Lincoln Mullen is a historian of American religion and the nineteenth-century United States.
Part of the fun of collaborating with other people—and perhaps especially with graduate students—is that they think of things you never would have. So here is an American Religious Ecologies zine ( PDF ), put together by Shae Corey who was a graduate student on the project. Shae put this together for a conference on DC history, and she also wrote up a blog post for RRCHNM about how to…
The American Historical Association and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media jointly award the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History . Applications for the 2026 prize are now open with a due date of May 15. This is the signal prize in digital history. The Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History is sponsored jointly by the AHA and the Roy Rosenzweig…
Paul Ford and Rich Ziade at the Aboard podcast have a good reminder that good software requires design—and thinking about it as a product—and not just functionality. In my world of DH projects, too many projects are just CRUD apps around a database. While I am optimistic about the possibilities of building with LLMs, we need (I need) more product thinking: not what is most obvious from…
I’ve benefitted a great deal over the years from Kieran Healy’s guides to doing scholarship in plain text, so it’s fun to see his discussion of laying out his Data Visualization book (a book I’ve taught before and will teach again.)
Congratulations to my colleague Jessica Otis and her project team for winning the Renaissance Society of America’s Digital Innovation Award for Death by Numbers . Death by Numbers is one of the data-driven social history projects at RRCHNM, and we announced the prize here .
Welcome back to the (very) occasional newsletter. It has been 668 days since the last issue. Behind, ahead Two months ago it dawned on me that I was behind. I hadn’t been avoiding generative AI for my work. In fact I used it quite a bit. I would give Claude a database schema, and then ask natural language queries and copy and paste the SQL. When I taught students how to make visualizations,…
Two months ago it dawned on me that I was behind. I hadn’t been avoiding generative AI for my work. In fact I used it quite a bit. I would give Claude a database schema, and then ask natural language queries and copy and paste the SQL. When I taught students how to make visualizations, I showed them how to use a chatbot to debug their code. I certainly wasn’t above getting a chatbot to…
Another brilliant design , well executed, from Robin Rendle. My own tastes tend to the straightforward, not to say boring. But I love the whimsy of this one. Via: jasonheppler.org
I absolutely adore the design of V. H. Belvadi’s scholarly website . It’s not a design I’d adopt for myself, but it’s a wonderful idea, flawlessly executed. The printer’s key is perfect. Via: jasonheppler.org
This essay on RSS readers asks “why do RSS readers look like email clients?” Though the essay is a little overwrought—if beautifully designed—the main point resonated with me. If RSS readers look like email, then they produce the sense of obligation that email produces: Brent borrowed email’s interface, but RSS isn’t people writing to you. It’s people…
One of the more enjoyable parts of leading RRCHNM is getting to chair the committee that selects the winner of the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History. This year the prize went to Envisioning Seneca Village . Seneca Village was a mixed race but majority Black community located on what became the site of Central Park in New York City. The village was demolished to make way for…
You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. You gave me a large language model; and my profit on’t Is, I make maps as a joke.
My friend and colleague John Turner published his biography, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet , this past summer with Yale University Press. (Why the delayed blog post? Because I manage to publish a blog post as frequently as John publishes a new book.) In addition to the fascinating and well written biography—a worthy sequel (prequel?) to his biography of Brigham Young…
My colleague Stephen Robertson’s incredibly detailed and thoughtful digital monograph, Harlem in Disorder , has won the 2025 Ángel David Nieves Book Award for Best Monograph from American Studies Association, as well as honorable mentions for prizes from the American Society for Legal History and the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute.
After more than a decade at Reclaim Hosting, I’ve moved this site to Cloudflare. My new buddy Claude also cleaned up scores of old posts which were migrated from blog engine to blog engine.
Always a pleasure to take a group of GMU PhD alumni out at the American Historical Association annual meeting.
I’ve posted my syllabus for this semester’s iteration of Data Analysis for History. I’ve been teaching this course for over a decade. (Previous iterations: 2014 , 2016 , 2017 , 2018 , 2019 , 2020 , 2023 .) This is the first time I have totally re-thought the syllabus, rather than iteratively improved it. The course has always had two principles in its approach. The first is that…
Computational Humanities Research is a new journal, edited by Lauren Tilton and Kristoffer Nielbo. From its description at Cambridge University Press: Computational Humanities Research (CHR) is an open access journal in the computational humanities, publishing transdisciplinary papers that are grounded in humanities research questions and use computational, quantitative methodologies to analyse…
Welcome back to the (very) occasional newsletter Working on It . It has been 277 days since the last issue. Antisemitism, U.S.A. A couple of years ago, my colleague John Turner and I bounced around ideas for a podcast on the history of antisemitism in the United States. We were sure it was necessary topic that public audiences would benefit from learning about. Regrettably, it has become painfully…
My student Kris Stinson will be defending his dissertation at the end of the semester. Here is the formal announcement: The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is pleased to announce the following dissertation defense: Shadows and Solid Things: Religion and Archaeology in the Atlantic World Kristofer Stinson, History Advisor: Dr. Lincoln A. Mullen Friday, April 19, 2024 01:00pm–03:00pm…
The first time that I came across the name Roy Rosenzweig was in the textbook for a class titled simply, “Historiography.” The book discussed Rosenzweig’s 1983 book, Eight Hours for What We Will , as a key work in American labor history. Since Eight Hours is a history of workers in Worcester, Massachusetts, just thirty miles from where I grew up, I went to the library and checked…
I am grateful to have worked for Mills Kelly for the past four years as he has served as the executive director at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. In a blog post on our website , he reflects on the last four years at RRCHNM, and a bit beyond.
According to the whiteboard outside our kitchen, there are fourteen days left of summer. So here is a summertime newsletter, heavy on the pictures and light on the prose. Currently listening I found this double LP album for $3 at the CD Cellar in Falls Church. Merle Haggard and The Strangers were recorded live during services at four different churches or chapels. I’m listening it to it for…
Greta Swain —a PhD student in history at George Mason and a key contributor to many projects at RRCHNM—has successfully defended her dissertation. For a long time now I’ve been trying to persuade people to use digital history methods to say something meaningful about the past, and not to stop with creating tools and databases. And that is just what Greta has done in a remarkable…
A new podcast—or rather, a longstanding podcast— has joined R2 Studios at RRCHNM. Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a women’s history podcast that showcases 18th and early 19th-century women’s letters that don’t always make it into the history books. Using her training as a historian and documentary editor, Kathryn Gehred and her guests dig into the story behind each letter and…
News about four students from GMU’s PhD program in history: one off to be a postdoc, one off to work at the Center for Military History, two off to positions as assistant professors.
The May newsletter from RRCHNM contains news of a visualization about Victor Recording’s expeditions in Latin America, two graduate student successes, and a grant for American religious history. Subscribe here .
We are grateful to acknowledge a second NEH grant in support of our American Religious Ecologies project. The National Endowment for the Humanities announced this week that RRCHNM will receive a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant for $350,000 to continue our work with the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies for the next three years. This new grant follow on our previous award, also…
If you care about the open web, you probably use RSS feeds. And if you use feeds and you’re on a Mac or iOS, then NetNewsWire is the best RSS reader available. And it’s free and open source.
The American Historical Association is accepting entries for the 2023 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History. The Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History is sponsored jointly by the AHA and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University (GMU). It was developed by friends and colleagues of Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007), the Mark…
The Congregational Library and Archives has kindly invited me to talk about America’s Public Bible: A Commentary with them on April 19. The event is online and open to the public if you register here . Join us for a virtual discussion with Lincoln Mullen to celebrate the release of America’s Public Bible: A Commentary, an interactive scholarly work that uncovers the history of the Bible in…
The Guardian has a three-part series combining visualizations and prose to explain about Manchester’s rise as an industrial textile city and its connection to the slave trade: How Slavery Made Manchester the World’s First Industrial City Accounting for the Cotton Capital’s Human Cost How The Guardian Covered Slavery
My colleagues Jason Heppler and Mills Kelly in the Washington Post today about their collaboration with two local public history sites in Northern Virginia. The houses contain graffiti left by Civil War soldiers, which they will be digitizing and preserving.
The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is launching a newsletter. You can sign up here . This is the best place to keep up with how our students and staff are creating history for public audiences. The first issue is out tomorrow, featuring news of a new podcast on the history of the American revolution; a grad student exchange with a European university; and a new data visualization…
Greetings. As foretold, my interactive scholarly work, America’s Public Bible: A Commentary , is being published today by Stanford University Press. What, you ask, is an interactive scholarly work? I would argue that it is a book which combines prose with the affordances of new media. My children would respond: “Mommy has written a book. You only just made a website.” 1 I leave…
My colleague Jason Heppler writes about “ Building A Data API For Historical Research .” A follow-up to this post .
Ted Gioia has a good issue of his newsletter on academic publishing’s “death instinct” : In this case, the wounds are truly self-inflicted. Scholarly works and textbooks don’t need to be a shrinking business. Many other parts of the book business are flourishing right now. In fact, some niches in publishing are growing rapidly (for example my platform Substack). But those…
As Americans go to the polls to vote in today’s midterm Congressional elections, they will be able to watch results flow practically in real time. By the end of the day, the data for the election returns will be more or less available. For much of United States history, of course, information flowed more slowly. But even still, we can take it for granted that there are regular records of…
A very helpful list of best practices for shell scripting . I’m no expert on shell scripting, but I write lots of little scripts, so it is helpful to have a template for best practices.
Hi folks. I write to you after, lo, these many months with two pieces of news and some recommendations. On December 13, my digital book America’s Public Bible: A Commentary will be published online by Stanford University Press. The book will be a part of Stanford’s digital publishing program , which publishes interactive works of scholarship. More on the book in the lead up to…
Sometime ago Kellen Funk and I used computational analysis to study how the Field Code created the category of civil procedure in American law, and how that New York code spread across jurisdictions in the nineteenth-century United States. We published an article about those specific findings, and have given various talks, shared code, published datasets, and the like. Since that time we have…
The most recent issue of the American Religion @ RRCHNM newsletter features an announcement of our Luce Foundation grant for a podcast on the history of American antisemitism, a new map of male and female preachers in the National Spiritual Alliance, and a new collection of oral histories about the Jewish experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, among other things.
Caroline Greer writes about a National Spiritual Alliance church named after its pastor, Dorcas Brown, and maybe the biblical Dorcas too.
I often have small snippets of Markdown that I want to copy to the clipboard and then paste as HTML. I thought about writing an extension for Visual Studio Code, or a custom script for Boop . But that seemed like a lot of work for a simple task. And then I remembered: Unix. sh pbpaste | pandoc | pbcopy There is a one-liner which will work on a Mac to paste Markdown into Pandoc and then copy the…
If you are a GMU student, faculty, or staff member, you can access library resources from off campus using a library proxy. Suppose you want to access this article: Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 735–62. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/108.3.735 . Following that DOI will take you to this page at the Oxford…
The start of the academic year at RRCHNM also means the return of many of our graduate students. This week RRCHNM welcomed twenty-five graduate research assistants or graduate affiliates . RRCHNM on the first day of classes. Graduate students are a critical part of the work that RRCHNM creates, and RRCHNM is in turn core to the experience of many of the graduate students in GMU’s Department…
This weekend I am giving a presentation about the future of digital scholarship in the field of American religion at the Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture . In the presentation I’ll be sharing a number of digital projects in American religion that I’ve learned a lot from. Since the proceedings of the conference will be published later, I won’t publish my…
Hi folks. Lest this newsletter’s status be downgraded from occasional to sporadic , let me catch you up on the latest news about digital history and American religion from my small corner of the world. My colleagues at RRCHNM and I have started a newsletter about our work. Titled “American Religion @ RRCHNM,” the newsletter is headed up by our excellent outreach manager, Bridget…
I was asked to write up what I thought made someone a good academic mentor, in less than a page. Since I had to write it up quickly, here it is for further thought. This list is partial and based on my own experience, but here is what I’ve observed from watching the good mentors that I have had. What got you here is not what will get them there. Too much of mentorship is the mentor…
RRCHNM is a shop that is more and more working on computational history and historical data visualization. But we are also first and foremost a web shop: ever since Roy Rosenzweig saw the potential of the internet and left CD ROMs behind, we’ve been committed to delivering history via people’s web browsers. Those two commitments are becoming increasingly compatible. For example, Ben…