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 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

m on February 24th, 2009

Many of my friends have recently acquired Macs, and they’ve been asking me about typing in Lithuanian on the thing. My preferred answer is to use the extended key options available to the US Extended keyboard layout (which lets one type in Lithuanian without switching out of a US layout).
My answer, however, is limited not [...]

Continue reading about Extending the keyboard on the Mac

One little thing about the article.xslt in MultiMarkdown that I don’t like are the boring headers. For some reason (and perhaps it’s MLA style to do this), I think having the last name next to the page number looks more professional, more seriously academic, than just having page numbers. So, how can I make Scrivener [...]

Continue reading about Customizing Multimarkdown to make Scrivener easier, part B

[UPDATED]
In my last post, I showed how to install the biblatex package along with the MLA style rules for the bibliography and citing in MacTeX. In a later post, I’ll discuss how to roll your own biblatex styles (hint: it’s not that difficult). But for this post, I’m making the first gestures towards the bridge [...]

Continue reading about Customizing MultiMarkdown to make Scrivener easier, part A

m on May 11th, 2008

I’m still in the proposal state, in which I’m doing two things at once: writing a 18-page document that, among other things, covers in very sparse detail a bibliography of about 150 texts. So the first part of the Humanities Dissertation Project is to be able to write in Scrivener, build a bibliography in Zotero, [...]

Continue reading about MLA bibliographies in MacTeX

m on May 11th, 2008

I wrote a while ago that computing blogs bore me. This is still true. But this is a project not of telling you, the reader, about new gadgets or my complaints about various forms of software. Instead, this is documentation. I am documenting the technical means by which I am constructing my dissertation in the [...]

Continue reading about The Humanities Dissertation Project