Category Archives: Research

Historian’s Road Trip

Posted on October 23, 2012 by LaDale Winling

This summer my family took a road trip out to the western Chicago suburbs to support some research I have been doing on the creation of Argonne National Laboratory. Argonne was located near Lemont along the Illinois and Michigan Canal … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Chicago, Cities, Higher Education, History, Research | Leave a comment

Historic Aerial Photography – Soil Conservation Service

Posted on June 16, 2012 by LaDale Winling

Next up in blogging the book project is a return to aerial photography. Background: during the New Deal, agriculture was a key priority, and soil a specific component of that — see, for example, Don Worster’s The Dust Bowl. So … Continue reading →

Posted in Chicago, Cities, Digital History, History, New Deal, Photography, Research, University of Chicago | Leave a comment

Using a Wiki to Keep Notes

Posted on May 19, 2012 by LaDale Winling

Murph, a friend of mine from graduate school, used to take notes on a wiki on his personal site, Common Monkeyflower. I was damned impressed and tried to implement a wiki on the cheap for a few years, to no … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital History, Higher Education, History, Internet, Research | Leave a comment

OSU and the PWA

Posted on April 1, 2012 by LaDale Winling

Recently I have been working on a chapter on Austin, Texas, and the relationship between higher education institutions (eg UT) and the federal government at mid-century. Prompted by this, I have gone back through some of my PWA research from … Continue reading →

Posted in Higher Education, History, New Deal, Research, University of Texas | Leave a comment

Modest Living

Posted on October 8, 2011 by LaDale Winling

As part of my book research I’m looking at the 1930 U.S. census for Austin, Texas. Since a local public library has an institutional subscription, I can look at digitized pages through Footnote/Fold3, a genealogy research service. I stumbled across … Continue reading →

Posted in Austin, Higher Education, History, Research, University of Texas | Leave a comment

Historians and the Public

Posted on October 4, 2011 by LaDale Winling

Thomas Bender, from a recent paper on historians and public engagement: The scholar, for Dewey, does not approach the public as an expert, but rather as one of the public. But, and this is crucial, he or she is a … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Public History, Research | Leave a comment

N-grams and the Ivory Tower

Posted on September 25, 2011 by LaDale Winling

One of the more prominent areas of focus in the digital humanities has been text mining. Having started from a prominent place in literature studies, the method has now become a developed tool in digital historians’ toolkits (cf The Programming … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital History, Higher Education, History, Research | Leave a comment

Section 112 Credits

Posted on July 1, 2011 by LaDale Winling

The Section 112 Credits program was an urban renewal effort created in the Housing Act of 1959 to facilitate the expansion of universities and hospitals in urban areas. The program created a 2-to-1 federal matching grant given to cities where … Continue reading →

Posted in Research, Short Summaries | Leave a comment

Short Summaries

Posted on June 30, 2011 by LaDale Winling

A new feature I’m adding is Short Summaries, a basic introduction with reading recommendations to issues or topics that come out of my research. The first one is yesterday’s post on Section 112 credits, a widely-used but highly understudied urban … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Research, Short Summaries | Leave a comment

Google Fusion Tables

Posted on February 28, 2011 by LaDale Winling

Just checking out the capability of a Google data tool using a dataset I have. It’s pretty nifty, but it seems to have a few bugs. The project at the University of North Dakota was completed in 1936, for example, … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital History, Geography, Higher Education, History, Research | 1 Comment