Commonplace

If you, like me, will be heading to Nashville in a few weeks for the National Council on Public History’s annual meeting, you might find Elizabeth Catte’s guide to Nashville’s food and culture on a budget useful for your pre-trip research.

Interesting piece over at the Duke Library blog on defining digital humanities (hat tip to Mike Widner).

The research model is going to be harder to quantify. We do have some measurable components: we provide some services, and we do (or will do) some grant-funded projects. We also produce output, including code, web services, papers, articles, and blog posts. But for the most part we focus on building pieces of ever-evolving, ever-growing, resources that are never ‘finished’—resources that are harder to quantify than finished books or articles, websites or databases are. So, in some ways we look more like faculty than staff, in other ways we look more entrepreneurial. Startups take risks on building big things, hoping, of course, that they’ll be profitable. Very often the things they try don’t work, but sometimes they do, or sometimes they suggest a completely different (but better) direction. The thing is: you’ll never catch anything if you don’t put your fishing line in the water. We try to control for risk, to fish where the fishing’s good, but our basic posture is still research-driven and so to some extent risk bearing.

I’ve been remiss in pointing out that my buddy Elijah Meeks’ D3 in Action has appeared in print. I’ve been getting chapters of the book through Manning’s early digital access for the last few months that he’s worked on the book and can say that it’s an excellent introduction to D3. If you’re looking to get started with the library and, more importantly, how you can use visualization in the humanities effectively, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy.

Nicely researched piece from Brent Rose. I’ve never really bought the hype around bulletproof coffee. Then again, if butter in your coffee is your thing then don’t let this stop you.

Thanks to my colleague (and co-host) Elijah Meeks for pointing me to a project by Nils Weidmann, who has put together CShapes – an R package and GIS shapefile of country boundaries and capitals between 1946 and 2008.