Welcome to My Blog

Like so many others who enjoy the sound of their own voice and the sight of their own words on a printed page—I would estimate this group as a majority of humanity—I have increasingly felt the urge to write a blog. Blogging has obviously emerged as one of the remarkable, unique products of the web, providing for the first time a nearly frictionless way to immediately reach a worldwide audience with your thoughts.

Having written for paper media, I’ve experienced the frustration of the glacial pace of most publications. In academia this problem is particularly acute. For instance, I completed the first draft of a book chapter I wrote on nineteenth-century mathematics in May of 2002; I finally got to see it in print in May of 2005. Even in the best cases (and there are not many), an academic journal article generally takes a full year from the time you have completed most of the work on the article to the time it shows up on the pages of the journal.

On the other hand, maybe there’s not much urgency in seeing the latest on Victorian mathematics. As far as I know, all of the mathematicians I discuss in the book chapter remain dead, or at least oddly unproductive; those who are interested in their lives and work would just as well wait for a considerate, thoughtful, and complete article regardless of how slowly it took to arrive in print. And unlike in the sciences, there is rarely concern about precedent. My book on the larger history of pure mathematics in the Victorian era has taken about full decade between inception and completion, but I haven’t had many sleepless nights worrying that someone else has duplicated my work or theories.

So here’s the rub, and I suspect I’m not alone in this view: while I’m attracted to the instant gratification of publishing to the web, I’ve more often than not found blogs to be dissatisfying. Perhaps it’s absurd elitism or years of reading overly long tomes. But it’s a feeling that’s hard to shake. The ease with which one can post means that it’s often too easy to post the half-baked and the half-written.

So for this blog I’ve tried to set a higher mark for myself (the elitism now unites with an unwise masochism). While my posts may not be daily, I hope that they will function more like well thought out mini-articles, and transfer to this blog’s audience my understanding of the digital humanities in as great a depth as possible.

Stay tuned for posts explaining how to do for yourself experimental digital work (e.g., how to use the Google Maps API to build your own interactive historical map); posts communicating in a plainspoken way some of the more complex topics in computer science in ways that hopefully will spark ideas among humanists; and posts exploring the implications of new technologies and methodologies for teaching, learning, and researching in a digital age.

I hope that you’ll also join the conversation by emailing me at dcohen@gmu.edu if you have any comments or suggestions.