.allposts

111001%Applescript and Notational Velocity%applescript-and-notational-velocity.html%October 1, 2011%Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:00:00 CDT%<p>In an earlier post, I explained <a href="http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=153">how I use plain text files and Notational Velocity as a task-management alternative</a> to the GTD program <a href="http://culturedcode.com/things/">Things</a>. Towards the end of that post, I also hinted that I have been able to automate parts of my system by using some Applescript and Automator tricks. Most of these tricks depend on using an apparently little-known feature of Notational Velocity, which is the ability to perform the “search” command on your notes using Applescript.</p>
100920%In Which I Digitally Archive Some Articles%digitally-archive-articles.html%September 20, 2010%Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 CDT%<p>Several months ago, I learned about Rice University’s <a href="http://scholarship.rice.edu/">Digital Scholarship Archive</a>, an institutional repository where faculty members can store and share published and unpublished work online. Many universities now have such repositories, including the <a href="http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/55467/browse?type=dateissued&amp;submit_browse=By+Date">University of Michigan</a>, <a href="https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/">Johns Hopkins</a>, and others. But as Shane Landrum (<span class="citation">[@cliotropic]</span>[]) recently suggested, I’m not sure history faculty are widely aware of these repositories. I know that without a tip from the great Lisa Spiro (<span class="citation">[@lisaspiro]</span>[]), I might not have learned of Rice’s DSA at all. But I’m glad I did, and here’s why and how I’ve posted some of my published work to the repository.</p>
130316%Get Book Citations at the Command Line using OttoBib and ISBNdb%get-citations-with-isbndb-and-ottobib.html%March 16, 2013%Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:00:00 CDT%<p>Recently I’ve been finishing footnotes for an article, a process that invariably requires looking up or checking lots of bibliographic information.</p>
110717%H-Net 2.0?%h-net-2.html%July 17, 2011%Sun, 17 Jul 2011 00:00:00 CDT%<p>Several years ago now, <a href="http://edwired.org/2007/09/10/the-end-of-h-net/">Mills Kelly wrote a provocative post</a> suggesting that the future of <a href="http://www.h-net.org/">H-Net</a> was bleak. After noting that the traffic on many of H-Net’s edited, subject-specific e-mail lists was declining, Kelly argued that e-mail lists had outlived their usefulness for scholars online. “If H-Net is going to survive into a second decade,” he said, “I would urge its leadership to give up on email and move on. Digital communities in the Web 2.0 world just aren’t created in email any more.”</p>
120515%More Plain-Text GTD%more-plain-text-gtd.html%May 15, 2012%Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>About a year ago I adopted a <a href="./plain-text-gtd.html">plain-text system for getting things done</a>, using Notational Velocity, Simplenote, and the “q” key as a substitute for bigger GTD programs like Things or OmniFocus. I’m still happily using the same system today and have developed a few additional “hacks” to make it work for me.</p>
120716%Tips for Using Mutt%mutt-tips.html%July 16, 2012%Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>For about six months now, I’ve been using <a href="http://www.mutt.org/" title="Mutt">Mutt</a> as my email client. It’s not perfect (as the tagline on the official website admits), but it works for me.</p>
120928%Why (and How) I Wrote My Academic Book in Plain Text%my-academic-book-in-plain-text.html%September 28, 2012%Fri, 28 Sep 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>These days, it seems like the ancient past of personal computing is becoming the wave of the future. Do a simple search for <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=writing+in+plain+text" title="Google search on plain text writing">writing in plain text</a> and you’ll find thousands of people making the case for using a file format (*.txt) that worked long before Microsoft Word was a sparkle in Bill Gates’s eye. In fact, I don’t even have to make the general case for using plain text here; people like <a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/1161549/forget_fancy_formatting_why_plain_text_is_best.html">David Sparks</a>, <a href="http://bettermess.com/a-plain-text-primer/">Michael Schechter</a>, and <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/writing-power-tools-text-editors/38940">Lincoln Mullen</a> have already done the work for me.</p>
130503%Using Pandoc on iOS (Sorta)%pandoc-on-ios.html%May 3, 2013%Fri, 03 May 2013 00:00:00 CDT%<p>As I’ve explained before, I now do almost all of my writing—<a href="http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/my-academic-book-in-plain-text.html">including my academic writing</a>—in plain-text, Markdown files. I then use the incomparable document-conversion tool, <a href="http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/">Pandoc</a>, to turn these files into HTML, Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, or EPUBs. Even <a href="./colophon.html#how-this-site-is-built">this website</a> is produced with Pandoc.</p>
110524%Plain-Text GTD%plain-text-gtd.html%May 24, 2011%Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 CDT%<p>This post does just what its title says, so if terms like <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/an-introduction-to-gtd-getting-things-done/22719">GTD</a>, <a href="http://culturedcode.com/things/">Things</a>, and <a href="http://notational.net">Notational Velocity</a> mean nothing to you, you may want to move along: there’s nothing to see here but an excruciating display of plain-text nerdiness.</p>
120907%Search Engines from the Command Line on a Mac%search-engines-from-command-line.html%September 7, 2012%Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>Lincoln Mullen wrote a post yesterday about <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-hack-urls-for-faster-searches-in-your-browser/42304">How to Hack URLs for Faster Searches in Your Browser</a>. His tips showed how to add different search engines to Google Chrome, but it got me thinking about how I could do something similar from the command line. A few bash functions later, I now have an easy way to search Google Scholar, Flickr, IMDb, and even proprietary databases in my university library—all in the browser of my choice. For example, say I want to search Google Scholar. At the command line, I can now just type this:</p>
130321%Turning Gmail into Google Reader%turning-gmail-into-google-reader.html%March 21, 2013%Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 CDT%<p>In 2005, Karthikeyan Sankaralingam wrote a webpage about using <a href="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~karu/gmailrss/">Gmail as an RSS reader</a>. It ended with this note: “I am fully aware when/if Google releases a true RSS reader—this tool may become obsolete.”</p>
120501%Two Simple Timers%two-simple-timers.html%May 1, 2012%Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>Like <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/an-everyday-essential-the-timer/22675">Natalie Houston</a> and the Profhacker gang, I sometimes use a timer to keep me on task when I need to be productive, especially when the tasks at hand are ones that I’d rather put off. But instead of investing in a full-blown timer program, I’ve hacked together two simple timers for my Mac that I can fire up whenever I need them. Both are rough around the edges, but they work for me.</p>
130115%The Abolitionists on PBS%abolitionists-on-pbs.html%January 15, 2013%Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 CST%<p>Last Tuesday, PBS premiered the first episode of <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/abolitionists/"><em>The Abolitionists</em></a>, a three-part documentary showcasing the lives of five prominent antislavery Americans. I was honored to appear briefly in the film and hope the show sparks increased popular interest in the history of abolitionism.</p>
120925%Before Juneteenth: The Emancipation Proclamation in Texas%before-juneteenth-talk.html%September 25, 2012%Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>In 1926, the <em>Dallas Morning News</em> began publishing a serial comic strip on Texas history. It ran for only two years, but it shaped the way that generations of Texas schoolchildren learned about their state’s past. And it highlights the uncertain place of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texans’ memory of the Civil War.</p>
120710%Introduction to My Book%book-introduction.html%July 10, 2012%Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>On April 14, 1865, hours before Abraham Lincoln sat down for the last time at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison sat down for the first time in Charleston, South Carolina. More than three decades before, Garrison had founded the Boston <em>Liberator,</em> a newspaper dedicated to universal, immediate slave emancipation. In 1833, he helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), a group devoted to the same goal. And by the time he went to Charleston, Garrison had served as the society’s president for over twenty years. Only in the last few, however, had emancipation changed from a despised, minority opinion to the official policy of federal armies in a cataclysmic civil war. With the war now ending and a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery awaiting ratification, Garrison had come to Fort Sumter to attend a flag-raising ceremony at the invitation of Lincoln’s administration.<sup><a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1">1</a></sup></p>
110309%The Case of John L. Brown%case-of-john-l-brown.html%March 9, 2011%Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 CST%<p>Last Friday, I was very fortunate to be a presenter at the annual conference of the <a href="http://spinner.cofc.edu/atlanticworld/?referrer=webcluster&amp;">Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World program</a> at the College of Charleston. This year’s topic, <a href="http://spinner.cofc.edu/atlanticworld/civilwar/index.html">“Civil War–Global Conflict,”</a> attracted a great slate of fascinating papers.</p>
120502%Dick Dowling and the Battle of Sabine Pass: The View from Emancipation Park%dick-dowling-lecture.html%May 2, 2012%Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>The Civil War is far away–generations away–from where we sit right now. But measured in miles, the Civil War is not very far away at all, even here in Houston.</p>
110407%The Digital Early Republic%digital-early-republic.html%April 7, 2011%Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 CDT%<p>It may still be the case that historians, as a whole, are <a href="http://tedunderwood.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/why-search-was-the-killer-app-in-text-mining-and-what-we-might-learn-from-it/#comments">averse to using databases of digitized primary sources in their research</a>. My impression is that this is rapidly changing, however. This impression is admittedly unscientific and based only on the scholarship that I read. My perceptions may also be skewed by the fact that I myself have found digital databases useful in my research, as illustrated by <a href="http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=126">my last post</a> on a Lincoln quote and my previous series on <a href="http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=46">John Brown’s Timbuctoo</a>.</p>
130625%How Many Slaves Were Refugeed to Confederate Texas?%how-many-refugeed-slaves-in-texas.html%June 25, 2013%Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 CDT%<p>In his new book, <em>Freedom National</em>, historian James Oakes notes that by the middle of 1862, slavery was already crumbling in the lower Mississippi Valley—the “throne” of the South’s “cotton kingdom.” In Louisiana, northern Mississippi, and western Tennessee, “everyone knew that runaway slaves and Union armies formed a nearly irresistible magnetic attraction.” One result, writes Oakes, was that many planters began trying to “refugee” their slaves by moving them west out of the path of Union armies—sometimes by traveling as far as Texas.<sup><a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1">1</a></sup></p>
100811%In Search of John Brown’s Timbucto, Part I%john-brown-timbuctoo-part1.html%August 11, 2010%Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:00:00 CDT%<p>Recently the <em>Washington Post</em> reported on the ongoing excavation of <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/02/AR2010080205217.html">a nineteenth-century African American settlement called Timbuctoo</a> in New Jersey. This long-buried community, now evident only in the traces of found Mason jars, crumbling bricks, and the memories of the community’s living descendants, was founded in the 1820s “by freed blacks and escaped slaves” who bought the land from Quaker abolitionists.</p>
100903%In Search of John Brown’s Timbucto, Part II%john-brown-timbuctoo-part2.html%September 3, 2010%Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 CDT%<p>In <a href="http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=14">Part I</a>, inspired by a <em>Washington Post</em> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/02/AR2010080205217.html">article</a> about archaeologists who are uncovering an early nineteenth-century African American town in Timbuctoo, N.J., I set out to discover how another black community in upstate New York got the name “Timbucto.”</p>
130109%The Lives of Frederick Douglass%lives-of-frederick-douglass.html%January 9, 2013%Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:00:00 CST%<p>Many Americans are familiar with the <em><a href="http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DouNarr.html">Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass</a></em>, published in 1845; it is certainly the most famous personal narrative of slavery ever written. (In 2002, the City of Baltimore sponsored a city-wide reading of the <em>Narrative</em>, which the mayor lauded as an “example of perseverance and determination.”) But fewer readers are aware that Douglass wrote another autobiography in 1855, entitled <em><a href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DouMybo.html">My Bondage and My Freedom</a></em>. Probably even fewer are aware that a third autobiography was published in 1881, <em><a href="http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/dougl92/menu.html">The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass</a></em>.</p>
131001%Mining the BPL Anti-Slavery Collection on the Internet Archive%mining-bpl-antislavery.html%October 1, 2013%Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 CDT%<p>No archival collection was more important to my book on American abolitionism than the <a href="http://www.bpl.org/distinction/featured-collections/anti-slavery/">Anti-Slavery Collection</a> at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. Today, it contains not only the letters of William Lloyd Garrison, one of the icons of the abolitionist movement, but also large collections of letters by and to reformers somehow connected to him. And by “large collection,” I mean <em>large</em>. According to the library’s estimates, there are over 16,000 items at Copley, many of which I pored over in three separate trips to Boston while writing my dissertation and book.</p>
110402%New light on a Lincoln quote%new-light-on-lincoln-quote.html%April 2, 2011%Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 CDT%<p>In an age of word clouds, topic modeling, text mining, and infinite archives, it’s not surprising that many discussions about digital history focus on the “big” uses of things like keyword searching and digitized texts. For historians, access to huge archives of online text raises important questions about <a href="http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/hownot2read.html">how to read—and how not to read—a million books</a>. Big archives also create exciting opportunities for visualization and text analysis like <a href="http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/projects/lincoln/media/pinsker/">Building the Digital Lincoln</a>, Rob Nelson’s <a href="http://americanpast.richmond.edu/dispatch/">Mining the Dispatch</a>, and Cameron Blevins’ <a href="http://historying.org/2009/08/31/text-analysis-of-martha-ballards-diary-part-1/">work on Martha Ballard’s diary</a>.</p>
130522%Open Notebook History%open-notebook-history.html%May 22, 2013%Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 CDT%<p>What would happen if historians made their research notes public? What would it look like to make our notebooks “open source”?</p>
140413%Remembering Henry: Refugeed Slaves in Civil War Texas%refugeed-slaves-oah.html%April 13, 2014%Sun, 13 Apr 2014 00:00:00 CDT%<p>In the autumn of 1865, somewhere near Berwick Bay, Louisiana, a black man named Henry suffered a severe flogging at the hands of Robert Campbell Martin, Sr., the man who had once been his legal owner. Three years earlier, Henry briefly witnessed the liberating potential of the American Civil War when Union troops arrived in Louisiana’s lower Lafourche district, forcing Martin, Sr., a sugar planter, to flee his Albermarle plantation without his slaves. But Henry’s experience of life without a master proved vanishingly brief.</p>
101027%Transnational History and the Civil War Era%transnational-history-civil-war-era.html%October 27, 2010%Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:00:00 CDT%<p>This post was originally published on my old blog as <a href="http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=98" title="Permanent Link: Transnational History and the Civil War Era">Transnational History and the Civil War Era</a>.</p>
120724%Trusting the Water Cure%trusting-water-cure.html%July 24, 2012%Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>Historians of the early republic now understand a great deal about how the post office, the steam engine, the telegraph, and the printing press helped to stitch a growing nation together while simultaneously connecting Americans to a wider world. The “water cure,” a nineteenth-century health reform movement also known as hydropathy, was in many ways the perfect example of how an antebellum “communications revolution” created extensive information networks on even the most obscure topics. After its genesis in Austria in the 1830s and 1840s, by the 1850s the “water cure” claimed a transatlantic following with devotees as diverse as Charles Darwin, Stonewall Jackson, David Ruggles, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a host of unknown clients from Russia, Germany, Italy, and beyond. By the beginning of the Civil War, the New York City newspaper, <em>The Water-Cure Journal</em>, claimed tens of thousands of subscribers, and over 200 hydropathic establishments dotted the country from upstate New York, to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Salem, Oregon.<sup><a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1">1</a></sup></p>
110526%Wendell Phillips and the “Ever-Restless Ocean” of Democracy%wendell-phillips-ever-restless-ocean.html%May 26, 2011%Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00:00 CDT%<p>American democracy means, at the very least, majority rule. And Wendell Phillips was, above all, a democrat. “I plant myself always on democratic principles,” Phillips said in 1865. “I am a democrat, ingrained, from top to toe.”<sup><a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1">1</a></sup></p>
120405%Announcing the Dick Dowling Digital Archive%announcing-dick-dowling-archive.html%April 5, 2012%Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>It gives me great pleasure to announce the unveiling of the Dick Dowling Digital Archive and the related exhibit, <a href="http://exhibits.library.rice.edu/exhibits/show/dick-dowling">Dick Dowling and Sabine Pass in History and Memory</a>. The collection and the exhibit, both proudly powered by <a href="http://www.omeka.org">Omeka</a>, were produced by myself and undergraduate students in Civil War history at Rice University in collaboration with <a href="http://library.rice.edu/collections/WRC">the Woodson Research Center</a> at Fondren Library, the <a href="http://digital.houstonlibrary.org/cdm/">Houston Area Digital Archives</a>, and the <a href="http://hrc.rice.edu">Humanities Research Center</a>.</p>
121127%Backward Design for a Backwards History Survey%backwards-survey.html%November 27, 2012%Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 CST%<p>Next semester I am planning to try something new with my HIST 118 course, which is listed in the schedule as “The United States, 1848 to the Present.” I am going to teach the course backwards—from the present to 1848.</p>
120904%Communicating with Professors%communicating-with-professors.html%September 4, 2012%Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>The best parts of my college experience were the relationships I built with individual professors. In my very first semester, for example, I took an introductory logic course with <a href="http://www.indiana.edu/~hpscdept/people/allen.shtml">Colin Allen</a>, now at Indiana University. I loved the logic, but even more important for my development as a student were the conversations I had with Allen outside of class, on topics ranging from science to computer programming to the philosophy of religion.</p>
111013%Google Docs and Group Work%google-docs-and-group-work.html%October 13, 2011%Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 CDT%<p>Mark Sample recently had a <a href="http://www.samplereality.com/2011/09/14/on-reading-aloud-in-the-classroom/">great post about reading aloud in the classroom</a>, in the course of which he also briefly revealed how he uses Google Docs as a sort of digital whiteboard for collecting responses from students. I’ve also sometimes used Google Docs in the classroom for similar purposes. The advantage of doing this, of course, is that the Google Doc created during class can later be shared with students online. And because Google Docs can be edited collaboratively by several users at once, it also makes it possible to reproduce the old pedagogical technique of having students “go to the board” to write down responses without ever requiring that they leave their seats.</p>
110313%Grading with my iPad%grading-with-my-ipad.html%March 13, 2011%Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 CDT%<p>A friend recently emailed me to ask how I feel about using my iPad to grade student papers. One of the main reasons why I bought an iPad when it came out was to help with this task; since I ride the bus and light rail to work most days, I wanted an easy way to take my grading and reading with me, without having to lug a huge stack of papers around. My friend’s email gives me a good excuse to briefly summarize the steps I take to use my iPad for grading, and to share some of my reflections on how it’s worked out so far.</p>
130819%How to Discuss a Book for History%howtodiscuss.html%August 19, 2013%Mon, 19 Aug 2013 00:00:00 CDT%<p>In an earlier post on <a href="/howtoread.html">How to Read for History</a>, I offered advice to undergraduate students who are assigned heavy reading loads for history classes. My central point in that essay was that reading is best thought of as a kind of conversation—ideally, a conversation that will continue after a reader has finished a book.</p>
080801%How to Read for History%howtoread.html%August 1, 2008%Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 CDT%<p>History courses usually have heavy reading loads. But you can make the load lighter if you develop effective strategies for reading. This page is designed to introduce history students to some of those strategies, but these tips are not the last word on reading effectively. Hone your own reading strategies. Practice different strategies over periods of time. And be sure to consult <a href="#further-reading-on-reading">the advice of others</a> about how to read.</p>
120113%Methods in U.S. Cultural History%methods-in-us-cultural-history.html%January 13, 2012%Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 CST%<p>Today I started teaching my semester-long graduate seminar, HIST 587: Methods in U.S. Cultural History. The <a href="http://caleb.mcdaniel.web.rice.edu/pdf/hist587syllabus.pdf">syllabus</a> I will be using is very similar to the one I used in the <a href="http://caleb.mcdaniel.web.rice.edu/pdf/hist587.pdf">Fall 2009</a> semester, in that the major objective will be to produce a draft of an article-length essay based on original research. But I am also going to be trying at least two new things this time around.</p>
130106%Resolutions for Teaching Digital History%teaching-digital-history.html%January 6, 2013%Sun, 06 Jan 2013 00:00:00 CST%<p>Last semester, I received some funding from my campus’s Humanities Research Center to run what the center calls a <a href="http://hrc.rice.edu/masterclass/">Masterclass</a>—a year-long, one-credit special topics course in which both undergraduates and graduates can enroll. <a href="http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu">My masterclass course</a> is on digital history, but in my case “masterclass” is a bit of a misnomer. I am far from having “mastered” digital history, and have not yet made serious use of digital history methods in my own research. My institution has no center in digital history, and my department has no cluster of self-identifying digital historians. The “masterclass” so far has basically been a lecture series in which I have invited digital historians from <em>off-campus</em> to speak about their methods and lead practical workshops and discussions with my students.</p>
101013%Teaching with Blogs%teaching-with-blogs.html%October 13, 2010%Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 CDT%<p>Tomorrow at noon, I am going to be speaking about blogging and teaching at a “brown bag” <a href="http://library.rice.edu/events/dr.-caleb-mcdaniel-on-classroom-blogging">workshop at the Digital Media Center</a> at Rice. This post contains a rough outline of what I plan to say, as well as links to resources that I will mention at the workshop.</p>
120831%Why Study Digital History?%why-study-digital-history.html%August 31, 2012%Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 CDT%<p>In our first meeting of <a href="http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu">Digital History at Rice</a>, we each shared our reasons for wanting to study this subject. Here I want to elaborate a little bit on mine. My graduate program in history did not offer any training in digital history methods, but in the last ten years, I’ve had a series of realizations that make me want to learn more about them.</p>