I’m not a regular year-end blogger other than yearly theme posts but I wanted to take a moment at the end of 2024 to reflect amidst my own 2025 theme. One thing I’ve done pretty consistently since 2021 is to consider a yearly theme. Those have been:
Foundation for me means a few things: new structures in place around health and fitness, some long-term work we’ll be doing around our acreage (barn restoration, garden expansion, orchard expansion, prairie re-wilding), career goals, and some long-term household tasks. So this year will be spent, in part, with an eye towards the future. We’ve also had, in some ways, a tough 2024. This year will serve as something of a reset as well.
If you are interested in what I’ve been reading, you can check out my micro.blog reading log.
New Book, New Digital History, Next Book, New Blogging
In March 2024, my book Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High Tech Urbanism came out with the University of Oklahoma Press. I’m really proud of how well the book turned out and it’s been well-received (including my neighbor, who unbeknownst to me told me he was reading it and really liked it. It’s the best review I could’ve gotten). As part of the book’s release, I did a couple of podcasts and visited a few classes to talk about the project. All in all, I’m happy with the work.
It was also a busy time around RRCHNM. We launched several new projects this year, including:
- The Arnham Postal History project, providing a database and mapping environment for tracing postal routes in the Netherlands during World War II.1
- La Sfera, or The Globe by Gregorio Dati: Still in development but soft launched a couple of months ago, the project is a critical edition of Gregorio Dati’s La sfera manuscript written sometime around 1430.
- The Denig Manuscript: In collaboration with the Winterthur Museum, Library and Gardens, we provide an interface to read, view, and hear the eighteenth-century illuminated manuscript by the Pennsylvania Dutch merchant Ludwig Denig.
- Connecting Threads: Launched in October at an event in London, Connecting Threads seeks to investigate the consumption of Indian and Indian-imitation fabrics by communities of the global south. Much more is coming in the next year. To pursue that work, Deepthi Murali and I won an NEH grant to continue the work.
- Lots of progress on existing projects as well: a redesign of the Bills of Mortality website; new content for Religious Ecologies; new work for the Civil War Graffiti project.
- I’ll be teaching Digital Public History in our Digital Public Humanities certificate program again this spring.
- I also began a new mentorship with one of our graduate students helping me out with development work. It’s been a lot of fun and, I hope, engaging and useful for her.
I’ve begun work on my next book as well this year. I’m returning to some work I completed in graduate school on the Sagebrush Rebellion in the northern plains. I’m hoping to spend a lot of time in the archives this year—in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska—so I can make some further progress on the work. Relatedly, I’ve started a side blog/newsletter called Tack & Ink where I’ll be writing about my research in progress. I hope you’ll consider subscribing.
Life
2024 wasn’t all work, of course. My family and I had a busy year of experiences: a big summer road trip through Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho; we attended concerts of Sarah Jarosz, NEEDTOBREATHE, Hozier, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson; visiting family; and lots of work around our acreage.
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This project was transferred to the PI for hosting and, unfortunately, may not be online at the moment. ↩︎
