Donkey Hottie

Reinventing Traditions, or, “tschüss, Schoenhof’s!”

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:43:21 +0000

It is probably normal to have some kind of routine in cities one visits often. Whenever I’m in LA, I try, like every non-local, to duck into an In-N-Out for a grilled cheese animal style. If I’m lucky, I try to hit the In-N-Out by the Museum of Jurassic Technology, so I can let the [...]

Nearest Neighbors and Monte Carlo Simulations with Dos Passos

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:40:43 +0000

[I'm not entirely sure why I'm turning this into a post. It's essentially my final project for my Advanced GIS class. I think it's rather provocative, however, and it shows a few immediate possible further directions for analysis.] In my earlier geospatial analysis of the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos, I decided that I was [...]

Dreams begin with blue nylon anoraks

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:18:46 +0000

[It's weird that the same week I buy something from J. Crew for the first time in some 7 years, I also stumble across this old article of mine, originally published in the Chicago Maroon on 30 September 1997. I'll wait for you to calculate its age. In a further stroke of luck, I even [...]

Digital History and visualization

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:30:43 +0000

As it’s the end of the quarter, it’s final project time at the university (my own final project for GIS, which involves Monte Carlo simulation(s), will hopefully start spinning its wheels this weekend). The students in Jo Guldi’s graduate class on digital history, Chris Bench and Liz Blake, had their presentations this afternoon, and I [...]

GIS and the Humanities, part 2

Sun, 31 May 2009 01:47:42 +0000

In the first part of this post, I described how a lot of ways in which work in the humanities is interacting with the spatial is in the process of generating “flat maps.” That is, they reproduce what is already in the texts themselves, without pushing any analytical balls forward. These sorts of projects engage in [...]

GIS and the Humanities, part 1

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:19:30 +0000

(although, actually, all the talk about using a GIS is in the second part!) I often feel like I’m a few drinks behind the rest of the crowd when it comes to drinking the digital humanities Kool-Aid. This is kind of a problem, because a chunk of what I’m trying to do with my dissertation is [...]

Writing that chapter…

Mon, 25 May 2009 14:30:49 +0000

It’s been forever since I’ve contributed to the Humanities Dissertation Project, I fear. I have something big in the background that I’m preparing toward it, but I thought I’d take advantage of my recent presentation of part of a chapter for the American Cultures workshop to include some handy (Xe)LaTeX tips I picked up. The biggest [...]

What use are dying languages?

Fri, 01 May 2009 21:40:12 +0000

I’m positive people are way smarter about this than I am, but I only alluded to what I see as three reasons for studying dying languages in my previous post on the documentary The Linguists. Our linguists in the movie, Anderson and Harrison, sketch out basically three reasons, and movie addresses the three reasons over [...]

Disappearing languages and documentaries

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:53:51 +0000

Language Log has been getting me excited about the documentary The Linguists for quite some time now, but the DVD costs $300, and it didn’t seem to air on any local PBS stations. Luckily, the movie is finally available (for a short time) online at babelgum.com. I strongly encourage people to watch this movie, as [...]

Biographies in dos Passos’s USA trilogy

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:20:47 +0000

In preparation of presenting a paper on dos Passos (that is part of the second chapter of my dissertation), I decided to buckle down and try to develop a sort of large grasp on the three novels that make up the USA trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. Part of that grasp [...]

Zotero and DevonThink

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:41:25 +0000

Humanities Computing at the UofC recently had a lunchtime talk about various online bibliographic tools for academics. Hopefully it’ll eventually be online (hint, hint), but we spent most of our time discussing CiteULike (which IDidn’tLike) and the new public beta of Zotero 2.0. I’ve mentioned Zotero a bit in the past, but I want to [...]

Obligatory (but short) post on the new Facebook

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:24:38 +0000

I use Facebook a ton. I have been an ardent supporter for years. Twitter (@muziejus) I’ve come to much later, but I’ve been messing with it a bunch. I instantly understood a rather fundamental difference between the two: I started getting follows on Twitter from people I didn’t know and would never know. In contrast, [...]

Pieces of flair

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:44:38 +0000

Last year while speaking to a professor about Obama, she mentioned that she had been collecting “flair” pertaining to Obama, and I somehow immediately understood that to mean either real, true baubles or buttons pertaining to the man (like those I continue to see daily on my commute), or, rather, Obama-themed “pieces of flair” from [...]

Sex problems

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:45:55 +0000

I posted on Lithchat a link to a Cafe Blogas article from today about an old book of Lithuanian erotica that includes a quick excerpt (with my translation into English) that simply has to be read to be believed. It’s not that the language is forced (though perhaps it is simplistic). It’s that the topic and [...]

Extending the keyboard on the Mac

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:37:24 +0000

Many of my friends have recently acquired Macs, and they’ve been asking me about typing in Lithuanian on the thing. My preferred answer is to use the extended key options available to the US Extended keyboard layout (which lets one type in Lithuanian without switching out of a US layout). My answer, however, is limited not [...]