The blog's themes, summarized

I’m going through the process of migrating my blog over to micro.blog, which has given me occasion to revisit my tags really for the first time (there’s no easy way to manage tags when you’re using Hugo from the command line). Doing so allowed me to clean up and consolidate a lot of tags into things that I think will be much more useful for navigating parts of this site (both for readers but also myself).

The hope here is to try and draw out what I see as themes across my writing. Here’s an attempt to do so across my most frequently used tags. (Thanks to Alan for the inspiration to do this).

• I have posts about conferences I attend, specifically about the Western History Association, the American Society for Environmental History, and the American Historical Association.
• Posts about programming, or specifically about Ruby, Python, Javascript, or Golang.
• I care a lot about coffee.
• I have what I consider my commonplace notebook for quotes, poems, and ideas.
• I collect writing about writing.
• Lots of posts about digital history and digital humanities (yes, these are different things). Some of these are newer lines of thinking, like artificial intelligence.
• I have various aspects of research documented here, including things on the American West, text analysis, spatial history, and data visualization. This includes some new things I’m beginning notes on what I call repair & maintain, material about Wendell Berry, and pieces on environment and/or climate change.
• I think and write about place, including regionalism, the American West, and the American Midwest.
• I’ve started noting when I watch a movie, and what I think of it.
• I also have other reviews, primarily around technology or books.
• I care about the web and the indie web and blogging a lot.
• Here I write about the university and academic life generally.
• I write on our homestead life and my Farmall H restoration project.

I’ll also use this post to collect some essays I’ve written elsewhere (some of which are reproduced here):

• “Spoiled Fruits: Environmental Inequality in Silicon Valley” for AHA’s Perspectives on History
• “How Silicon Valley provides the blueprint for cleaning up our drinking water,” for The Washington Post
• “How Silicon Valley Industry Polluted the Sylvan California Dream,” for The Conversation

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Overall, this was a useful exercise. It was nice to pull together these themes and ideas: In part so I don’t have to revisit those areas where I’ve said all I want to say, but also to follow the trails of things I’m still in the midst of thinking about. (Some of that new thinking is happening in my other blog Tack & Ink). I expect this to be something of an evolving post as new themes, ideas, and essays emerge.