Recent Articles
The issue of mobility in academia
Feb 10, 2007 career, travel Leave a comment
Barbara Weinstein, the new president of the AHA and an inspiring professor that I’ve heard speak in an informal setting in Toronto, talks about the issue of mobility in Academia on the latest issue of Perspectives. I confess that the need for travelling is one of the main attractions of the academic life for me. I love the idea of having to travel for conferences and to spend the occasional summer or academic year abroad. Yet, sometimes life gets in the way and Weinstein speaks about what happens when a scholar can’t move around so much. Very interesting article.
Call for more professors to start blogs
Feb 10, 2007 digital media, publication, research Leave a comment
Dan Cohen, an Assistant Professor of history at George Mason University and a director of the Center for History and New Media issued a public call for professors to embrace the blogosphere. Among other advantages, it would make the exchange of ideas and information easier and faster than the current book-journal format.
too many docs!!
Feb 8, 2007 ditigital documents, research, tools 8 Comments
Most of my documents at the archives are available in microfilm, which, although nice for preserving the integrity of the 600-year old documents I look at, means that the only available copying method is a paper photocopy from the microfilm. It’s all very nice to have hard copies of things but for a big research project such as mine, it means I end up with thousands of paper sheets to bring home.
I pondered about it for a while. The lot was too heavy to bring with me as carry on when I go back to Canada. Sending it through the mail or as checked luggage means a risk I’m not prepared to take. The only way I could do it is if I had a second set of copies done. That way, I could send one set, wait until it got there and then send the second set without having to worry about it. There’s only one problem with that: it would double the amount of paper and weight of the whole lot.
The solution occurred to me when I had to scan a document for my dad. Since we don’t have a scanner at home here, I went to a local photocopying place in Gracia. I noticed that their photocopying machine was also a scanner so theoretically, it would be just as easy for them to scan something as it would to photocopy it. So I talked to Susana, the girl in charge, and we agreed on a price per volume to scan my documents. I took about half of what I have sitting at home last week and went to pick it up yesterday. Total: 2,771 pages. About 1.5 GB stored on a DVD. And that’s only half of what I have photocopied at home! And I have probably as many pages from the digital registers*! I estimate that by the end, I’ll probably have somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 manuscript pages, covering a short period of 10 years.
I’ll definitely need to find a way of narrowing it down when I get back….
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* some of the chancery registers I look at have been digitized (photographed) and I was able to just copy the image files instead of making photocopies of those…
MacJournal: good for writing thesis?
Feb 5, 2007 macjournal, research, tools 8 Comments
“Keep a diary.” That was one of the most common advices I got from more experiences friends and wise supervisors before I set out to do research. It could be a personal diary or a more work-related journal of ideas for future project. Anything where I could write down things that occurred to me while I spent hours stairing at manuscripts… This advice was further strenghtened when I read Joan Bolker’s Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day, in which she advises students to keep a diary related to their research. Being a computer geek, I immediately thought that to be useful, such a diary needed to be searcheable electronically. Something a little fancier yet more practical than Word. Along came MacJournal, a nifty little program that allows one to organize information under multiple journals and entries:
On the left side you can see the journals and within those, the entries. There doesn’t see to be a size limit – some of my entries are several pages-long.
One can also have a quick look at all the entries available in a journal and can access them through a hyperlink:
Up until recently, I had been using this program for basically two things: to write random data that doesn’t fit in my database and to keep a personal diary of my visits to the archive. After a discovered an easy upload option to wordpress (and also to blogger & other blogging platforms), I started using it also to write blogs when I’m not online.
I’m now thinking it might work as a tool to organize my notes once I start writing my dissertation. It lends itself well to the old method of subject cards – I can have each chapter as a journal and the different subjects treated in the chapter as entries. I’m quite attracted to how fast MacJournal searches through all the entries and how easily the entries can be printed or exported as pdf. Another bonus is that I can import text from other programs – Word for example – as either an entry or as part of a pre-existing entry. Does anybody envision any drawbacks?
Here I imported a file (bibliography.doc) as a new entry:
Welcome!
Feb 4, 2007 Introduction, Peregrina 1 Comment
I’m a PhD student of history and I’ve decided to create this blog to talk about the adventures, trials & tribulations of research, writing, teaching, and presenting history. I usually avoid writing about it in my general blog since I assume it would bore most people to death. So I wanted to create a space where fellow historians and grad students could share their experiences as we make our path through the study of history… I’m sure there must be others like me out there feeling like a total fraud but who nonetheless would like to give it a real shot at being a good historian and teacher.
But before we get into that, here’s a little on my choice of “pilgrim of history” for the title of this blog:
In Spanish, the verb peregrinar means to travel through a series of places or to go from one place to another. It also defines a “peregrina(o)” (pilgrim) not only in the religious sense of someone who visits a holy site but also someone who wanders through foreign lands. It also gives it the more colloquial meaning of a weird and strange person (“raro o extraño”).
The verb peregrinor, peregrinari, peregrinatus sum in Latin means – peregrinari est peregre iter facere, per aliena loca peragrantem proficisci, patria procul abire; in English: to go abroad, travel through foreign parts or countries, live in foreign countries…
When I was a child, I thought history should be taught at the actual places events happened. We should have to go to Greece and Rome to learn about classical civilizations, to travel to Africa, Latin America or Asia to learn about European imperialism & colonization, and to visit the medieval towns of Europe in order to get a sense of the Middle Ages. Thus, the word pilgrim best describes my journey through life and history…
