Donkey Hottie

Are grass’s roots that much more impressive than trees’?

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:14:19 +0000

When I came to the center yesterday, it was clear that I had rolled in via Vélib’. “Be careful tomorrow with Vélib’,” one instructor warned me, because today’s general strike will make the bicycles extremely valuable. With at least the RER B scheduled to be out of commission, it’s entirely possible that I would have [...]

Mechanical reproduction of la manif and the Tea Party

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:50:50 +0000

When the Awl complains that this has been a miserable American summer, they’re mostly right, but it hasn’t been exactly a great summer in France, either. Sarkozy has decided to kick off the 2012 presidential campaign extra early by re-burnishing his xenophobic credentials, angling to get the support of the far-right Front National types–the very [...]

Celui dans lequel Paris me manque

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:37:07 +0000

This might get a bit weepy or whiny in places, but I promise there’s a bigger point to it. I’m writing this post from Café de Paris, which is more or less exactly what it sounds like, except that it’s in Vilnius. I’ve spent a lot of time here over the two months I’ve been [...]

xkcd and the Global South

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:19:23 +0000

This xkcd comic from Monday has been forwarded around a bit. My own reaction was heavily influenced by @sepoy’s comment that maybe JFK was talking about the “global south (po folk)” avant la lettre. I think it’s funny that JFK could have merged the idea of the “Global South” with the literal southern hemisphere. Randall [...]

Imperialist n00bs: quit complaining about the vuvuzelas

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:27:35 +0000

Yoann Gourcuff is blaming the vuvuzelas for France’s uninspired play on Friday night in Cape Town. The players couldn’t hear each other on the field, he whined, and they had to rely on gestures. Patrice Évra added that the players can’t sleep because the vuvuzelas start going off at 6am every morning.1 Twitter has been [...]

Image vs. Text (also quant. vs. qual.)

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 01:02:35 +0000

[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital [...]

South Africa vs. Mexico

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:56:43 +0000

Yet again, I’m putting off the “Fieldwork vs. Armchairwork” post, which began as a joke threat, but is actually slowly turning into a few ideas about methods courses from a total neophyte and non DGS. In the meantime, I’m getting very excited about 64 other “vs.” coming up in the next six weeks, namely the [...]

Curating addendum (ok… “webmapping vs. mapping”)

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:40:01 +0000

Yesterday’s post on the tension between curatorial/service-y intellectual work and straight up analytical work was intentionally kept rather general, both for larger appeal and since I’m trying to figure out my approach to these questions in a way that’s consistent. Today, I’ll be a bit more specific, and this is sort of a warning about [...]

Curating and analyzing (or, curating vs. analyzing)

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:58:46 +0000

“It seems kind of absurd to expect a 30 year old to be able to produce a monograph,” one of the attendees of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research at UVA said after our dinner in the stunning Dome Room. We were chatting as a group, and the topic moved to how the dissertation as [...]

Learning a language: human vs. machine

Mon, 31 May 2010 15:35:52 +0000

Should a foreign language requirement for a literary studies PhD be fulfillable by a machine language? Or maybe even by a methods course (like a course in statistics, GIS, or some other competence in computational technology)? These questions have been on my mind since I flew back Sunday morning from an energizing time at lovely [...]

World Cup commercial update

Fri, 21 May 2010 15:29:40 +0000

When I last wrote about the World Cup ads in March, they were just starting to appear. Now Nike has tossed out an initial try with their “Write the Future” ad campaign: It’s a cute enough ad, to be sure, on the first viewing, and it gets me a bit excited, but there are some [...]

Type B Digital Humanist

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:55:27 +0000

My little collection of webpages and blog posts (pearltree) grows slowly, but I was glad to add a post today by Matthew Jockers, whose work got highlighted in an article in the Chronicle back in 2008, just as I was designing my dissertation proposal. It was inspiring in the sense that I felt like what [...]

Vélib’ and generally using a bicycle in Paris

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:59:14 +0000

Using a bicycle in Paris, even for tourists, is more or less a must. The Parisian government will even reimburse you part of the cost of an electric bicycle in their attempt to green up the streets (as well as reduce congestion).1 The city is great for walking, and I’ve certainly worn out shoes in [...]

Pink-Letter Day in France

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:40:39 +0000

[UPDATE: Added video links] As the iPhone app beside this paragraph indicates, it was kind of a big day for the Parti socialiste in France, who managed to win control of 21 of 22 regional councils in metropolitan France. Only Alsace squeaked by with a UMP majority, and overseas, the UMP won control of the [...]

Only crazy people vote

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:41:03 +0000

Everyone in the US knows that the more removed an election is from a presidential election, with emergency special elections inhabiting the limit point away, the more turnout will be depressed. Furthermore, everyone in the US knows, since the Christian Coalition rode this pony into power, that the lower turnout is, the fewer votes you [...]