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Connecting the Dots

This is the incredibly belated transcript of my HASTAC 2015 keynote. Many thanks to the organizers for inviting me, and to my fellow participants for all the wonderful discussions. The video and slides are also online. You can find citations to some of the historical illustrations and many of my intellectual inspirations here. What I said and […]

Culturomics 2: The Search for More Money

“God willing, we’ll all meet again in Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.” -Mel Brooks, Spaceballs, 1987 A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (2012 CE, Indiana), I wrote a few blog posts explaining that, when writing history, it might be good to talk to historians (1,2,3). They were popular posts for the […]

[Review] The Book of Trees, Manuel Lima

The first line on the first page of The Book of Trees is “This is the book I wish had been available when I was researching my previous book, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information.” It’s funny, because this is also the book I wish had been available when I was researching my own project, Knowledge Uprooted. It took […]

Understanding Special Relativity through History and Triangles (pt. 1)

We interrupt this usually-DH blog because I got in a discussion about Special Relativity with a friend, and promised it was easily understood using only the math we use for triangles. But I’m a historian, so I can’t leave a good description alone without some background. If you just want to learn how relativity works, […]

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Connecting the Dots

[Review] The Book of Trees, Manuel Lima

Understanding Special Relativity through History and Triangles (pt. 1)