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E.H. and K.N.C., "Where nobleman and knave meet," Economist blog, September 7, 2013 IN THE print edition this week we look at “Kindred Britain”, an amazing digital humanities website that traces relations between 30,000 British people. Is it possible to resist frittering away hours in front of the computer screen while examining the remote relatives of George Washington (originally British, of course) or the literary friendships of Mary Shelley? The project harnesses data about the ties among people in an innovative way. Historical individuals are presented as dots connected to each other on a network map. Colour-coding suggests how figures are linked, say, by marriage or profession. Rolling over the dots brings up a wealth of information about the people. A scrolling timeline across the bottom of the site lets users skim through the ages. A map of the world lets people scan by geography. >>> "Rutgers to Host Lecture on Emerging Field of Digital Humanities,...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe "Length of the average dissertation," from FlowData . This chart initiated a round of chest thumping by academic historians. Apparently we historians write the longest dissertations. Now, according to this chart, philosophers and classicists do not write dissertations, when in fact they do. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the chart is correct. What does it tell us about historians? Either we do more research than scholars in any other field (unlikely from my interdisciplinary vantage point), or we are less able to articulate our findings in a pithy manner than our colleagues in other departments on campus. When I made a snide remark about length on Facebook, my historian friends jumped to the defense of 325 page dissertations as the necessary length for a monograph. Other fields publish articles rather than books. Thus, the argument went, they can get away with less. This perplexed me. A doctoral dissertation no matter the field shoul...

Philip White  When we think about the budget mess in Washington, it’s easy to focus on how it affects what’s now and what’s next. But what’s often overlooked is how bu dget cuts impact the study of the past. Or, how those cuts might shape history for current and future generations. Harry S. Truman's farm home in Grandview, Missouri In the past year, I’ve spent many a Saturday morning at the Harry S. Truman Museum and Library in Independence, Mo., merrily panning for research gold sifting through umpteen boxes and folders. Thankfully the museum and the researcher’s reading room/library will not be closing. But as of March 24 , Truman’s old white-board home in Independence (which he far preferred to the other White House he lived in, dubbing the latter, “ the great white jail ”) will be closed on national holidays, Sundays and Mondays. The Noland house across the street, which once belonged to Truman’s cousins, is being shuttered for good. And though visitors can still mosey around t...

Randall Stephens Since 2007 the US Intellectual History (S-USIH) blog has nurtured a lively community of historians. Since then that virtual group has morphed into a series of annual conferences and the Society for US Intellectual History. The revamped S-USIH site is a real model for digital humanities and shows how best to foster conversations within a field. The blog features book reviews, op-eds, think pieces, and essays that frequently spark heated debates in the comments section. (Like many U.S. historians I’ve watched all this with real interest—reading, lurking, and occasionally commenting on posts.) To find out a little bit more about how the website has led to a vibrant Society and what the group does, I recently caught up with key members and founders: Andrew Hartman (Illinois State University), Tim Lacy (Loyola University), Benjamin Alpers (University of Oklahoma), and Ray Haberski (Marian University). Randall Stephens: The US Intellectual History blog started in 2007. Wh...

Maureen McGavin, "Digital project focuses on Lincoln-based sermons," Emory News Center, February 22, 2013 The route of Lincoln's funeral train A group of graduate students at Emory University specializing in digital research in the humanities have created a new website that uses digital tools to analyze and compare the text of sermons delivered after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Their project uses various digital text tools to map geographic and thematic patterns in the collection of 57 sermons, which reside in the Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library of Emory's Robert W. Woodruff Library. The scholars are calling their project "Lincoln Logarithms: Finding Meaning in Sermons" and they hope it will become a model for the next wave of research in the humanities. >>> Max Fisher, "A surprising map of the world’s national holidays (only two countries have no national day)," Washington Post , February 26, 2013 This map...