How the digital age is democratizing history, and spreading misinformation.
Read More "What is historical research in the internet age?"
Dissertation Progress: Week of October 5th
I started this week off with a visit to a class on plague. Most of my work time was spent compiling manuscripts into an appendix that no one will ever read. And I’m taking out my mounting anxiety by sewing a coat.
Read MoreWorking motherhood
In my circles, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of those deep losses that aches dully for a long time. Among the women I know, there is a feeling that RBG was one of us, whatever that means. To a certain subset, it means that she was a working mother.
Read MoreThe great pumpkin pudding experiment
Do you ever get a taste in your mind? Like you just imagine a flavor that you’ve never had before and you wonder whether you can make it happen? That’s how pretty much all of my cooking projects come together. Call it my particular form of synesthesia.
Read MoreDissertation Reading (and reading, and reading)
A while back I wrote about my dissertation writing process and its many stages of revisions. Now that I technically have a full draft (albeit one with a bunch of holes and exposed seams), I’ve entered the reading phase.
Read MoreDissertation Progress: Week of September 7th
Last week(s) I did lots of work, and none of it was my dissertation.
Read MoreHow do you tell the history of video games?
Like most people who’ve seen it, I’m feeling that the new Netflix series on the history of the video game industry is… lackluster. The problem is that it’s a history of the industry. The major points in the story are technological paradigm shifts, legal battles, and corporate marketing strategies. These highlights are filled in with personal stories from people who enjoyed the commercial product as kids, people who are overwhelmingly white or male. But even when the series manages to highlight contributions or experiences from a more diverse group – the Black engineer who developed the cartridge system, the woman who pioneered graphic RPGs, the gay man who made a pride game in the middle of the AIDS crisis – these just feel thin, like drops in the bucket that don’t capture what made video games important. Part of the problem is the storytelling, which seems to assume that its audience is simultaneously middle aged white men who grew up playing games or programming, and young kids who know absolutely nothing about anything. But the bigger problem is one of historical discipline – video games might be an industry, but they are also a cultural phenomenon, and their history has to be a cultural one.
Read MoreDissertation Progress – Week of August 17th
I maybe finished a full draft of my dissertation this week?
Read MoreTwo years postpartum
The most important thing I’ve been told in this early stage of motherhood is “the postpartum period is two years long.”
Read MoreComfort Food
The first time I heard the phrase “comfort food”, I asked my mom what it meant, and she told me it was food that made people feel good. I thought that was a strange definition, since at the time I didn’t really have any emotional association with food and so that was a pretty foreign concept to me. I also remember thinking that definition wasn’t it because people seemed to mean something specific when they said it. Comfort food, I realized, was used to describe all the foods I had a viscerally negative reaction to – food that you might see in a commercial being slowly dropped into melted butter or drizzled over something. I guess I did have an emotional association with food after all.
