it appear that my muscle memory is associated with the keyboard and not the operating system.

By deleting Slack.

Fifty-six proposals for our workshops and special issue with the Journal of Social History. That’s … more than I expected.

Current status: recreational finding of studs.

“My next two book projects” is the new “my next book project.”

Happy belated birthday, Philip Schaff, born January 1, 1819, and founder of the American Society of Church History.

If you are at the AHA, check out this panel on “Lessons Learned from Three Digital Dissertations in History." It features two George Mason doctoral students, Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe and Jeri Wieringa, as well as Zoe LeBlanc from Vanderbilt. As far as we know, Celeste’s dissertation is the first born-digital dissertation in history.

Tim Larsen’s religious biography of J. S. Mill for the Spiritual Lives series he edits at Oxford is deeply interesting and surprising. I’m a last-minute addition to a panel commenting on the book and series at the American Society of Church History annual meeting this week.

Pro tip for collaboration: Don’t update the axis legends on your visualizations from variable names to proper descriptions until you’ve signed off on the figure. You can tell at a glance if your collaborators have snuck an unfinished figure into their drafts.

American religious history is everywhere. But sometimes it shows up in the public library parking lot.