Last Friday, I learned that Al Berger had passed. He was a long time colleague in the history department at the University of North Dakota where he taught and researched 20th century US history and modern military history. He retired a few years ago and the department is only now working to fill the gap… Read More →
Yesterday, the state board of higher education announced a new president for the University of North Dakota. After a session of deliberation, a few white puffs of smoke ascended from the Chancellor’s inner chamber and a herald of the board solemnly announced “Habemus Presidentum.” Andrew Armacost will become UND’s 13th president and the chant of “Armacost virumque cano” was heard… Read More →
At a meeting a week before spring break, one of the student representatives expressed concern about the University of North Dakota budget crisis impacting teaching (and learning) on campus. He noted that low faculty morale and a lack of confidence in university leadership did little to motivate learners and had become a distraction. I think… Read More →
It’s been a hectic week here in North Dakotaland. So hectic, in fact, that I don’t have time to write about myself. The self-promotion machine has run up against the oppressive reality of … life and books and outrage! Fortunately, when I’m too busy to promote myself, other people do pick up the slack. I… Read More →
In a productive coincidence, there was a provocative published in the Los Angeles Review of Books that subjected the Digital Humanities to rather pointed criticism aligning the darling of tech-savvy humanists, granting agencies, and university administrators everywhere with the dreaded neoliberal bugbear of our age. In short, the authors associated the rise of the Digital… Read More →
I agreed to write a short piece for North Dakota Quarterly about the institutional context for Elwyn Robinson’s History of North Dakota. This is part of a series of short essays and reviews of the work to celebrate the book’s 50th anniversary. I’m not entirely satisfied with what I have now, but it’s a start.… Read More →
In a couple of weeks, I head back east to the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture at the Hellenic College Holy Cross to be on a panel of scholars who “use traditional and digital means to build a broader audience for the field inside and outside of the academy.” I suspect my… Read More →
A few weeks back my buddy Paul Worley penned an interesting blog post on digital humanities and “getting hit by the proverbial bus.” The post talked about the ripple effect of Joel Jonientz’s death in our little digital humanities community on campus. For the University of North Dakota, the digital humanities was an explicitly collaborative… Read More →
On Monday evening, some of Joel Jonientz’s University of North Dakota colleagues and I began the gut-wrenching process of preparing his digital archive. (For more on Joel, check out his blog here and my little post on him here.) While Joel was trained as a painter, in the last decade he had moved heavily to… Read More →
One of the great things about travel is that I got a chance to read a couple of books. I finished up a fairly recent classic of modern anthropology Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines. Situated at the intersection of Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” and Bruno Latour’s work on the agency of machines, Orr’s classic records… Read More →
Yesterday, I had rare good fortune. A blogger responded to my blog post. Now, I will admit that this blogger, Prof. Jack Weinstein, is a member my local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Academic Bloggers, Podcasters, and Self Promoters, but a response is a response. His post is rather straightforward. He argues that a… Read More →
The recent volume of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 19 (2012) addressed the complex issue of integrating Geographic Information Systems and methods grounded in embodied experiences or phenomenological approaches to archaeological space. In the literature, these two approaches to archaeological space and landscapes have been at odds with each other. Recently, however, a group… Read More →
