I’d like to organize an informal online reading group to read and discuss very recent works in American religious history. The group could meet via Skype once per month or once every two months, and discuss a book that has been published on American religious history in the past year. It could be a good way for graduate students at different universities to interact and to keep up with the literature.

Are you interested? If so, leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

Below is the list of books for a readings course I’ll be taking with Brandeis professor Jonathan Sarna. The list is admittedly idiosyncratic. I’ve left off books I’ve already read, so there is very little about, say, colonial religion or American fundamentalism. The list is also constrained by what’s possible to read within a week or a semester. I hope it will be helpful to other people putting together reading lists, just as Michael Altman’s lists have been helpful to me.

If anyone would like to exchange lists or talk about these books, let me know.

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Digital humanities is a spectrum. To put it another way, all humanities scholars use digital practices and concepts to one degree or another, even those who do not identify as digital humanists. Working as a digital humanist is not one side of a binary, the other side of which is working as a traditional scholar.

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Books from the Espresso Book Machine

I’ve been frequenting the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge to use their Espresso Book Machine. It’s a print-on-demand machine that produces “library-quality paperbacks” very quickly. The makers of the EBM advertise that it can print a book in minutes. That’s probably true of the Harvard Book Store too, but the big books that I’ve had printed have taken closer to an hour. The operator lets the pages cool so that they’ll bind better, which I appreciate. Each book I’ve had printed so far has been better than the last, and the Magnalia that I bought tonight was very well done. The source of the books are scanned editions from Google Books.

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I have a short article published in the Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association, titled “Confessionalization and the Creedal Tradition.” This article, which is mostly about sixteenth and seventeenth century European history, is well outside my typical research, which is about American religious history. Here is an abstract and PDF.

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Have you heard the saying “What would Jesus do?” Who hasn’t? In the 1990s the phrase became a fad among evangelical Christians, who printed the abbreviation WWJD? on bracelets, t-shirts, and posters, spawning in turn a host of mocking pop culture imitations. WWJD can provide a useful lens for looking at evangelical consumer culture of the late twentieth century. But the phrase can also serve as a parable about contemporary copyright law.

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Today the Washington Post ran an article about college professors who ban laptops from their classroom. The article sparked a conversation among the digital humanities crowd on Twitter, some sympathizing with the ban, but most protesting. The debate reminded me of playing Trivial Pursuit this weekend.

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Last weekend I attended a conference at Yale University titled The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities. I’m only just starting to explore how I’ll relate my own scholarship to digital methods and products, so the conference was a help in getting acquainted with the issues within the field of digital humanities. It was also good to meet a number of grad students and scholars working in digital humanities. In this blog post, I want to reflect on a few of the talks that I found most engaging.

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For a long time I’ve looked for a website that could catalog my book collection. I wanted something where I could easily import the books, but with the power to edit the metadata if I chose. The emphasis of the site had to be cataloging, but social features would be nice too. And the site had to work with any book, not just the latest vampire thriller. I tried GoodReads, Shelfari, and the my library section of Google Books, and they were all useless. I finally found the application that I liked: LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is very powerful at cataloging—so powerful that some libraries use it as their catalog. I’ve added something like 350 of my books so far. I enter the ISBN or title of the book, LibraryThing searches a library catalog of my choice (usually the Library of Congress), and imports the book into my catalog. From there, I can edit the metadata and change the cover. Maybe the single greatest feature of LibraryThing is it’s concept of a work, as opposed to specific editions. For example, I can link to a work page, which includes all the editions of that book.

LibraryThing’s cataloging tools would be powerful enough, but they have some interesting social tools too. For example, the top-three books that I share with other people are The Riverside Shakespeare, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

LibraryThing gets both Web 2.0 and Library 2.0.

For each of my classes, I have a Zotero collection. For each of the assigned readings, I import an item and take notes on it. In class discussions, I then have access to my notes.

The problem is that by midway through the semester, I have dozens of items in my collection, and so it takes a lot of awkward fumbling around to find the few assignments for that day in class.

Too many Zotero items

My solution is to give each item a tag with the date it will be discussed in class. For example, items that will be discussed today I tag “2010-02-01.” After I filter the collection by that tag, I have list of just the items I need to refer to.

Just the readings for today

A simple solution, but it helps me.