Category: databases
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Tales from the Port: Part 2 — Migrating the Database
In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have promised to write a blog post every night this week. The port has been going well, but I’ve been working late each night, and it’s just too hard to write clear English prose starting at midnight. So here, at last, is the promised post on migrating Project Quincy’s database…
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Tales from the Port: Day 1 — Dry Dock
Welcome to my one week blog series, Tales from the Port, chronicling my rewriting of Project Quincy from Ruby on Rails to Django. This series may be a little rough around the edges — I’ll be writing it every night after I accomplish my goals for that day. But I wanted to give people a…
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Am I even qualified?: Writing about Digital History
About two weeks ago, my article “Fielding History: Relational Databases and Prose” went online for open peer review and possible inclusion in the open access essay collection Writing History in the Digital Age, edited by Jack A. Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki. If you haven’t heard about Writing History in the Digital Age, you owe it…
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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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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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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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Introducing DAVILA
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…
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The Design Bug
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,…
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Control your Vocab (or not)
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…