Author: jabauer
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Abigail and Thomas
I probably can’t call Thomas Jefferson a metrosexual in my dissertation, but that’s why I have a blog. Abigail Adams is famous for bringing out the best in her correspondents, but Thomas’s letters to her are particularly striking, perhaps because we have so little to compare them to. He burned his wife’s letters shortly after…
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Republicans of Letters
Here are the slides for my January 26th talk at Brown University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, “Republicans of Letters: Historical Social Networks and The Early American Foreign Service Database.” The abstract ran as follows, “Jean Bauer, an advanced doctoral candidate in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and creator of The…
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In Pursuit of Elegance
I wrote this for the HASTAC Scholars’ forum on Critical Code studies, which I co-hosted in January. To see the post in its original context, click here. *********************** One of the older jokes about programming states that every great programmer suffers from the following three sins: laziness, impatience, and hubris. Laziness makes you write the…
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Leaks in the Age of Sail
As a diplomatic historian I have been meaning to write something about the Wikileaks debacle for some time now. However, my good friends at Monticello beat me to it when they interviewed me and then put the podcast online. So head over to their site and check it out. Listen to the podcast
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Do You See What I See?
This is the abstract for my talk, “Do You See What I See?: Technical Documentation in Digital Humanities,” which I gave at the 2010 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science. The actual presentation was more informal and consisted of a series of examples from my various jobs as a database designer. The slides…
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Into the woods we go (again)
I owe an apology to woodcutters everywhere. After my misadventures yesterday (see previous post), I confidently announced that Google Earth had allowed me to find the missing entrance to the original Blue Ridge Tunnel. Luckily for me, I blogged about my experience and was thus kept from making (yet another) critical error. My friend (and…
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A Walk In the Woods
I am revising my opinion of friendly woodcutters. This afternoon, I was out in the woods by Afton, VA looking for an abandoned railroad tunnel from the 1850s. My plan was to photograph the tunnel entrance, so Will Thomas could use the image in his new book. When it was completed in 1858, the Blue…
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Partial Dates in Rails with Active Scaffold
As a historian I am constantly frustrated (but bemused) by how computers record time. They are so idealistically precise and hopelessly presentist in their default settings that creating intellectually honest digital history becomes impossible without some serious modifications. In designing Project Quincy, my open-source software package for tracing historical networks through time and space, I…
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It’s [A]live!
It is with great pleasure, and no small amount of trepidation, that I announce the launch of the Early American Foreign Service Database (EAFSD to its friends). While the EAFSD has been designed as an independent, secondary source publication, it also exists symbiotically with my dissertation “Revolution-Mongers: Launching the U.S. Foreign Service, 1775-1825.” I created…
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As We May Code
Since the debut of the iPad, I can’t stop thinking about path dependency. These virtual keyboards separate letters from numbers from symbols onto three distinct screens. While using my iPhone, I find myself spelling out words like “between” because I’d rather keep to the letters keyboard than switch back and forth to write “b/w.” Everyone…