http://quintessenceofham.org The story of his assiette of popes-eyes, the quintessence of ham for sauce, and the gravy of twenty-two partridges for sauce for a brace, was always beyond the credit of any sensible person. –William Verral, A Complete System of Cookery Fri, 11 May 2012 08:09:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 http://quintessenceofham.org/2012/03/26/only-a-historian/ http://quintessenceofham.org/2012/03/26/only-a-historian/#comments Mon, 26 Mar 2012 04:20:01 +0000 Sean http://quintessenceofham.org/?p=835 “The world needs ditch diggers too.” –Judge Smails, Caddyshack (1980) At last week’s Digital Humanities Luxembourg (DHLU) symposium, a common refrain could be heard in nearly every presentation: “I’m only a historian.” Uttered apologetically at the beginning of a number of presentations, after two days it became the object of parody and ultimately comprised part [...]]]> http://quintessenceofham.org/2012/03/26/only-a-historian/feed/ 6 http://quintessenceofham.org/2012/03/01/pressforward-joins-forces-with-openedition/ http://quintessenceofham.org/2012/03/01/pressforward-joins-forces-with-openedition/#comments Thu, 01 Mar 2012 04:59:38 +0000 Sean http://quintessenceofham.org/?p=778 I’m pleased to announce a new partnership between PressForward and OpenEdition. PressForward is the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s project to study and produce alternative means scholarly communication. OpenEdition, led by the Centre for Open Electronic Publishing in Marseille, shares many of the same goals but on a much larger scale: it [...]]]> http://quintessenceofham.org/2012/03/01/pressforward-joins-forces-with-openedition/feed/ 1 http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/11/16/survivorship-bias-survivor-guilt-and-opportunity-cost/ http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/11/16/survivorship-bias-survivor-guilt-and-opportunity-cost/#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2011 05:15:13 +0000 Sean http://quintessenceofham.org/?p=746 N.B. For best results, try to get Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” going in your head before proceeding. Two recent blog posts by Larry Cebula and Holger Syme highlight the deep divide that separates the pessimists from the optimists in academia. Cebula explains why he steers his students away from pursuing a career as a professor, essentially [...]]]> http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/11/16/survivorship-bias-survivor-guilt-and-opportunity-cost/feed/ 6 http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/05/21/on-usage-figures/ http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/05/21/on-usage-figures/#comments Fri, 20 May 2011 21:18:36 +0000 Sean http://quintessenceofham.org/?p=701 Among the more eye-popping numbers associated with LinkedIn’s recent initial public offering is the 100,000,000 members it claims. What do those hundred million people do with their LinkedIn accounts? If they’re like me, they quietly ignore the endless spam but never quite motivate to unsubscribe. Or maybe they occasionally click through a link returned by [...]]]> http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/05/21/on-usage-figures/feed/ 10 http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/05/06/zotero-versus/ http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/05/06/zotero-versus/#comments Fri, 06 May 2011 04:38:55 +0000 Sean http://quintessenceofham.org/?p=658 Brian Croxall recently lit up the comment feed at the Chronicle with his ProfHacker comparison of “Zotero vs. Endnote,” where the debate centered mostly around issues of citation fidelity. As Fred Gibbs notes, however, “while citation formatting is one major reason to use bibliographic software, it isn’t necessarily the only or even primary reason, especially [...]]]> http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/05/06/zotero-versus/feed/ 11 http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/04/20/time-shifting-and-historical-research/ http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/04/20/time-shifting-and-historical-research/#comments Wed, 20 Apr 2011 03:09:12 +0000 Sean http://quintessenceofham.org/?p=630 About ten thousand years ago, we were introduced to the phrase “time shifting” by a decade-long lawsuit over the right to use VCRs to tape TV shows for later viewing. Today’s DVR has of course made this process far easier and probably more widespread, but the idea remains the same: rather than watch something right [...]]]> http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/04/20/time-shifting-and-historical-research/feed/ 20 http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/04/08/the-end-of-french-history/ http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/04/08/the-end-of-french-history/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 23:19:34 +0000 Sean http://quintessenceofham.org/?p=584 As a historian I like to think that I’m comfortable with the idea of fields dying. Maybe they’re reborn and live to fight another day (like diplomatic history, or so we all keep hearing), and maybe they never really die at all (like quantitative history, safely entrenched at Paris 1-Sorbonne). But what about the old [...]]]> http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/04/08/the-end-of-french-history/feed/ 3 http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/03/27/fatcamp-florence/ http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/03/27/fatcamp-florence/#comments Sat, 26 Mar 2011 19:27:24 +0000 Sean http://quintessenceofham.org/?p=571 This past week’s THATCamp Firenze was a huge success, offering plenty of opportunities to learn about new projects and the various national and international flavors of digital humanities that are flourishing in Europe. But seriously, on a blog with this title, how can I ignore the most spectacular part of the trip?]]> http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/03/27/fatcamp-florence/feed/ 3 http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/03/04/zotero-and-aws-or-how-we-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-cloud-part-1-of-2/ http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/03/04/zotero-and-aws-or-how-we-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-cloud-part-1-of-2/#comments Fri, 04 Mar 2011 03:06:48 +0000 Sean http://quintessenceofham.org/?p=428 Zotero’s server infrastructure has evolved in countless ways since the project’s 2006 launch, but most of those changes are super boring and not worth remembering. Over the past two months, however, we moved the bulk of Zotero’s back end to Amazon Web Services, a step that I believe is uniquely noteworthy in the context of [...]]]> http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/03/04/zotero-and-aws-or-how-we-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-cloud-part-1-of-2/feed/ 23 http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/02/15/zotero-storage-goes-global/ http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/02/15/zotero-storage-goes-global/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2011 03:54:02 +0000 Sean http://quintessenceofham.org/?p=433 Because I live under a rock (Vietnam), I only recently discovered the Google Charts API. When I saw that it supported maps, I thought it might be fun to plot the sales data for Zotero File Storage provided by the nonprofit corporation I started along with a bunch of other academics. Bear in mind that [...]]]> http://quintessenceofham.org/2011/02/15/zotero-storage-goes-global/feed/ 5