This semester I’m fortunate to have the opportunity — two opportunities really — to supervise an undergraduate and a graduate student working on two very different internships. The typical history internship is one where the student works at a client site off campus and the supervising professor simply makes sure something that has academic merit…
Tag: 1989 online
Why Wolfram Alpha Won’t Work for Historians
In our most recent episode of Digital Campus one of the news items I had a particularly caustic view of was the new search engine Wolfram Alpha. My broader pronouncement in the podcast that WA will “sink like a stone” is predicated on the incredibly clunkiness of the interface and the fact that when the…
What a Way to Launch a Website
For the past three years now my colleagues and I have been hard at work on the website Making the History of 1989. We are very proud of the site and have been gratified to see traffic grow each month. Our hope is that by the end of this 20th anniversary of the events of…
Imperial Legacies in the Present
The excellent blog Strange Maps has just offered up a very interesting example of the last legacies of the recent past — meaning the past hundred years or so. This map, which superimposes the borders of Imperial Germany and Russia on a map of electoral data from the 2007 parliamentary elections in Poland. Even a…