Playing 80 Days as a New Year’s Eve family game. 🎮

Working some more on the text adventure game with the 10 y.o. Despite my explicit instructions that we are in fix-bugs-and-ship-it mode, she is undeterred and continues to add features. 😂

My daughter and I have been writing a text adventure game for the ten-year-old set over the break. It’s close to being ready for beta testing. Lots of bad jokes.

Currently reading: A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman 📚

Got a nice email from a fifth grader telling me that her class is using my map of slavery and that the map was wrong to label Maine as part of Massachusetts. So I got a chance to write back commending her curiosity and attention to detail, and explaining the Missouri Compromise.

Finished reading: The Course of God’s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America by Philippa Koch 📚

I love the idea of character-based playlists for the TV show Halt and Catch Fire. Here’s one for Joe MacMillan, for example.

Currently reading: The Resurrection of Johnny Cash by Graeme Thomson 📚

Someone recently complained on GitHub, “You haven’t updated this package in three years.” What they should have said was, “You wrote software that works without a bug for three years.”

I had no idea you could get a document camera for anything [approaching](https://www.ipevo.com/products/vz-r by) a reasonable price. This could be a game changer for online teaching or even just meetings. To be considered …

Currently reading: History and Presence by Robert A. Orsi 📚

No one cares about reproducible research (including me) until they need to run some research scripts from a couple years ago (including me).

Parts of the DOI/CrossRef system are amazing. The XML responses in email … less so.

I finished a longer (12K words) piece of writing yesterday and a shorter (2K words) one today. A combination of deadlines and children in school provided both motivation and opportunity.

RRCHNM has cleaned up its back catalog of video on YouTube. There’s a lot of good history here.

✉️ Working on It #11: The Stack.

Ted Gioia designs and builds his home library.

Earlier this year I got myself a proper stereo. My family had stereo equipment like this when I was growing up, and I listened to lots of music that way. Even with a smart speaker and streaming in the house, I hardly ever listened to music. Now we listen to a lot more.

The kindergartner, the fifth grader, and the two professors are all packed up for the start of school tomorrow. Let’s hope this goes well.

A grandfather clock my daughter made out of legos.

I’m very pleased with the Obsidian iOS app, which lets me get away from iCloud syncing and lets me add notes while not at my computer.

Currently reading: Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith (Spiritual Lives) by Elesha J. Coffman 📚

Delighted to see my friend Sam Lebovic’s new book available for pre-order: A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization. That’s one heckuva cover.

I left one meeting today by saying I had to go to my next appointment. My next appointment was eating ice cream cones with my kids on the deck.

Right now I’m writing a crawler that discovers all the digitized text-based sources in the Library of Congress’s sources. I really like writing it in Go: software both simpler and more solid than anything I’ve written in other languages. All the code will land in this repository.

This summer and fall I’m working with the amazing and fun folks at LC Labs on a project called Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud. I’m extending America’s Public Bible to find biblical quotations across the Library of Congress’s digital collections.

• Explanation from Library of Congress

• Story about the project from the Wall Street Journal

I’ve said it elsewhere, but probably not here on Micro.blog:

I’m very glad that Jason Heppler (@jaheppler) has joined RRCHNM as a developer-scholar. He’s going to do great things; we’re going to do great things.

Here’s the announcement, but check out Jason’s work directly.

Currently reading: The Human Factor by Graham Greene 📚

Currently reading: The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton.📚

Currently reading: To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party by Heather Cox Richardson. 📚

Not as exciting as the title would indicate.

And definitely not exciting once you log in.

Current status: Johnny Cash, “The Beast in Me.”

Currently reading: Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy by K. Healan Gaston. 📚

… until it doesn’t.

It works …

In 2017, I changed the topic of my digital methods class to Reconstruction. Twenty days before that class meets this year, a mob organized on social media flying the Confederate battle flag stormed the Capitol while a Southern senator proposed an Electoral Commission.

My internal monologue upon assigning the Gospel of Mark:

“Hmm. Should I scan this reading for the students?”

“The Gospel of Mark might be the most widely distributed text in the history of humanity. I think they can find themselves a copy.”

“Saves time, and also educational.”

I’m teaching The Global History of Christianity this semester. It is far and away my favorite course to teach, even though I feel humbled—and almost crushed—by the weight of the subject.