“It seems kind of absurd to expect a 30 year old to be able to produce a monograph,” one of the attendees of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research at UVA said after our dinner in the stunning Dome Room. We were chatting as a group, and the topic moved to how the dissertation as [...]
Continue reading about Curating and analyzing (or, curating vs. analyzing)
Should a foreign language requirement for a literary studies PhD be fulfillable by a machine language? Or maybe even by a methods course (like a course in statistics, GIS, or some other competence in computational technology)? These questions have been on my mind since I flew back Sunday morning from an energizing time at lovely [...]
Continue reading about Learning a language: human vs. machine
My little collection of webpages and blog posts (pearltree) grows slowly, but I was glad to add a post today by Matthew Jockers, whose work got highlighted in an article in the Chronicle back in 2008, just as I was designing my dissertation proposal. It was inspiring in the sense that I felt like what [...]
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 [...]
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
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 [...]
Continue reading about Nearest Neighbors and Monte Carlo Simulations with Dos Passos
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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 [...]
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 [...]
