blog reach

I’ve been running this blog a little over a year, and my sitemeter location stats have surprised me on a number of occasions. This is a very modest blog. According to wordpress stats, over the past year or so I’ve logged just a little over 20,000 page views. Now, mind you, many of those are repeat visitors or people who didn’t hang around at all. Still, for the esoterica of my academic research and its process, I’m happy with that many page views, and I am hoping I can continue to grow my audience.

The vast majority of visitors to my blog have come to see how I use devonthink, and I’m OK with that too. Tech tools are awesome, and have much to offer academics. And in fact, my devonthink posts have drawn a global audience. I’ve had visitors from every continent, save Antarctica. Some of those visits come from unexpected places, but none more unexpected than a short visit today from Myanmar! Ha, that one I noticed.

 

Second poll up on the Andean Studies blog

There’s a second poll up on the CLAH Andean Studies section blog, this time on “historians” of the 17th century. In the first, Pedro Cieza de Leon maintains a commanding lead with 7 of 12 votes cast.

Go vote in the second, which includes such ubiquitous 17th century authors as Guaman Poma and Garcilaso de la Vega. Interestingly, one would have to say that Guaman Poma ahs likely had the most impact of 17th c. Andean “historians,” even though his work languished in obscurity during his own lifetime, and long after his death. Still, if we were to use citational counts as a means to establish scholarly reputation, Guaman Poma would be far ahead of all others simply because almost every book on colonial Andean history seems to include at least one of his drawings.

 

Poll on 16th Century Andean Historians

I’m helping put on the roundtable this year for the Andean Studies section of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH). CLAH holds its yearly meeting simultaneous with the AHA. Happily, the AHA is meeting in San Diego this year, which promises much nicer climes to the normal Chicago/DC/NYC in January that I’ve come to expect.

Our idea for the roundtable this year is to hold a sort of “un-panel,” which will be dominated by discussion rather than presentation. Inspired by the success of conferences such as THATCamp, I thought it would be fun to construct a participatory panel within the midst of the AHA, and suggested that this year’s Andean Studies roundtable do just that on the topic, “The Future of the Andean Past/El futuro del pasado andino.” We’ve set up a blog on which official panel participants will publish 1500-word essays on what they see as the future of Andean History (defined broadly), and solicit any feedback in the form of comments. Then, in San Diego, we will hopefully enjoy a conversation on the future direction of Andean History on the shared basis of these prior dialogues. I really hope it works, because I’m very excited by the idea of panel discussions that break with the read-to-me-and-I’ll-try-to-squeeze-a-question-at-the-end model of most history conferences.

In the vein of gearing up for those essays, I’ve put up a poll of 16th-century Andean Historians, with Titu Cusi Yunpanqui, Juan de Betanzos, Cieza de Leon, and Sarmiento de Gamboa. Also there’s a space to suggest another name. Plan is to do this for the rest of the colonial period, the nineteenth century, and a couple for the 20th century as well.

So, go vote!

 

Adding some SelfControl

I’m certain I’m not the only one out there who struggles with this, but I suffer from a combination of addiction to my online world and a tendency towards distractibility. I seriously can have problems with my ability to focus, which can be a real detriment to both research and writing. I know of some who simply work on a computer that isn’t hooked up to the virtual world. As my workflow has evolved over the years, this simply isn’t an option for me. In the process of both researching and writing, I am constantly looking up citations, chasing down bits of information, and the like. But, there are only a handful of domains that are legitimately part of that workflow– and twitter, facebook, cyclingnews, netnewswire, and the rest of places I often let distract me aren’t on that list.

What to do? Well, recently I’ve been using the Mac app SelfControl to help force me out of my bad habits. SelfControl allows you to blacklist domains (and their subdomains) along with mail servers — or any other paths to the internet. There is an option to whitelist domains, but I’ve found it doesn’t work as well. So, I’ve been slowly adding places from my virtual world onto the list of unacceptables. When SelfControl is turned on, blacklisted places simply cannot be accessed until the timer runs out. You pick how long you want the blocking to occur, and then it does. There’s no way around it except letting the clock run out. Then, your system’s full access to resources is restored. It’s almost like a counter-growl, cutting off the possibility of distracting notifications.

Other programs do this as well– I’ve also used Freedom a bit, which completely cuts your machine off from the internets. But, that’s too drastic for me as I explained above. For Windows users out there, you could try StopDistractions.

Now get to work.

 

Using DEVONthink for Course Management

DEVONthink is an extremely powerful and adaptable database program that has significant potential for qualitative researches across the humanities. It’s ability to store and connect discrete bits of information, from the quickly jotted idea to pdfs of articles, books, dissertations (many of which can now be downloaded directly from UMI), and the like, is in my experience unparalleled in either the Mac or Microsoft worlds. Your mileage may vary, but that has been my experience. Last Fall I wrote a series of posts documenting what was then my digital workflow, and which utilized DEVONthink Pro Office 1.5. Those posts are all linked to here.

As many of you may now, since those posts were originally written, Devon Technologies has been putting the long-awaited DT2.0 through extensive public beta testing. And, while it is a beta release, I have found DT2.0 to be very completely stable, only lacking the planned implementation of a few features.

 

Can Google Books Serve Scholars Better…?

YES!! Of course. And this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed identifies some of the key problems the current search model of Google Books poses for scholars. (Since it’s a Chronicle article, it’ll probably be moved behind their wall in a few days.) Geoffrey Nunberg points to the real mess that Google has made of metadata for the scanned works.

I love Google Books– Yes, there are real and important legal questions about access, copyright, the danger of monopoly, and the like. No, Google is not engaged in scanning the world’s cumulative knowledge for altruistic reasons, but rather to enhance their algorithmic access to the accumulated information beyond, or rather before the information age.

 

Oh, Blackboard, Wherefore Do I Hate Thee?

Let me count the ways. They are seventeen.

And today, it’s the user input count that’s driving me crazy. I’ve sworn off of using Blackboard and am sticking to it this semester with one exception– group emails. I wanted to send out group emails to all of my classes the week before classes to inform my students that we won’t be using Blackboard this semester and to provide links to the blogs I’m using to run class. I will absolutely admit that the ability to send emails to all of my students and my TAs is a nice function.

Indeed, my TAs want to be able to do that as well for each of their discussion sections. I had already enrolled the TAs in the main-combine blackboard course, but this requires that I enroll them in the individual section pages as well. My classes are all cross-listed with Latin American Studies, so there are two sections of each section, as it were.

So, what does it take to enroll a new user in a Blackboard  Course or Section page? Sixteen (16) clicks of the mouse plus one data field entry. That’s right– and there are no shortcuts that I can find. An example of how ridiculous this 17 maneuvers– the initial click that actually adds the user does not allow you to define that user’s role and defaults to student, which requires eight of the seventeen actions. Here’s the list:

 

Quito 1809: In Defense of King, Religion, and Patria pt. II

The first week of rule was obviously a busy one for Quito’s Supreme Junta. In addition to deposing the Audiencia and its president, the junta initiated attempts to gain support both in the city and in the region traditionally ruled by the High Court whose seat was the highland capital. They had much more success with the former than with the latter. In addition, the junta informed the two neighboring viceregal capitals of their actions and justifications. In part, the junta’s initial successes in securing and maintaining loyalties in the barrios of Quito owed to the Marqués de Selva Alegre’s judicious use of traditional performative claims to legitimacy– particularly costume, religious ceremony, and at least the veneer of consultation. The 13th of August, two hundred years ago today, was one of a few important days in securing this legitimacy, culminating on the 16th with a cabildo abierto.

 

Quito 1809: In Defense of Religion, King, and Patria

It’s an important day in Ecuadorian History– we know this, of course, because one of the three main north-south corridor streets in Quito is named 10 de agosto (10th of August). Two hundred years ago today, on the 10th of August 1809, a local junta constituted largely by local Quiteño elites deposed the Audiencia of Quito and established local rule in the wake of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. The nationalist historiography of Ecuador has long claimed this date to be the fulfillment of Eugenio Espejo’s vision of an Independent Quito, and date the Ecuadorian Independence Movement to the 10th of August. It is, of course, much more complicated than that. In fact, when Quito was finally liberated from Spanish rule more than a decade later, in the early 1820s, the revolutionary calendar dated from the establishment of the 1810 Bogota junta, and all dates on government documents were given as, for example, Year 16, 1826.

 

the hiatus ends

I have been derelict in my blog duties this summer– really since my last week in Quito. I started a long post on spending a day in Quito’s Centro, and how much has changed since the last time I was there. Included in those changes were a whole host of elements that pointed to this day in history some 200 years ago– 10 de agosto 1809, the opening salvo of Quito’s version of the Age of Revolution. I’m hesitant to call it the first date of Ecuadorian Independence because, despite nationalist historiography’s appropriation of the 10 de agosto movement for its arc of Independence, that is not what was going on. But more on that in a new post here, which includes sections from my book manuscript on this very topic.

For now, a brief recap of the accomplishments of the June trip to Quito. By the numbers:

total images: 19,122

total manuscript pages: @34,000