Archive for Digital Life

The Virtue of Deadlines

Time waits for no man.

Time waits for no man.

Today I discovered another virtue of the Faculty Initiative on Digital Identity: it provides deadlines.  This is a truth I have long understood about writing, about the academy, and about myself: it’s really hard to produce anything worthwhile without a deadline to focus your thinking.  When I’m productive, it’s because a deadline is looming, and when I’m unproductive, it’s because I have all the time in the world.  The need to build out my digital identity forced me to undertake some (small) writing tasks that I might otherwise have put off.  Today, I wrote a brief intellectual autobiography for my “Scholarship” page, a task that I had put some idle thought into but which I had never bothered to actually complete.   The necessity of filling in that blank white page with something forced me to finally be rigorous in thinking about and writing down some of the unifying themes of my various scholarly projects.  So if nothing else, the deadlines inherent in this initiative (as much as they seemed tediously quotidian to me yesterday) are forcing me to think more clearly.

The Quotidianness of Digital Identity

Woodville's Charge of the Light Brigade (courtesy of Wikipedia), another famous exercise in futility.

Woodville’s Charge of the Light Brigade (courtesy of Wikipedia), another famous exercise in futility.

This week I have been thinking  about digital identity as a process, an insight that emerged from a serendipitous overlap between an email conversation with a friend and the the week’s readings for the UMW Domain of One’s Own Faculty Initiative.   Read more

Midcentury Love

20131221-140153.jpgI have often argued that the square, blocky buildings of the 1940s-1970s that dominate American cityscapes don’t deserve all the hate that they get. A lot of them have very nice proportions, and I find their minimal adornment preferable to plastic historical pastiche that has dominated architecture since the 1980s. See for example my favorite plain midcentury building in out neighborhood of College Terrace in Fredericksburg, the Washington Building pictured at left. And now there’s a blogger who shares my feelings. Actually, he feels them much more strongly than I do, strongly enough to have developed an extremely impressive (and impressively productive) blog on the subject, Midcentury Mundane. I cannot express how much I love this blog, both its concept and its execution. Plus, lots of bonus Upstate New York love, and he even covered Fredericksburg’s “Big Ugly” Although he called it “not a very interesting and engaging building,” obviously I secretly love it. It provides your eye such a nice break from the cloying cuteness of Caroline St.

What the Digital Humanities Can Do

meme-say-digital-humanities-one-more-timeIf you’re like me, you’ve been hearing about Digital Humanities for a long time, without totally understanding what the term means.  Or, more precisely, without totally understanding what of real value the “digital” can add to the “humanities.”  The Digital Humanities can do lots of things, I am assured, but my problem has always been imagining exactly what those things are, and more importantly, what their payoff is.  This blog post (h/t Kevin) does the best job I’ve seen so far of collecting and explaining high-quality examples of what the Digital Humanities can do.  As a historian of tourism, I’m particularly enamored of the project mapping the Green Book.  Highly recommended.

Places I Have Lived, in 1941

Yesterday Kevin sent me a great site put together by Yale that has made available 170,000 photos taken by the Farm Security Administration between 1935 and 1943 to document the last years of the Depression and the early years of World War II.  When I was procrastinating today, I looked up three of the places where I have spent significant chunks of my life to see what life was like there in 1941. Read more

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