Another Quarter Bites the Dust

Looking back on the prior entries here, I see that I haven’t updated since October 14 of last year. Busy times tend to mean less time spent on my website. Things are still pretty busy, but at least now I seem to have a tiny bit of breathing room as Winter Quarter rolls to a halt.

The Princeton book is now on shelves (and just got a shout-out on Instapundit). I finished the copyediting stage on the Cambridge book (and ended up having to do quite a bit of the indexing, too) and am awaiting page proofs for that. The Archive has now gotten to a full-collection streaming beta test, which was used pretty extensively by my CS162 students (this was the first time their research projects used the Archive more than the Proquest/LATimes option). We’re also proceeding with the expansion to the San Diego market, although we still need to settle some logistical questions down there. And of course, this quarter I’ve also been teaching my Presidential Communication and Evolution of Communication Technology courses, as well as three honors sections, SRP and 199 supervision, and helping develop two exciting new USIE courses for next quarter.

On an unrelated note, I came across the above chart (from the statistical atlas of the 9th census, from 1870) and was reminded of a conversation with one of my honors sections this quarter, in which we were discussing the need to control for “The South” in a time series Erik Engstrom and I did examining newspaper partisanship and voting patterns. The chart shows the percentage of the population then that was foreign-born. Pretty striking.

I also wonder why a chunk seems to have been cut out of upstate New York. Odd.