m on January 16th, 2010

The problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for n individuals to manage to fire in unison?
Our applications for dissertation fellowships are due at the end of February, which means that I’ve had my sole chapter on the mind quite a bit lately, even while wasting most of yesterday [...]

Continue reading about Task managing a dissertation

m on November 25th, 2009

About a year ago, I stumbled upon Merlin Mann’s procrastination hack, the (10+2)*5. Simply put, it posits that one should focus strenuously on tasks for ten minutes, then take a two minute breather, and then return to the tasks. The few times I’ve consciously used it, it’s been rather useful, making the day go by [...]

Continue reading about (10+2)*5 web script for procrastinators

m on October 16th, 2009

Obviously, I suppose, my previous post about the likelihood of getting all 8 anniversary Astérix figurines in only 14 tries of Kinder Surprise eggs was related to a classic statistics problem, the Coupon Collector’s Problem. The problem assumes a uniform random distribution of coupons (I guess, in cereal boxes, or something), and then goes about [...]

Continue reading about Astérix and the coupon collector’s problem

Graduate students don’t have money. They need computers. I started seeing netbooks everywhere I turned this year. Students had them in the classroom, and postdocs (on a same level of poverty as grad students, I think) started ordering them. The netbook is a ultra-petite laptop. More than a smartphone (minus the “-phone”), but still not [...]

Continue reading about The $350 Mac laptop and the $80 resurrection

[I'm not entirely sure why I'm turning this into a post. It's essentially my final project for my Advanced GIS class. I think it's rather provocative, however, and it shows a few immediate possible further directions for analysis.]
In my earlier geospatial analysis of the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos, I decided that I was [...]

Continue reading about Nearest Neighbors and Monte Carlo Simulations with Dos Passos

m on June 4th, 2009

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As it’s the end of the quarter, it’s final project time at the university (my own final project for GIS, which involves Monte Carlo simulation(s), will hopefully start spinning its wheels this weekend). The students in Jo Guldi’s graduate class on digital history, Chris Bench and Liz Blake, had their presentations this afternoon, and I [...]

Continue reading about Digital History and visualization

m on May 30th, 2009

In the first part of this post, I described how a lot of ways in which work in the humanities is interacting with the spatial is in the process of generating “flat maps.” That is, they reproduce what is already in the texts themselves, without pushing any analytical balls forward.
These sorts of projects engage in [...]

Continue reading about GIS and the Humanities, part 2

m on May 30th, 2009

(although, actually, all the talk about using a GIS is in the second part!)
I often feel like I’m a few drinks behind the rest of the crowd when it comes to drinking the digital humanities Kool-Aid. This is kind of a problem, because a chunk of what I’m trying to do with my dissertation is [...]

Continue reading about GIS and the Humanities, part 1

m on May 25th, 2009

It’s been forever since I’ve contributed to the Humanities Dissertation Project, I fear. I have something big in the background that I’m preparing toward it, but I thought I’d take advantage of my recent presentation of part of a chapter for the American Cultures workshop to include some handy (Xe)LaTeX tips I picked up.
The biggest [...]

Continue reading about Writing that chapter…

m on April 21st, 2009

Humanities Computing at the UofC recently had a lunchtime talk about various online bibliographic tools for academics. Hopefully it’ll eventually be online (hint, hint), but we spent most of our time discussing CiteULike (which IDidn’tLike) and the new public beta of Zotero 2.0. I’ve mentioned Zotero a bit in the past, but I want to [...]

Continue reading about Zotero and DevonThink