Jean Bauer

Author: jabauer

  • As We May Code

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    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…

  • Introducing DAVILA

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    I have just released my first open source project. HUZZAH! DAVILA is a database schema visualization/annotation tool that creates “humanist readable” technical diagrams. It is written in Processing with the toxiclibs physics library and released under GPLv3. DAVILA takes in the database’s schema and a pipe separated customization file and uses them to produce an…

  • Trees

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    (with apologies to Joyce Kilmer) I think that I shall never see A graph as lovely as a tree. A tree whose thick, strong root is prest Against the lower bound at rest; A tree that looks a little strange While its data does self arrange; A tree that may grow up or out But…

  • The Design Bug

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    Edward Tufte should come with a warning label. Since I took his course a year ago last October, I have been bitten by the design bug. I realized the depth of this obsession last night while putting together a projected syllabus for a summer course in the History Department. Just a simple word processing document,…

  • Great Teachers Never Die

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    A new semester starts tomorrow, and I’m thinking of my grandmother, Marjorie Good. She was an artist, whether she held a paintbrush in her right hand or used her left hand to play boogie-woogie on the piano. I’m thinking of her right now because she was also a teacher. She taught English for nineteen years…

  • The Cloisters, Part I

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    On the fifth day of Christmas, my husband and I took the A train the length of Manhattan up to one of my favorite spots in New York City — The Cloisters — home of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Medieval Art Collection. Even more than the art, I love the building, a medieval-style cloister…

  • Control your Vocab (or not)

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    I am a NINES Graduate Fellow for 2009-2010, and this post was written for the NINES Blog. To see it in its original context, click here. Yesterday I had two conversations about controlled vocabulary in digital humanities projects (a.k.a. my definition of a really good day). Both conversations centered around the same question: what is…

  • Loss

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    When a person dies, it’s as if a library of irreplaceable volumes has burned to the ground. My grandfather died this past Saturday. He was an extraordinary man who escaped Nazi Germany and survived the blitz in in London. He worked on antidotes to nerve gas, helped build the first production sites for antibiotics in…

  • and the name of a good book

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    When you leave a message on my friend’s voicemail, she asks that you give your name, your phone number, and the name of a good book. Since I’m in grad school for history, I tend to end my messages with phrases like “if you suddenly need to know about balance of power politics at the…

  • Aristocrats, Agendas, & Adams

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    Some days I think the biggest problem facing digital historians is our workflow. We are already expected to juggle archival research and secondary readings with teaching and writing. Add a digital project into the mix and the temptation to pull out one’s hair becomes almost irresistible. The madness increases when you are the primary programmer…