It’s been a remarkable year.

• We gave birth to our second daughter. Those two provide so much joy and silliness in my world, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
• We completed a bunch of home renovations. Thankfully, we should be done with those.
• I published two journal articles with my brilliant colleague here in the libraries.
• I sent off two book manuscript drafts: an edited volume on digital community engagement, and my book on Silicon Valley’s environmental history.
• I wrote and submitted three grant proposals.
• And all of that among the teaching, program development, digital history development, ongoing research projects, committee and service work, outreach, conferencing and presentations, and mentorship that make up my days.

Looking forward to a break over the holidays, and excited for the year ahead.

“Zero waste helps us reexamine our relationship with stuff in a way that can seem progressive and anti-consumerist. But the way this movement is promoted and practiced seems to drag us right back into traditional gender roles.”

And the ultimate triumph of being anti-web is to make links scarce. The smallest possible number of links a platform could allow is zero, so Instagram gets as close to that theoretical limit as possible, and gives you… one.

I’m peer reviewing conference proposals for Digital Humanities 2020 and, as always, I’m blown away by the innovative and exciting work that’s being produced.

A smart piece on why it’s so hard to get young people into activism in places where they feel forgotten.

‪I just sent off a full book manuscript to my editor. ‬

I really enjoyed Firefox’s wrap-up of my year.

I’ve been learning Norwegian 🇳🇴 and have to say the way Duolingo teaches possessive pronouns has me totally lost. I just can’t wrap my head around it yet, since the possessive typically comes after the noun rather than before.

I’ve created my first R package: a dataset of Superfund sites in the United States. Contributions and suggestions are most welcome.

There’s something refreshing and liberating about checking in on Micro.blog, only to see that I have just ten to twenty posts to catch up on.

The United States as viewed from California.

“I’m acutely aware of the fact that in many contexts that I enter, I’m probably the only native person there or has maybe ever even been there."

“The U.S. government’s system for declassifying and processing historical records has reached a state of crisis.”

Over at the blog, I reflect on @lmullen’s first newsletter on the idie web.

“Chatham House predicts urbanisation, population growth and economic development will push global cement production from 4 to 5bn tonnes a year. If developing countries expand their infrastructure to current average global levels, the construction sector will emit [470 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide by 2050](Concrete & Destruction @ The Guardian https://urbanculturalstudies.wordpress.com/2019/11/27/concrete-destruction-the-guardian/).”

John James Audobon, wild turkey, from The Birds of America, ca. 1830.

Thankful today for family, friends, colleagues, and students. Happy Thanksgiving 🦃 Take some time to reflect on our history today.

Fantastic comic by Vrendi: Why Am I Scared to Ride a Bike?

Excited to announce the volume I’ve edited with Rebecca Wingo and Paul Schadewald will be coming out in the spring of 2020 with the University of Cincinnati press as an open-access Manifold publication.

Close. I think the book draft is close.

Some summer reading.

Inspired by the NYTimes piece showing where single family zoning is prohibited in several US cities, I decided to try and reproduce that work for Omaha. Pink is zoned for single family; green for multifamily. High res image is here.

“People who think of themselves as progressives, environmentalists and egalitarians fight fiercely against urban development, complaining about traffic and shadows and the sanctity of lawns.” The NYTimes, basically summarizing my book.

I just whipped up a small geolocation web app for a course I’m working with this Fall, in case anyone has a similar need to find the lat/lon of where they’re standing/sitting.

Me: opens Spotlight, types rstud Spotlight: Did you mean rstudio_logo_125x125.png? Me: muscle memory hits return before I see the error Spotlight: haha good luck ever opening RStudio again! Me: wait no