Tag: writing

• Reflecting on 2025: Researching, Connecting, and Exploring

  This blog has slowly transformed into a place where I mostly just post this annual year in review sort of post. I may still consider other types of posts in the future, but for the time being, I will be sure to at the very least maintain this annual tradition. This is the 13th one of these year end reflective posts. If you are curious, you can see my reflections at the end of 2024, 2023,  2022,  2021,  2020, 2019,  2018, 2017, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.

  I’m a big fan of the value of self reflection, so I get a lot out of taking time to round up, and try and synthesize things at least once a year. If you are curious about what I’ve been reading about, you can check out the 50 some I read this year in order on Goodreads.

  

  Rounding Out Year Two at AIP

  I started as AIP’s first Chief Research Officer in February of 2024. So, 2025 was my first full year in this role. I feel like I really found my stride this year. Back in January we put out AIP’s first annual research agenda. Over the course of the year, the fantastic team of social scientists, historians, archivists and librarians that I support delivered a lot of great results aligned to that agenda.

  At the start of the year we launched an interactive with info on physical scientists and engineers employed by the U.S. federal government in February. In April, we put out a report on the Impacts of Restrictions on Federal Grant Funding in Physics and Astronomy Graduate Programs. Along with that, in the fall we also were able to publish short report that provides data on International Students in U.S. Physics and Astronomy Graduate Programs and some of the first national data so far to document a decline in STEM graduate student enrollments in 2025. That is just a sampling of some of the 17 reports that our social science team put out this year.

  

  While I am proud to have supported all of that work, I should note that I am particularly proud of this report that we came out with in December that focuses on the stories of 22 different early career volunteer leaders in science and engineering societies in AIP’s federation. Along with that report, we were able to put out this article earlier in the fall in Physics Today that focuses in on four of the early career leaders stories and works to offer some really practical and clear advice for early career professionals and their mentors.

  In support of that research agenda, we were able to kick off some great digital collecting initiatives through AIP’s Niels Bohr Library and Archives. We launched a new tool to recive photo submissions from physical scientists in July and that same month kicked off a new initiative founded by the Henry Luce Foundation focused on documenting and celebrating women’s contributions to the physical sciences. In September we kicked off a project to collect stories from physical scientists whose career journeys have been impacted by funding cuts. Following along with our focus on collecting photos this year, I also wrote a piece for Radiations Magazine about my experience encountering the NIST-4 Kibble Balance.

  

  Dinner of the American Physical Society (APS) at the Ambassador Hotel . Fred Hess & Son, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, gift of Mark Zemansky.

  Along with those activities that help to advance that overall research agenda, I was able to make some time to explore and share out some small stories highlighting some of the unique historical materials of the Niels Bohr Library and Archives. I wrote about a fun story that Physics Today ran in 1969 to identify everyone in a photo from a banquet at an American Physical Society conference from 1932. I also wrote a short piece exploring some telegrams and photos in our collections from the J.H. Van Vleck papers. I wrote about Jack Oliver’s fascinating memoir, Shakespeare Got It Wrong, and used that as a prompt to invite more physical scientists to document their lives in memoir for us to preserve and provide access to. I was then excited to share out about some of the new memoirs from scientists that we received for the Sigma Pi Sigma newsletter.

  I also interviewed a number of researchers and memory workers about their work. I interviewed author Olivia Campbell about her book Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History. I interviewed the sociologist of science Janet Vertasi about her ethnographic research on robotic space missions. I interviewed historian of science Joe Martin about his research on the history of the development of solid state physics. Lastly, I interviewed Leontien Talboom about her work at Cambridge University Libraries with Stephen Hawking’s floppy disks.

  Web Archives & Digital Preservation

  I’ve been channeling most of my research and writing energy directly into my work at AIP. With that said, I did also make some progress on a few other side projects related to web archiving and digital preservation that I had been working on for a while. Ben Lee, Jonah Estess and I had a piece on digital traces and records of Colin Powell’s Case for War in Iraq PowerPoint on the web come out in the journal Internet Histories.

  

  I was also able to get the full manuscript Digital Preservation: A Critical Vocabulary, the edited volume that Rebecca Frank and I have been working to support, up online and submitted. I anticipate that we will likely be able to get the final version of the book worked through the process to be published next year.

  Bridging the Last Book and Work at AIP

  In the spring, I was invited to give a talk on campus at the University of Michigan as part of their Data, Archives and Information in Society Seminar program. It was great to get the chance to talk a bit with students and faculty and further develop the through-line between my last book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory which came out last year and the work that I’m supporting around collective memory in my role at AIP.

  

  Along with that, I was thrilled to have the chance to have a conversation with Shannon Mattern about the book and in the context of all the disruptive change that has been happening to the culture memory community as part of the Internet Archive’s Future Knowledge Series.

  Last but not least in this run of interviews, I very much appreciated the chance to participate in a two part interview post, Science As Story, Memory as Infrastructure (part two) for the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Scholarly Kitchen blog with Wendy Queen. That presented a nice opportunity to discuss how the work I am trying to support these days is focused on demonstrating ways that social science and humanities work and research can, and should, support empowering positive change in the physical sciences.

  

  Along with all that work and interaction, I was honored to be invited back to Madison Wisconsin this fall to be recognized as a luminary of alum of the institution. While I was back in Madison, I also had a conversation with some of the current students in the Integrated Liberal Studies program about careers and the role of study of the humanities. There is a nice piece about that event in the fall newsletter from the Integrated Liberal Studies Program. I was also honored to be inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma, the physics and astronomy honor’s society this fall.

  Travel and Exploration

  There was a good bit of travel and exploring this year too. We rang in the new year at a cabin out in the woods in West Virginia. We had an amazing trip to Japan at the start of the year. We had a few trips back to Chicago for family events. I ended up getting the chance to go to Alaska for a quick trip for work. I got to Santa Fe and Denver for meetings. I tagged along with Marjee for a conference she was going to in San Fransisco. We went for a getaway out to the beach in Delaware and we went up to Woodstock NY for a bit to see the leaves change.

  December 19, 2025

  History, philosophy, physics, Science, writing

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• Reflecting on 2023

  As a year comes to a close I try to round up and reflect a bit on this unit of time. This year 10th one of these year end reflective posts that I’ve written. You can see my reflections at the end of 2022,  2021,  2020, 2019,  2018, 2017, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.

  I’m a big fan of metacognition, so I get a lot out of taking time to round up, reflect, and try and synthesize things at least once a year. If you are curious about what I’ve been reading about, you can see the 50 books I read this year in order on Goodreads.

  

  

  

  Year two as Director of Digital Services

  At the start of 2022, I was about six months into my new role as the Director of Digital Services. This year I was really able to get into the swing of things. Early in the year, I was excited to be able to share out about the Library of Congress Digitization Strategy. If you are curious to learn a bit more about what kinds of things folks across the Digital Services Directorate are working on, you can check out some of these interviews I was able to get up over the course of the year with Thomas Crowley, Carly Boerrigter and Lauren Algee.

  After Disruption is Complete

  At the end of 2021, I shared that I was under contract on my next book, After Disruption a Future for Cultural Memory. At the end of 2022, I’d shared that I submitted the full draft manuscript for the book. For anyone interested, I’ve had open review drafts of the first and second half of the book, out online since July of 2022. I’m happy to share that the full manuscript of the book was well received by peer reviewers. This year I worked through a short set of revisions to the manuscript to address reviewer comments, developed the index for the book, and worked through two rounds of reviews of page proofs. The book has gotten some really great advance praise. I’m thrilled that this book will be available open access when it comes out. It looks like it should be published in May of 2024. So stay tuned for that.

  

  

  Spanish Translation of Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation

  The open access version of the Spanish translation of my last book, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation was published earlier this year by the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. La teoría y el oficio de la preservación digital was produced by a team of library and information science experts led by Isabel Galina Russell. It was published earlier this year in print. I’m very grateful for the work this team put into making this book more accessible.

  December 29, 2023

  books, business, publishing, self-publishing, writing

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• On Writing, Making and Mining: Digital History Class Projects

  This is the forth post in a multi-post series reflecting on the digital history course I taught last semester at American University. For more on this you can read initial post about the course, the course syllabus, my posts on the value of a group public blog on how technical to get in a digital history course and on how the students content will continue to be a part of future version of the course.
  

  I am a big fan of the idea that building and making is a hermeneutic. Part of what makes the idea of the digital humanities particularly nifty is the idea that we can embrace building tools, creating software, designing websites and a range of maker activities as an explicit process of understanding. Because of this, and in light of my feelings about the necessity for students to develop technical competency, I knew I wanted students in my class to work on a digital project.

  With that said I gave my students a choice.

  Everyone had to write proposals for both a digital and print project. For print projects they  proposed papers that either used digital tools to make sense of a set of texts or proposed interrogating something that was itself “born digital.” For digital projects students were required to create some kind of digital resource, a blog, a wiki, a podcast, an interactive map, a curated web exhibit, a piece of software, etc.

  When I mentioned the structure of this assignment to Tom Sheinfieldt he suggested that I would be receiving 20 papers. One paper from every student. We’ll get back to what I got once I explain my justification for including writing as an option.

  Three reasons writing in Digital History is new

  Here are three reasons to justify using the limited time in a digital history course to work on writing projects.

  The case for writing about mediums

  Historians are trained to work with particular kinds of materials and to ask questions which are (to some extent) based on the nature of those materials.  Historical understanding fundamentally requires us to understand how the nature of a given medium shapes and effects the traces of the past it has on it. This requires us to know to think about communication in a letter as a different voice from a speech, and further to recognize that the transcript of a speech is not necessarily  what was said, and does not include information about how it was said. It also requires us to approach different media on the terms on which they were used and the terms on which they function. For an example of some of this kind of work in photography I would strongly suggest Trachtenberg’s Reading American Photographs. Similarly, there is a extensive tradition in “reading” and interpreting everything from tree rings in environmental history, to Long Island parkway bridges in the history of technology, to forks and spoons in Bancroft award winning works of American History. This is all to highlight that there is a long tradition of understanding objects in context in history.  I really want my students to become, to borrow from Matt Kirshembalm borrowing from William Gibson “aware of the mechanisms” they are intrepreting. In this capacity I want my students to do extensive research using and interpreting born digital materials.

  The case for writing about data

  While history has a long history of working with deeply understanding the medium on which traces from the past are recorded, in my experience, much of that history tends to be focused on close reading. Taking a few examples and digging deeply into understanding them.  In the sciences the question is what do you do with a million galaxies, in the humanities it is what do you do with a million books? In both cases the answer is that we need ways conceptualize and refine ways to do distant reading or at least a hermeneutics of screwing around. In class we looked at a range of examples in this space, nGram, CHOA, tools like Voyer and even things as simple as Wordle.

  The case for writing as part of building

  Many my students wanted to go into public history. I want them to take the opportunity to deeply explore and reflect on how systems can be created to support their work. Here I am very much in the build things camp, but a big part of building is critically reflecting on what is built. For example, writing about the web presence of a war memorial on Flickr, Yelp, and Tripadviser can offer substantive insights into what and how we should make tools and platforms to support public history. I feel quite strongly that we need a body of design and development literature that deeply engages with analyzing, evaluating, digital humanities projects.

  So did I get 20 papers?

  I am thrilled to report that many of the students jumped at the opportunity to develop digital skills and build out web projects. In the end I received ten papers and ten digital projects. Several students who built digital projects made comments like “I decided to step outside my comfort zone,” and I was thrilled to see them do exactly that. I think the fact that we worked with so many relatively easy to use platforms for getting web projects up and out there (ie wordpress.com, omeka.net, google my maps, etc.) played a role in getting these projects up and out there. You can browse on the projects page of the site. Both the papers and the digital projects turned out great. From the proposals to the final projects I think you can really see development toward some of the core ideas. With that said there was one interesting trend that I am curious about getting other peoples thoughts on.

  No one touched text mining/text analysis:

  I thought that some of the students would take the opportunity to use tools like Vouyer or even something as simple as Wordle to work with some of the texts they are already working with in their research. Or, similarly, that some students would use some of the online corpra we looked at to explore some of their research interests in this kind of environment. To take these tools, or to take some of the corpora we were working with and use them to do some historical research. We talked about this a fair bit but no one took these up as a project idea. Instead, all of the papers students worked on explore born digital issues. Don’t get me wrong, students wrote very cool papers, for example, looking at the web presence of different war memorials and examining Fallout’s idea of the wasteland in the context of the history of apocalyptic writing. Further, the web projects turned out great too.

  For whatever reason, no one wanted to try to work with the tools like Vouyer or Wordle, and no one took on the opportunity to write something up using Google nGram or Mark Davies Corpus of American English or Time Magazine corpus. In future iterations of this course I imagine I might require everyone to write a short post using at least one of these sorts of things with a set of texts. Thinking about primary source material is data sets is one of the most important things for historians to wrap their heads around.

  Is text mining more radical than building for historians?

  Students were excited to create digital projects. Students were excited to write about born digital source material. However, no one touched text mining or anything remotely related to distant reading.  Now it is possible that I just didn’t make this sound interesting enough. With that said, we did in fact have a great conversation about distant reading, we did cover some of the very easy to use tools and corpra early in the semester and everyone clearly got it. It makes me think that while in digital humanities conversations the idea of building as a hermeneutic is a hot topic that, at least in the case of digital history, distant reading may well be even more radical. In my own reflection, the kind of data mind set that one needs to develop and deploy in this sort of research feels more distant than the idea that we learn through building.

  June 2, 2011

  making, mining, teaching, thinking, writing

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