I'm a fan of the French press, but I really would like to try out the AeroPress someday soon.

I was playing around with Ruby the other night and wrote a simple n-gram generator. In case anyone is interested, here is the script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w
# r_ngram.rb
# Generate a simple bi- and tri-gram, prints to STDOUT
# Usage: ruby ngram.rb file.txt
# To save the output to a file: ruby ngram.rb file.txt > output.txt

$words = File.read(ARGV[0]).downcase.scan(/[a-z]+/)

bi_grams = Hash.new(0)
tri_grams = Hash.new(0)

num = $words.length - 2
num.times {|i|
  bi = $words[i] + ' ' + $words[i+1]
  tri = bi + ' ' + $words[i+2]
  bi_grams[bi] += 1
  tri_grams[tri] += 1
}

puts "## -- bi-grams -- ##"
bg = bi_grams.sort{|a,b| b[1] <=> a[1]}
(num / 10).times {|i| puts "#{bg[i][0]} : #{bg[i][1]}"}
puts "\n"
puts "## -- tri-grams -- ##"
tg = tri_grams.sort{|a,b| b[1] <=> a[1]}
(num / 10).times {|i| puts "#{tg[i][0]} : #{tg[i][1]}"}

Starting tonight with a talk by Donald Worster, the Center for Great Plains Studies is hosting their symposium 1862: The Making of the Great Plains. I'll be at the electronic poster session on Thursday discussing the William F. Cody Archive. Featured speakers at the symposium this year also include Elliott West, Martin Jischke, Richard White, William Thomas, Myron Gutmann, and David Von Drehle.

Saturday, the history graduate students are kicking off the seventh annual James A. Rawley Conference, which we are holding at the Homestead National Monument this year. Coming fresh off of comprehensive exams, this should make for a nice way to end the week.

I'm bad about taking out the trash.

Plus, it dawned on me that if we went back in time ten years, the amount of trash I currently have would've filled my hard drive completely full.

Jason Fried:

Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

Good advice.

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Jeff Jarvis:

The internet’s not broken.

So then why are there so many attempts to regulate it? Under the guises of piracy, privacy, pornography, predators, indecency, and security, not to mention censorship, tyranny, and civilization, governments from the U.S. to France to Germany to China to Iran to Canada — as well as the European Union and the United Nations — are trying to exert control over the internet.

Why? Is it not working? Is it presenting some new danger to society? Is it fundamentally operating any differently today than it was five or ten years ago? No, no, and no.

So why are governments so eager to claim authority over it? Why would legacy corporations, industries, and institutions egg them on? Because the net is working better than ever. Because they finally recognize how powerful it is and how disruptive it is to their power.

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The french press method. The way to make coffee.

"We should not be committed to the existence of institutions, but to the ends those institutions were created to enable." -Abby Rumsey

What value do journals and books add versus digital scholarship? We invest value into these forms of scholarly presentation as though they carry value of their own. As Tom Scheinfeldt tweeted relatively recently, the book and the article are like gold and silver. They carry no intrinsic value; print text is a form we grip to out of tradition and invest our own value into.

How might we define scholarly communication?

1. idea(s) and formulation
2. analysis and narrative
3. dissemination
4. reuse and citation

What forms can and do scholarly communication take?

1. narrative (traditionally)
2. analysis (traditionally)
3. data visualization (spatial, text, and so on)
4. data (and databases)
5. markup as interpretation (as Jerome McGann has argued elsewhere)

The web offers new forms of communication and dissemination, sometimes (often?) superior to the printed word, but we have yet to fully grasp it. Look at William and Mary Quarterly for example. They have a section on their site that contains additions for digital work (they call "Web Supplement") that accompanies the print. Contrast this with the born-digital article by Edward Ayers and William Thomas The Difference Slavery Made based off the Valley of the Shadow digital history project. These two examples illustrate where we've gone in the last ten years with digital scholarship — away from long form narrative on the web, and a turn to digital work to accompany traditional print. Some journals are pioneering new forms, like the digital-only Southern Spaces, but historians need to be aggressive in getting more journals in their fields to start thinking hard about how to handle digital scholarly production.

I'm not saying I'm in agreement with Jeff Gomez who argues that print is dead (although keep in mind some of the major shifts in publishing that occurred just last year that suggest digital publication is becoming more and more a norm). But I do think there is room for digital to be the only version of a text, narrative, or analysis.