Briefly noted for November 23, 2022

It looks like the theme of this week’s Briefly Noted post is Substack. I didn’t intend it, but each of the following is taken from the platform:

Substack is launching a new “letters” feature to support epistolary blogging. Like most things Substack, I love the idea, but I hate the paywall, and I worry about long term preservation and access. Epistolary scholarship has a long tradition in the humanities (St. Paul is a pretty decent example), and like blogging, I’m glad to see it making a comeback, just not on a proprietary platform.

Did you know Gettysburg still invites confederate reinactors to march in its Remembrance Day parade, battle flags and all? Neither did I. Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory writes: “Every year Confederate reenactors are invited to march alongside United States soldiers in Gettyburg’s Remembrance Day Parade, which commemorates Lincoln’s famous address. That’s right. On the same day that the community gathers to reflect on Lincoln’s words, Confederate flags are marched through the streets.”

A couple tech links via Platformer: Anti vaxxers are posing as public health authorities on Twitter with $8 “verified accounts” and the NFTs people bought as “lifetime passes” to Coachella seem to have disappeared with the rest of FTX.

Kareem Abdul-Jabar is the best. Here he is on forgiveness: “I see people constantly saying, ‘I forgive but I don’t forget,’ which they think makes them both moral and tough. Actually, they are neither. The phrase means the exact opposite of forgiving. To forgive is to forget the transgression in order to start fresh.”

Briefly Noted for November 9, 2022

Taylor Swift told us in the Folklore studio movie that the 5th track on each of her albums holds a special meaning for her. It wasn’t exactly a secret, but the film confirmed it. The tracks include some of her best: “All Too Well”, “Dear John”, “Tolerate It.” Here’s a Spotify playlist of Swift’s 5th songs. The latest, “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” is the highlight of her new album.

If you like Marketplace on NPR, listen to this recent episode of the Pivot podcast. Kai Ryssdal, the host of Marketplace, joins Kara Swisher to discuss the latest business/tech stories. It’s great to hear Ryssdal’s distinctive voice in this more free flowing, opinion laden format.

I’m very grateful to have been nominated for election to the Board of the National Council on Public History. If you’re a member, I hope you’ll read my candidate statement and consider voting for me.

UConn has a top-5 recruiting class this year in men’s basketball. That’s big.

Briefly Noted for May 27, 2021

I read Zach Carter’s magisterial biography of John Maynard Keynes, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Not only is it a super-readable education in economics and a sweeping history of the 20th century told through the prism of one of its most important intellectual and political figures, it also turns out that Keynes was … VERY COOL. Did you know that he was a core (the core?) member of the Bloomsbury set and close friends and sometimes housemates with Virginia Woolf? How about that he was married to a world-famous Russian ballerina? Or that, even though his economics work wasn’t particularly mathematical, he started his career with a work on probability and exchanged mathematical proofs with Bertrand Russell? The guy was really amazing, and so is Carter’s book.

I also highly recommend Jim McGrath’s article in The Public Historian on Museums and Social Media During COVID-19.

My boys love a Youtuber called MatPat. His real name is TK, and he produces several video series including “Film Theory,” “Game Theory,” and “Food Theory.” In each video, he makes an elaborate, meandering conjecture: how to survive the Hunger Games, how to predict Oscar winners, why Minecraft is so popular, etc., etc., etc. They’re silly, dense with facts, expertly produced, and fun. But one of these videos stands head and shoulders above the rest: How Trump is Winning with Reality TV. Posted in February 2016 — still early in the Republican primary — the video predicts a Trump victory; explains exactly how it will happen based on Trump’s previous career as a huckster, media badboy, and reality TV star; and presages the media manipulation mastery that Trump will use as President to avoid accountability and poison our politics. It’s something only a social media virtuoso with 9 million subscribers could understand so completely: you just gotta watch.

Briefly Noted for November 24, 2020

I just finished Alan Mikhail’s God’s Shadow, an excellent history of the Ottoman Empire told through the lens of one of its greatest leaders, the Sultan Selim, who ruled the most powerful empire in the world (outside of China) in the 16th century. It provides a much appreciated rebalancing of early modern European history away from its usual focus on the rise of the West. My only quibble is that it sometimes veers into confusing more important with more good, i.e. of painting the Latin West as racist and imperialist while breezily sidestepping the vigorous, military expansionism of the Ottomans as enlightened, magnanimous, and without ethnic prejudice. Surely there was plenty of cruelty and violence and debasement of “the other” on both sides of the Mediterrean 500 years ago.


We have an amazing, talented group of graduate student assistants at Greenhouse Studios this year. Check out their self-authored introductions on the Greenhouse Studios blog.


The Sourcery project, in partnership with colleagues at Northeastern University Library, just wrapped up a series of workshops on “Remote Access to Archives and Special Collections.” These brought together archivists and researchers over five weeks to talk about the challenges and opportunities for remote and electronic access to archival collections presented by the current COVID-19 crisis (and, indeed, before and after it). It was a lively, sometimes contentious set of conversations, which really drove home how little researchers and archivists have done to really understand where each other are coming from. We’ll be posting a white paper with findings from the meetings in the coming months. Stay tuned.

Briefly Noted for October 24, 2018

Caitlin Flanagan’s eloquent description of how histories, true or false, operate in families (e.g. Elizabeth Warren’s family):

How many times during my childhood did my father tell me that when his grandmother and her sister sailed to America, they had traveled ‘a class above steerage’? I was a Hula-Hooping child of the atomic age, growing strong on USDA beef and Cocoa Puffs. What did I know about steerage? But I knew my father in the complete and inchoate way that a child knows her parent, and I knew he wanted me to understand something important to him and—somehow—to me. I understood the lesson to be: The Flanagans have been down, but they have not been out. ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ Joan Didion once wrote. And we tell them inside our families so that something can live within them, some idea or value, some complicated honoring of an elder.

via The Atlantic

Briefly Noted for August 10, 2018

Hugh Trevor Roper on specialization in history…

Today most professional historians ‘specialise’. They choose a period, sometimes a very brief period, and within that period they strive, in desperate competition with ever-expanding evidence, to know all the facts. Thus armed, they can comfortably shoot down any amateurs who blunder… into their heavily fortified field… Theirs is a static world. They have a self-contained economy, a Maginot Line and large reserves… but they have no philosophy. For historical philosophy is incompatible with such narrow frontiers. It must apply to humanity in any period. To test it, a historian must dare to travel abroad, even in hostile country; to express it he must be ready to write essays on subjects on which he may be ill-equipped to write books.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, quoted in Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations

Briefly Noted for November 15, 2010

Open Access Week 2010 talk available — The full audio of Mason’s October 20, 2010 Open Access Week panel discussion is now available via our library’s institutional repository. Cliff Lynch of CNI kicks it off at about 4:55. My talk starts at about 31:30 with a shout out to Paul Fyfe’s Open Access Week talk from the day before.

JSTOR Mobile — In case you missed it, JSTOR has released a mobile site. It will be hard to view full page images on the small screen, but the handy “email reference” and “save reference” buttons should make it useful for work in archives and on the go (via ResourceShelf).

Facebook to integrate MS Office Web Apps — The big buzz today is about Facebook’s new messaging service, but what could matter more to teaching, learning, research, and campus life in general is the announcement that documents, spreadsheets, and presentations created in Microsoft Office Web Apps can now be shared and viewed directly within Facebook. Many campuses are considering or have already chosen to sign on to Google Apps. Combined with fact that most campuses IT outfits already know, trust, and use Microsoft products and most students and faculty are already using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Facebook integration should make Microsoft’s Live services just that much more attractive and give Google a real run for its money.

Briefly Noted for November 9, 2010

@kfitz and @amandafrench at Bryn Mawr — Friend of CHNM, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and our very own Amanda French will be at Bryn Mawr this Thursday, November 11, 2010 to anchor the National Undergrad Symposium on Digital Humanities. The symposium aims to explore the ways in which “digital publishing can create new openings for undergraduates to enter significant academic conversations.”

Masters Degree in Digital Humanities at UCL — University College, London is offering a new MA/MSc in Digital Humanities. As there are very few degree programs in digital humanities, this is an experiment to watch. According the organizers, the program “will allow students who have a background in the humanities to acquire necessary skills in digital technologies, and will also make it possible for those with a technical background to become informed about scholarly methods in the humanities.” Students will also take advantage of UCL’s location through work placements with libraries, archives, cultural heritage institutions, and digital culture organizations based in central London.

Tenleytown Heritage Trail — I was very happy to return home this week to find nearly twenty new illustrated narrative historical markers in my neighborhood. The Tenleytown Heritage Trail provides a self-guided tour of the “top of the town,” Washington DC’s highest neighborhood. Beginning at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Albemarle Street near the Tenleytown-AU Metro stop, the trail chronicles Tenleytown’s history from its origins as a colonial anchored by John Tennally’s taven, through its key strategic value in the Civil War, to its rich and diverse 20th century history. I hope to get some time to walk the trail before the cold really sets in.