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.

 

CLAH Andean Section Roundtable

Below the fold is a draft transcript of my comments for the upcoming CLAH Andean Studies Section roundtable, appreciably organized by Jane Mangan. I’ve seen the others’ draft comments as well, at it promises to be a fun and interesting discussion. Topics include identity, Independence, caudillismo, the environment, and servitude.

 

Posts on devonthink

As these are by far the most popular posts on this blog, here are direct links to my devonthink posts in order:

Devonthink and Other Mac Apps for History and Humanities Research

Devonthink for Historical Research, part II

Devonthink for Historical Research, part III

Please do stay around and read some of the other entries too!

Update: Devon Technologies released Devonthink 2.0 for public beta today, 18 December. I’ve just downloaded it and will be playing around with it for the next few days. In reading the initial documentation, it promises to be an excellent improvement on an already fantastic application. I’m especially excited about the universal inbox, the expansion of file-type indexing capabilities, the ability to open and search two databases at once, new PDF annotating functionality (not fully implemented in this build), tagging (not yet implemented), and more. As I get some time with it, I’m sure I’ll update how it changes/enhances the processes described in the posts above.

 

Fun with Google Books – 2 Agosto 1810

A recent post by Felipe Castro at Clíotropos reminded me to engage in my semi-annual search of the term “Quito” in Google Books. (By the way, Castro and H-Mex have put together a delicious page as an online catalogue to digitally-available old books relating to Mexico. It’s worth a look, with a little more than 100 titles already bookmarked.) Google is constantly adding new scans to their archive, which as I’ve said before is an absolute treasure trove of 18th and 19th century publications.

I try to regularly search a few different terms, including “Quito”, in English and in Spanish. This time there were a few surprises, including a short entry in the December 1810 edition of The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany . Included amongst letters to the editor, descriptions of small towns in Scotland, a reprint of Humboldt’s account of his travels in Mexico, was a section titled “Historical Affairs” that included brief comments on political develops in countries around the Atlantic and European world. Under the sub-heading “South America”, the magazine included miscellaneous reports on the state of political upheavals in Buenos Ayres (sic), Caracas, West Florida, and Quito. Much of the information came from letters sent from Jamaica, though the account of events in Quito was reprinted from reports in New York City newspapers:

 

More on the Machu Picchu controversy

A few days ago the New York Times online ran another article  discussing the Hiram Bingham controversy.  

In this case, I have a hard time imagining an argument against Peruvian control over the artifacts taken from Machu Picchu in the early part of the 20th century. But, ownership can be a tricky thing. At some point, it seems to me, archaeological remains become a patrimony of humanity, not simply the modern nation-state, a form of sovereignty just 200-250 years old, where the artifact happened to end up. My initial reaction would be to say that artifacts should reside in close physical proximity to their places of origin, but as patrimony of humanity, access to those artifacts for scholarly purposes should be sacrosanct. The same goes for the documentary record.

My own family has a farm in south-central Virginia, on the banks of the Nottaway River that has substantial indigenous artifacts dating at least to 6000 BCE. I spent much of my childhood summers walking the fields after a rain or after a plow following the rows, head down, looking for a newly up-turned projectile point. Our family always felt a sense of ownership over those old pieces of worked rock, which as I got older left me with greater, and greater unease. Cactus Hill, one of a handful of pre-Clovis sites in the Americas, is just 10 miles away. Though family interests have worked against it, I’ve always wanted a professional dig done in the sandy peanut soils of our farm. Part of this is simple curiosity, peaked more after the discovery of Cactus Hill. But part of it is a lingering feeling that the gorgeous projectile points, axe heads, and the like that formed my early Neolithic imagination were part of a patrimony that stretched beyond my family, beyond the arrival of Europeans to Virginia’s shores, and even beyond the sedentary groups of indigenous people who were ravaged by disease, warfare, and social disruption in the years leading up to and after those Europeans’ arrival.

Photo credit: Moises Saman for the New York Times.

Update: More on the controversy here.

 

Want to nail that AHA interview?

Some good advice at edgeofthewest.