For the Monday crowd: please circulate this widely.
It may be hard to find the perfect candidate (an experienced data engineer/architect generalist with an interest in cultural heritage willing to take a state salary), but it's a great group/mission/city and we know the right person is out there.
Getting a PhD and then working outside academia is dope. My advisees who’ve done that are more or less uniformly happy and feel that they’re using the skills they trained on. (I talked to one today who just landed a great gig). Just wanted to convey that to anyone it might benefit.
As always, this project is a labor of love, and I hugely appreciate the folks who support it with small donations each week. 🫶 This week's patrons-only look into the data in progress examples how the term "digital" appears in ads! Check out how you can help here: www.patreon.com/posts/data-p...
I normally play on a MacBook Air, so it is quite the change!
Picture of large tv with the title screen to Silksong on it
It’s Friday, the girls are in bed, and the spouse is in the city late for work. Time for some Silksong on the big tv!
My wife was GRD ‘13 and was a graduate fellow at one of the colleges for five or so years. A few of the other fellows were at the Law school and did their fair share of complaining too
I was in grad school there at the time and had some friends in the law school. Even at the outskirts it was so clear that guy was HATED. My wife had the misfortune of interacting with him on a few occasions and needless to say it was unpleasant
I for one am in favor of (preferably quirky) local solutions to computing issues (though I recognize that interoperability is of course important)
This is only VERY tangentially related, but I’ll take this as an opportunity to shout out one of my all time favorite works on computing history: Minitel mitpress.mit.edu/978026253775...
Haha, nice! This reminds of our computer lab, which had a guy in the corner who had cracked all the Warcraft installations so you didn't need to use the CD to play. Though thinking back I wonder why the computer lab teacher let us install Warcraft in the first place
Distinct memories of bringing this home shortly after it was released. It was one of the very few games for a Mac at the time and one of the even fewer that my dad let us install on his computer. It took a bit of swift talking, but he was also excited to put his new CDROM drive to good use.
as me about the prestigious foundation who told me and my dean IN WRITING that "UIC does not meet our standards for an eligible faculty institution"
Just filed and paid my taxes, so that means I can take the rest of the day off, right? ... right?
Why do we even bother with endnotes--this is my personal pet peeve as a historian, I need to read the spicy, sassy, whiny footnotes immediately
My college friend group used to do double feature nights where the goal was to choose the two most unlikely movies to be paired in a double feature, so I watched this with Rashomon
We are not nerds or anything:)
Yes please!
I’m putting together a piece right now along these lines.
Also on first glance I read this as “Ban Zhao” and was eagerly awaiting a compelling parallel with Han historiography :)
Was just looking at the article you posted and was wondering if subscribing was worth it
Just can’t bring myself to ask students to take on that risk
For sure, and opencode seems WAY worse for that
My intro to DH class spends far more time teaching the programming, but I doing a big redesign for the fall and we shall see what survives
It does help streamline things, but we try to go back to the programming to understand what is happening. Most students in the class have some background in coding which helps, and I try to get those without the background to a place where they can at least read it if not produce it ex nihilo
I try to walk them through taking ownership of the output and how we might use these as one tool among many in our toolbox, while also recognizing their limits. I put a lot of focus on doing things in a reproducible and interpretable way
We’ve been talking about/using Claude code but with local open weight models. I’ve been experimenting with things like OpenCode to move fully beyond that the commercial ecosystem, but I’m a bit leery of how loose it seems to be with permissions.
In my grad seminar we talk a lot about the models themselves, spend time fine tuning and experimenting with limits. We also turn to coding agents to adapt the tutorial code to a new corpus/different language (the class is focused on CJK text analysis). Or to rapidly prototype new visualizations
This came up tonight and she told me, “whatever, I saved you 300 euros”
The sickest burn I was ever subject to was when I was trying to buy an overcoat at some shop in The Hague. I put one on, thinking it looked pretty nice. My wife looked me up and down and said “you look like a magician.” Seeing my offended look without missing a beat she said “sorry, illusionist.”
If anyone knows any excellent and experienced data engineers who would be excited by a Richmond-based job in the cultural heritage sector, have them get in touch.
No, your voice is not loud enough. No, that's not the issue. Just use the microphone.