Yesterday’s post on the tension between curatorial/service-y intellectual work and straight up analytical work was intentionally kept rather general, both for larger appeal and since I’m trying to figure out my approach to these questions in a way that’s consistent. Today, I’ll be a bit more specific, and this is sort of a warning about [...]
Continue reading about Curating addendum (ok… “webmapping vs. mapping”)
While the big discussion in Washington (other than the snow) lately seems to have been the atavistic Tea Party Convention and the various fantasies of the American that were put on display within (I won’t link to anything since, remember, I’m no longer reading about US politics), the debate about national identity in France, an [...]
Continue reading about The pleasant death of the national identity debate
Holy smokes was I not surprised by the decision this week by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC. I was always suspicious of the argument that “money is not speech, it’s property,” though I repeated it several times. I agree with Bryan, in that I can’t really imagine that a pesky little thing [...]
Continue reading about America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws
[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 [...]
Continue reading about Nearest Neighbors and Monte Carlo Simulations with Dos Passos
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 [...]
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 [...]
In preparation of presenting a paper on dos Passos (that is part of the second chapter of my dissertation), I decided to buckle down and try to develop a sort of large grasp on the three novels that make up the USA trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. Part of that grasp [...]
Continue reading about Biographies in dos Passos’s USA trilogy
