Several people have written to me individually to express concern that they haven’t seen me on the Internet much lately. (Thanks for getting in touch! I really appreciate it, I just haven’t had the time to respond individually.) Since January, I’ve been very busy with professional and personal matters which have taken a good deal of time and will continue to do so. But there’s some good news amid the hard work:
I’m excited to announce that I’ve accepted a permanent faculty position in the history department at Florida International University in Miami, where I will be starting this fall.
My position is at the rank of Instructor, but it’s an unusually-structured position– a blend of classrooom instruction and service. I’ll be teaching 2 courses per semester, focusing primarily on digital history methods. In my service capacity, I’ll be advising faculty and graduate students on digital research and analysis methods. I’ll also be working with the university library on a number of digital projects, including but not limited to:
- digitization of some interesting archival collections;
- grantwriting to support these projects and development of digital-humanities infrastructure in the university libraries;
- helping out with a digital asset-management platform used by FIU’s libraries and museums;
- and helping to bring FIU’s digital collections into wider use within the history curriculum.
This is a great faculty opportunity with an alt-ac flavor, and I’m very enthusiastic to start working with FIU’s history department and library staff. Accordingly, for the next few months, I will mostly be scarce on the Internet, as I work hard towards a dissertation defense. Think of it as a social media sabbatical.
One of the few exceptions to my generally-offline spring and summer will be today and tomorrow, when I’ll be participating in the American Antiquarian Society’s conference “Research Libraries in the Digital Age: Needs and Opportunities,” which will be on Twitter at #AAS3rdCentury. More on that later, perhaps. For now, off to Worcester!
The American Historical Association annual meeting is the largest of scholarly conferences that historians usually attend. As far as I can tell, it’s a conference that faculty members will gripe (quietly or not) about going to, because:
- it’s gigantic, and research talks usually only draw the 5–10 people interested in what you’re working on
- it’s a jobhunting conference, so faculty members are locked in rooms with candidates all day.
As far as I can tell, neither of those two has changed for many people. However, compared to the two previous AHA annual meetings (San Diego in 2010 in Boston in 2011), this conference has a measurably livelier vibe.
Feeling like you're in over your head with that research project? You're not alone. Here's one tool for learning to swim.
Recently, I stumbled on Rachel Leow‘s series of posts (part 1, part 2, part 3) about DEVONThink Pro Office (DTPO) and how she used it for organizing her dissertation sources and writing (on decolonization in British Malaya). Chad Black, who studies early Latin America, is also a big fan of DEVONThink.
I’ve known about DTPO for years, but I held out on buying it. It’s relatively pricey for a grad student (over $100 even with a 25% student/educator discount), although the versions of DEVONThink without optical character recognition (OCR) features are cheaper.1 I experimented with an earlier version of DTPO a few years ago and didn’t see anything overwhelmingly awesome about it, plus it was slow on the hardware I had at the time. But Marta Rivera Monclova‘s recent effusive praise about DTPO led me to try it again (there’s a 30 day free trial version), and the current version (2.3 as of this writing) is much better than the last time I looked. I now wish I’d gone for it sooner.2
- For me, OCR is worth the money. One thing I’ve learned in graduate school: sometimes throwing money at a problem is cheaper than throwing time at it. This is a great example of the financial barriers to doing research with experimental digital methods; my institution doesn’t site-license most of the software research tools I’ve found most useful, so I’ve been paying out-of-pocket using my student loans. Not everyone’s able to make that choice or comfortable doing so. ↩
- In case you’re wondering: I am not being paid by DEVONTechnologies, the makers of DEVONThink Pro Office. My effusive praise for DTPO springs solely from the fact that when you’ve been bashing your head against a (research-methods) wall for months, you feel so good when the pain stops. ↩
