According to the whiteboard outside our kitchen, there are fourteen days left of summer. So here is a summertime newsletter, heavy on the pictures and light on the prose.
Currently listening
I found this double LP album for $3 at the CD Cellar in Falls Church. Merle Haggard and The Strangers were recorded live during services at four different churches or chapels. I’m listening it to it for a book I’m researching.
Currently visualizing
Kellen Funk and I recently presented our work on Legal Modernism at the Conference on Data Science and Law held at Fordham University. Above is one of the many visualizations from the paper. This one is drawn from the dataset we have generated, which includes 8.2 million citations from 9,749 U.S. legal treatises published before 1926 to some 368,000 distinct U.S. cases.
Currently collaborating
Since I last wrote, John Turner and I have received another $350k grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for our American Religious Ecologies project. Our wonderful project team (a few of whom are pictured above) also presented a poster at the American Historical Association annual meeting.
Currently defending
Greta Swain—a PhD student in history at George Mason and a key contributor to the Mapping Early American Elections and American Religious Ecologies projects at RRCHNM—successfully defended her dissertation on “Potomac Networks” last week. Here is why the dissertation is a masterclass in using digital methods for historical interpretation. Greta is off to Southern Methodist University as a postdoc.
Currently reading
This week my wife will send in the manuscript of her book for final copyediting. The book is provisionally titled The Olive Branch and the Sword: The United States in the Mediterranean, 1800–1805, and it will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press. For our fifteenth wedding anniversary, we took a trip to some of the sites in her book. Here we are outside the fortifications in Tangier.
Currently moving
I am packing up all of the books in my office at RRCHNM to move to the other side of the wall. More on that next time.