The First Draft

By Fiddly.fm

The First Draft features discussions about higher education, digital humanities, technology, games, and learning. Hosted by Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler and Paul Zenke.... more

· Education

Download on the App Store

Download on the App Store

Get it on Google Play

FAQs about The First Draft:

How many episodes does The First Draft have?

The podcast currently has 22 episodes available.

The First Draft episodes:

January 15, 2016S3E1: If Only Mark Twain Had D3
Welcome to Season 3, who are we now?, a discussion of Elijah and Jason’s visualizations of a timeline of wars of the United States, the D3.js Slack team, Jason's dissertation research, and superfund sites in Silicon Valley.
Show Notes
Our Town - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Our Town is a 1938 three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder. It tells the story of the fictional American small town of Grover's Corners between 1901 and 1913 through the everyday lives of its citizens.
Planet Money: Episode 647: Hard Work Is Irrelevant
Patty McCord helped create a workplace at Netflix that runs more like a professional sports team than a family. If you're not up to scratch, you're off the team. Is this the future of work?
The Talk Show With John Gruber by Daring Fireball / John Gruber on iTunes
The director’s commentary track for Daring Fireball.
IBM SPSS software
With SPSS predictive analytics software, you can predict with confidence what will happen next so that you can make smarter decisions, solve problems and improve outcomes.
Business intelligence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Business intelligence (BI) is often described as "the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes". The term "data surfacing" is also more often associated with BI functionality.
Principal component analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a statistical procedure that uses an orthogonal transformation to convert a set of observations of possibly correlated variables into a set of values of linearly uncorrelated variables called principal components.
A timeline of wars of the United States by Elijah Meeks
For most of its nearly two and a half century history, the United States has been at war. Some of these wars, like the American Civil War, were terrible and bloody and well-remembered. Others, like the Powder River War, were small and mostly forgotten. One was the result of an individual military officer disregarding orders and invading Mexico to retrieve stolen cattle.
A timeline of wars of the United States by Jason Heppler
I'm not suggesting my view is better than Elijah's; his timeline is making a particular point, and I think makes that point well. The point of his visualiation remains: the United States fights wars, and lots of them. But this view tries to reveal the regions of the world the U.S. fought those conflicts. I also extended Elijah's original dataset, including covert operations run by the United States during the Cold War. The timeline above seeks to provide another view, by looking at the regions of the world where these conflicts were fought as a way to see where the United States engaged over time.
emeeks/d3.layout.timeline
A layout for band-style timelines
List of wars involving the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is a list of armed conflicts involving the United States of America since its founding during the American Revolution.
Tiki-Toki, Beautiful web-based timeline software
Tiki-Toki is web-based software for creating beautiful interactive timelines that you can share on the internet.
Timeline JS3 - Beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use.
TimelineJS is an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines. Beginners can create a timeline using nothing more than a Google spreadsheet. Experts can use their JSON skills to create custom installations, while keeping TimelineJS's core functionality.
Topotime
A pragmatic data model, D3 layout, and Python functions for representing complex and/or uncertain periods and events.
Mark Twain Memory-Builder
If you are lucky, in a dusty used book store or flea market, you may someday happen upon a copy of Mark Twain's Memory Builder, a history game developed by Samuel L. Clemens in the mid-1880s and debuted in 1892, an obscure treasure by one of America’s great writers, an old game of memory almost entirely forgotten today.
Monroe Doctrine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Monroe Doctrine was a U.S. foreign policy regarding domination of the American continent in 1823. It stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S. intervention. At the same time, the doctrine noted that the United States would neither interfere with existing European colonies nor meddle in the internal concerns of European countries. The Doctrine was issued in 1823 at a time when nearly all Latin American colonies of Spain and Portugal had achieved or were at the point of gaining independence from the Portuguese and Spanish Empires. The United States, working in agreement with Great Britain, wanted to guarantee that no European power would move in.
Elijah Meeks on Twitter
"I created a #d3js slack team (http://t.co/xymBSCKjnM) for anyone who wants to talk D3.js. DM me with an email address if you want an invite." Join today!
Bay Area d3 User Group (San Francisco, CA) - Meetup
d3-js - Google Groups
Machines in the Valley: Growth, Conflict, and Environmental Politics in Silicon Valley by Jason A. Heppler
Machines in the Valley is a digital history project that serves as a companion to my dissertation. Between 1945 and 1990, the Santa Clara Valley experienced profound environmental change during an unprecedented wave of urban and industrial growth. With those changes came conflict over landscape change. Answering that question means extending historian Kenneth Jackson’s observation that “the space around us—the physical organization of neighborhoods, roads, yards, houses, and apartments—sets up living patterns that condition our behavior.” In Silicon Valley, the attitudes, ideas, and values that people impart on to nature—biological and idealized—reveals how ideas about nature played out in postindustrial American society. By examining the ways that people created place, the politics they engaged in to protect that place, and examining the physical changes to the landscape that resulted, my research argues for the importance of understanding how space creates politics. The story revolves around whose space Silicon Valley would become: A postindustrial trend-setter? A fertile and beautiful agricultural producer? A countryside paradise? A metropolitan leader?
Leaflet - a JavaScript library for interactive maps
Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Weighing just about 33 KB of JS, it has all the mapping features most developers ever need.
Hiroshima Cat Street View
My Neighbor Totoro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
My Neighbor Totoro is a 1988 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli. The film – which stars the voice actors Noriko Hidaka, Chika Sakamoto, and Hitoshi Takagi – tells the story of the two young daughters (Satsuki and Mei) of a professor and their interactions with friendly wood spirits in postwar rural Japan. The film won the Animage Anime Grand Prix prize and the Mainichi Film Award and Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film in 1988. It also received the Special Award at the Blue Ribbon Awards in the same year.
Choropleth map - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A choropleth map is a thematic map in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the statistical variable being displayed on the map, such as population density or per-capita income.
List of Superfund sites in California, Santa Clara County - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is a list of Superfund sites in California designated under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) environmental law. The CERCLA federal law of 1980 authorized the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to create a list of polluted locations requiring a long-term response to clean up hazardous material contaminations.
Superfund Site Overview Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. (South San Jose Plant), Pacific Southwest, US EPA
The 22-acre Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. (Fairchild) facility (former South San Jose Plant or Site) is located west of Highway 101 about nine miles southeast of downtown San Jose near the intersection of Monterey Highway and Highway 85. The Site is located in a light industrial and commercial area. The plant was constructed between 1975 and 1977 and used for electronics and semiconductor fabrication from 1977 to 1983. Solvents containing volatile organic compounds were used at the Site.
Sunnyvale: EPA plans on testing indoor air quality for vapor intrusion - San Jose Mercury News
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hosting a community meeting Dec. 10 to engage Sunnyvale community members in plans to test the indoor air quality in some of the schools and homes in the Duane and San Miguel avenues neighborhood.
Hetch Hetchy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hetch Hetchy is the name of a valley, a reservoir and a water system in California in the United States. The glacial Hetch Hetchy Valley lies in the northwestern part of Yosemite National Park and is drained by the Tuolumne River. For thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans in the 1850s, the valley was inhabited by Native Americans who practiced subsistence hunting-gathering. During the late 19th century, the valley was renowned for its natural beauty – often compared to that of Yosemite Valley – but also targeted for the development of water supply for irrigation and municipal interests.
Thank you for listening –– @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.
...more
1h 2min
August 31, 2015S2E10: The Deep Thinking Gap
Two new shows are joining Fiddly.fm, taking time off to write, making effective data visualizations, the deep thinking gap, the 2015 Quantified Self Expo, the Quantified Self movement, the challenges of measuring and visualizing complex things, Elijah’s workshop at Forward.js 3, and the instructor as entertainer.
Show Notes
Fiddly.fm
Our podcast network.
Pour Over
A new tech podcast by Jason Heppler and Paul Zenke coming soon to Fiddly.fm.
The First Draft - S1E9: The Greatest Lie the Writing Devil Ever Told
Jason and Paul discuss writing, note-taking, tagging, and outlining with Tree, Scrivener, Gitit, Evernote, FoldingText, Mendeley, Zotero, Editorial, Markdown, Copy, LaTeX, Pandoc, MacVim, TextMate, BibTeX, and DEVONthink.
Mac Power Users
"Learn about getting the most from your Apple technology with focused topics and workflow guests. Creating Mac Power Users, one geek at a time since 2009."
Gestalt Principles for Data Visualization: Similarity, Proximity & Enclosure
"But let me suggest that gestalt is very much a pragmatic aspect of creating data visualization, in fact a necessary aspect if you plan to do more than simple bar and line charts (and perhaps even for those simple charts)."
Machines in the Valley: Growth, Conflict, and Environmental Politics in Silicon Valley
A digital history project that serves as a companion to Jason's dissertation.
Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson
"Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson set down the riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Isaacson’s portrait touched hundreds of thousands of readers."
Katz, S. N. (2005). Why technology matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century. Interdisciplinary science reviews, 30(2), 105-118.
"Computing and digitisation are transforming not only the conditions of work for humanists, but also the ways in which humanists think and their disciplines are configured. The digital world both enables and compels new ways of thinking. And, significantly, it is just as transformative of teaching as it is of scholarship. Indeed, the most interesting thing about the new digital humanities environment may be that the distinction between teaching and scholarship is itself being eroded. The database is fast becoming the principal site of work in the humanities."
The Washington Post - Why Silicon Valley needs humanities PhDs
"Quit your technology job. Get a PhD in the humanities. That’s the way to get ahead in the technology sector. That, at least, is what philosopher Damon Horowitz told a crowd of attendees at the BiblioTech Conference at Stanford University in 2011. Horowitz is also a serial entrepreneur who co-founded a company, Aardvark, which sold to Google for $50 million. He is presently the In-House Philosopher / Director of Engineering at Google. Wait, you say, that’s insane. At a time when record numbers of people, among them those with high-level degrees, are receiving public assistance, what kind of fool would get a degree in a subject with no clear job prospects beyond higher education or teaching?"
The Frenzy About High-Tech Talent by Andrew Hacker | The New York Review of Books
"Pronouncements like the following have become common currency: “The United States is falling behind in a global ‘race for talent’ that will determine the country’s future prosperity, power, and security.” In Falling Behind?, Michael Teitelbaum argues that alarms like this one, which he quotes, are not only overblown but are often sounded by people who do not disclose their motives. Teitelbaum vehemently denies that we are lagging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, now commonly abbreviated as STEM."
A Science of Literature | Boston Review
"For some years, humanities scholars have sought to integrate computing technology into their research. These efforts—the “digital humanities”—have inspired public debate well out of proportion to the number of researchers involved or the scope of their findings. P.T. Barnums and Chicken Littles have proclaimed that computation will mark the end of humanistic inquiry. Actual literary research in this vein suggests otherwise."
2015 Quantified Self Expo, QS15
"The 2015 Quantified Self Exposition highlights the wearable devices and apps that give you intimate and direct feedback about yourself, from how you sleep, eat, and exercise, to what triggers fear and joy."
Quantified Self - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person's daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical). Such self-monitoring and self-sensing, which combines wearable sensors (EEG, ECG, video, etc.) and wearable computing, is also known as lifelogging."
Quantified Self, About
"The Quantified Self is an international collaboration of users and makers of self-tracking tools."
Beeminder
"It's reminders with a sting! Or, goal-tracking with teeth. Mind anything you can graph — weight, pushups, to-do tasks completed — by replying with data when Beeminder prompts you. Or connect with a service (like Fitbit or RescueTime) to report automatically. We plot your progress on a Yellow Brick Road to your goal. Keep all your datapoints on the road and Beeminder will always be free. Go off the road and you (literally) pay the price."
Beeminder - 1000 Days of User-Visible Improvements
"It’s amazing where one trivial user-visible improvement per day will eventually get you to. We’ve made 1000 user-visible improvements (UVIs) to Beeminder in the last 1000 days. [1] We had to or we’d have owed one of our users $1000."
stickK
"stickK empowers you to better your lifestyle. We offer you the opportunity, through 'Commitment Contracts', to show to yourself and others the value you put on achieving your goals."
Pact
Getting fit and staying healthy are hard. Pact uses cash stakes to help you achieve your health goals, week after week.
The Web We Have to Save By Hossein Derakhshan
"I miss when people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares."
Nicholas Felton's Personal Annual Reports
"Nicholas Felton spends much of his time thinking about data, charts and our daily routines. He is the author of many Personal Annual Reports that weave numerous measurements into a tapestry of graphs, maps and statistics reflecting the year’s activities. He was one of the lead designers of Facebook's timeline and the co-founder of Daytum.com. His most recent product is Reporter, an iPhone app designed to record and visualize subtle aspects of our lives. His work is a part of the permanent collection at MoMA. He has also been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, Wired and Good Magazine and recognized as one of the 50 most influential designers in America by Fast Company."
Daytum
"Daytum was conceived by Ryan Case and Nicholas Felton as an elegant and intuitive tool for counting and communicating personal statistics."
Reporter
"Reporter is a new application for understanding the things you care about. With a few randomly timed surveys each day, Reporter can illuminate aspects of your life that might be otherwise unmeasurable."
RescueTime
RescueTime gives you an accurate picture of how you spend your time to help you become more productive every day.
Forward - Web Technology Summits, Workshops and Online Content
"We're at it again. Forward 3 will be held July 29th, 2015 with workshops scheduled for four days around the main event. Join us in the historic Regency Ballroom in the heart of San Francisco."
Thank you for listening –– @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.
...more
38min
June 12, 2015S2E9: If We Have Opinions Let’s Go with Mine
Topics: Jason’s HASTAC lightning talk "Networks in the Humanities: An Introduction", following up on @mcburton’s feedback, "F··k It, Ship It", and the challenges of revisiting old projects.
Subscribe to our newsletter.
Show Notes
Home | HASTAC
HASTAC is an alliance of nearly 13,000 humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists and technologists working together to transform the future of learning.
HASTAC 2015: The Art and Science of Digital Humanities: Full Schedule
Jason Heppler: "Networks in the Humanities: An Introduction" What are networks and how have scholars used them? My talk sets the stage by demonstrating the ways humanists have used network analysis to uncover patterns, systems, and relationships. That relationships help us understand the world is not a new idea, but our opportunity to visualize large networks and formalize network methods for academic research is much newer. My talk will quickly give examples how scholars have used networks and address the kind of situations and questions we can ask with network analysis today.
@mcburton on Twitter
"Listening to @firstdraftcast and want to push back on @jaheppler that the post office stuff IS data. Data does not imply completeness"
Beyond Line and Pie Charts: Practical Applications of Complex Data Viz by Elijah Meeks
While data visualization has grown in popularity, most of the business application still favors two kinds: charts familiar to everyone (such as pie charts or line charts) or map-based geospatial information visualization. While data viz tools and libraries provide access to more exotic methods, it can be hard to deploy them outside specific domains. This talk will focus on hierarchical data visualization and network visualization and will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these methods, techniques for gently introducing these methods to potential stakeholders, and best practices for integrating them into data driven applications.
"F**k It, Ship It"
Before you complete any project that you really care about and show it to the world, you’ll likely be plagued by self-doubt. Will others understand it? Is it missing anything? Can you make it better somehow? At some point, you have to just say "Fuck it, ship it."
Spatial History Project
Budapest was one of around 150 towns and cities in Hungary where Jews were restricted to urban ghettos in the spring and early summer of 1944, and just one of hundreds of towns and cities across occupied Europe where ghettos were created. The process of ghettoization was profoundly spatial where perpetrators explicitly used tools of concentration, and segregation to carry out their objectives.
Elijah’s new personal website
Elijah Meeks is a senior data visualization engineer at Netflix where he helps understand how people experience Netflix.
Minimum viable product - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In product development, the minimum viable product (MVP) is the product with the highest return on investment versus risk.
Thank you for listening –– @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.
...more
23min
April 20, 2015S2E8: You Can’t Control an Ox
Topics: Elijah’s talk at the Bay Area d3 Users Group, Sankey diagrams, the Geography of the Post Storybench article, do we need a digital humanities department/center/specialization?, evidence visualization, what is data in the humanities?, "raw data", and data harnessing.
Show Notes
Bay Area d3 User Group (San Francisco, CA) - Meetup
We are all about d3.js!
Manning: D3.js in Action
D3.js in Action is a practical tutorial for creating interactive graphics and data–driven applications using D3.js. You’ll start with in-depth explanations of D3’s out–of–the–box layouts, along with dozens of practical use cases that align with different types of visualizations. Then, you’ll explore practical techniques for content creation, animation, and representing dynamic data–including interactive graphics and data streamed live over the web. The final chapters show you how to use D3’s rich interaction model as the foundation for a complete web application. In the end, you’ll be ready to integrate D3.js into your web development process and transform any site into a more engaging and sophisticated user experience.
Sankey diagram - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sankey diagrams are a specific type of flow diagram, in which the width of the arrows is shown proportionally to the flow quantity. Sankey diagrams are typically used to visualize energy or material or cost transfers between processes. They can also visualize the energy accounts or material flow accounts on a regional or national level.
Directed acyclic graph - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In mathematics and computer science, a directed acyclic graph, is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it is formed by a collection of vertices and directed edges, each edge connecting one vertex to another, such that there is no way to start at some vertex v and follow a sequence of edges that eventually loops back to v again.
Tapping digital tools to study how the west was won | Storybench
The U.S. postal system remains an exceptional feat, a system in which a letter can travel thousands of miles in a few days for a fraction of a dollar. Its network of post offices, distribution centers, and mail carriers is the quintessence of modern infrastructure and a public good that many take for granted. But how was it built? And could a digital analysis of its evolution reveal how the American West was settled?
The First Draft Podcast S1E7: Humanities Savior Narrative ft. Glen Worthey
Glen Worthey, Digital Humanities Librarian, Stanford University Libraries, joins Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler, and Paul Zenke to discuss his experiences at DH 2014, the popularity of DH projects, the humanities savior narrative, mentorship, Twitter, #dhsheep, linguistic inclusivity at conferences, and the future of DH programs.
Capta and Data: Visualization, the Humanistic Method, and Representing Knowledge | Introduction to Digital Humanities
While visualization has become an increasingly useful and important tool for humanists wishing to illustrate large aggregations of data that can be shown in such a way that it can be easily viewed and comprehended at a glance, visualization tools pose many challenges and are not without their caveats. This has prompted many scholars to propose new ways of understanding visualization as a humanities-centered tool that on the one hand challenges traditional conceptions of the relationship between visualization and the data being represented in all disciplines, not just those that are humanistic, thus redefining what visualization is and is capable of doing, and on the other hand attempting to accurately represent humanistic data without compromising its situatedness and socially constructed nature.
Thank you for listening. –– @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.
...more
31min
March 29, 2015S2E7: Shipping's the Verb
Topics: Elijah’s book (D3.js in Action) is now available in print, TaskRabbit and academic outsourcing, web scraping, creative genius, shipping, ORBIS vs. Neatline, and Left Shark.
Show Notes
D3.js in Action: Elijah Meeks: 9781617292118: Amazon.com: Books
D3.js in Action is a practical tutorial for creating interactive graphics and data-driven applications using D3.js. You’ll start with in-depth explanations of D3’s out-of-the-box layouts, along with dozens of practical use cases that align with different types of visualizations. Then, you’ll explore practical techniques for content creation, animation, and representing dynamic data–including interactive graphics and data streamed live over the web. The final chapters show you how to use D3’s rich interaction model as the foundation for a complete web application. In the end, you’ll be ready to integrate D3.js into your web development process and transform any site into a more engaging and sophisticated user experience.
Lincoln Mullen — D3.js in Action
What this book does better than almost all technical books, however, is explain what makes for good visualizations (in particular, in the humanities). In other words, the book does show you how do to x, y, or z techniques with D3, but even more it shows you what kinds of visualizations are worth doing. That is much harder to teach.
D3 in Action — Jason Heppler
I’ve been remiss in pointing out that my buddy Elijah Meeks’ D3 in Action has appeared in print. I’ve been getting chapters of the book through Manning’s early digital access for the last few months that he’s worked on the book and can say that it’s an excellent introduction to D3. If you’re looking to get started with the library and, more importantly, how you can use visualization in the humanities effectively, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy.
Manning: D3.js in Action
D3.js in Action introduces you to the most powerful web data visualization library available and shows you how to use it to build interactive graphics and data-driven applications. You’ll start with dozens of practical use cases that align with different types of charts, networks, and maps using D3’s out-of-the-box layouts. Then, you’ll explore practical techniques for content design, animation, and representation of dynamic data–including interactive graphics and live streaming data.
D3.js in Action Forum
Community feedback on Elijah’s new book.
William Playfair - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Playfair (22 September 1759 – 11 February 1823) was a Scottish engineer and political economist, the founder of graphical methods of statistics. William Playfair invented four types of diagrams: in 1786 the line graph and bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 the pie chart and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations.
Pie chart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A pie chart (or a circle chart) is a circular statistical graphic, which is divided into slices to illustrate numerical proportion. In a pie chart, the arc length of each slice (and consequently its central angle and area), is proportional to the quantity it represents. While it is named for its resemblance to a pie which has been sliced, there are variations on the way it can be presented. The earliest known pie chart is generally credited to William Playfair’s Statistical Breviary of 1801.
Charles Joseph Minard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Minard was a pioneer of the use of graphics in engineering and statistics. He is most well known for his cartographic depiction of numerical data on a map of Napoleon’s disastrous losses suffered during the Russian campaign of 1812 (in French, Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813). The illustration depicts Napoleon’s army departing the Polish-Russian border. A thick band illustrates the size of his army at specific geographic points during their advance and retreat. It displays six types of data in two dimensions: the number of Napoleon’s troops; the distance traveled; temperature; latitude and longitude; direction of travel; and location relative to specific dates. This type of band graph for illustration of flows was later called a Sankey diagram, although Matthew Sankey used this visualisation 30 years later and only for thematic energy flow).
TaskRabbit connects you to safe and reliable help in your neighborhood.
TaskRabbit allows you to live smarter by connecting you with safe and reliable help in your neighborhood. Outsource your household errands and skilled tasks to trusted people in your community.
Slack: Be less busy
We’re on a mission to make your working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.
Kickstarter
We’re a home for everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of projects, big and small, that are brought to life through the direct support of people like you. Since our launch in 2009, 8.3 million people have pledged more than $1.6 billion, funding 81,000 creative projects. Thousands of creative projects are raising funds on Kickstarter right now.
Kimono : Turn websites into structured APIs from your browser in seconds
You don’t need to write any code or install any software to extract data with Kimono. The easiest way to use Kimono is to add our bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark bar. Then go to the website you want to get data from and click the bookmarklet. Select the data you want and Kimono does the rest. We take care of hosting the APIs that you build with Kimono and running them on the schedule you specify. Use the API output in JSON or as CSV files that you can easily paste into a spreadsheet.
Prince: Convert HTML to PDF with CSS
Prince is an ideal printing component for server-based software, such as web applications that need to print reports or invoices. Using Prince, it is quick and easy to create PDF files that can be printed, archived, or downloaded.
import.io | Web Data Platform & Free Web Scraping Tool
We are a young startup that’s shaking up the world of data. From our homebase in London, we’re working hard to give people a totally new way to access data from the web. We have an amazing user base and were most recently voted Best Startup by O’Reilly Strata Santa Clara, GigaOM and Web Summit. Backed by top European VCs and Valley-based angel investors, our aim is to make a big impact in the world of data.
The Design of Business
Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apple’s iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative-they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results.
The End of ‘Genius’ - NYTimes.com
But the lone genius is a myth that has outlived its usefulness. Fortunately, a more truthful model is emerging: the creative network, as with the crowd-sourced Wikipedia or the writer’s room at “The Daily Show” or – the real heart of creativity – the intimate exchange of the creative pair, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney and myriad other examples with which we’ve yet to fully reckon.
Geography of the Post
The U.S. postal system was the nation’s largest communications network in the nineteenth century. By the close of the century the U.S. Post had extended its reach into nearly every city, town, and hamlet in the country. No other public institution was so ubiquitous and so central to everyday life; dropping off a letter or checking for mail at the local post office was a ritual shared by millions of Americans from Connecticut to Colorado. This visualization maps the spread of the postal network on its western periphery by charting the opening and closing of more than 14,000 post offices west of the hundredth meridian.
ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World
For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.
Seth Godin’s ShipIt Journal, now in free PDF format
Free to print, free to share. Don’t sell or modify. Here’s the thing: If all you do is read this on the screen, IT WON’T WORK. I use all caps with care here. IT WILL NOT WORK. You need to print it and write in it. The audio will help. Good luck. Go ship. Make something happen.
Neatline
Neatline is a geotemporal exhibit-builder that allows you to create beautiful, complex maps, image annotations, and narrative sequences from Omeka collections of archives and artifacts, and to connect your maps and narratives with timelines that are more-than-usually sensitive to ambiguity and nuance. Neatline lets you make hand-crafted, interactive stories as interpretive expressions of a single document or a whole archival or cultural heritage collection. You can import these documents (georeferenced historical maps, manuscripts, high-res photographs, etc.) from an existing collection, or create a new digital archive, yourself. Every Neatline exhibit is your contribution to humanities scholarship, in the visual vernacular.
Catbus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Catbus (referred to in the film as, Neko no basu) is a character in the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro, directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It is a large creature, depicted as a grinning male cat with a hollow body that serves as a bus, complete with windows and seats coated with fur, and a large bushy tail. The character’s popularity has led to its use in a spinoff film, toys for children, an art car, and being featured in the Ghibli Museum, among other products and influences.
emeeks/d3-carto-map — GitHub
d3.carto is a library for creating layer-based maps using D3. It allows you to easily make tile and vector maps that take advantage of D3’s amazing geospatial functionality.
The only real star of SB49.
Leftshark subreddit.
Super Bowl XLIX halftime show - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
During Perry’s performance of “Teenage Dream” and “California Gurls”, she was accompanied by several dancers in various beach-themed costumes, including two dressed as sharks. In their performance, one of the performers, left of Perry on screen, appeared to miss a cue and danced to his own beat instead of the planned choreography. The shark’s outfits, as well as the performance of this “Left Shark”, quickly became an Internet meme. The organizing choreographer RJ Durell stated that the dancers, both long-time stage performers from Perry’s past concerts, were not given rigorous choreography but instead told to mimic Perry’s moves and “to have loads of fun, and bring to life these characters in a cartoon manner”, and concluded that the Left Shark “nailed it”. Various other elements of Perry’s performance, such as her entrance on a mechanical lion, her costumes, and her exit on a flying star (which itself was compared to the former logo of NBC’s PSA segments The More You Know), were all incorporated into humorous images on social media.
Tetrad of media effects - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Generally speaking, a tetrad is any set of four things. In Laws of Media (1988) and The Global Village (1989), published posthumously, Marshall McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology/medium (put another way: a means of explaining the social processes underlying the adoption of a technology/medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously.
It’s settled! Creator tells us how to pronounce ‘GIF’ - CNN.com
“It’s pronounced JIF, not GIF.”
Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.
...more
48min
February 02, 2015S2E6: The Fear of Getting Scooped
Topics: The American Historical Association conference, Machines in the Valley, sharing work in progress, open research notebooks, and the myth of the individual scholar.
Show Notes
Open Notebook History | W. Caleb McDaniel
What would happen if historians made their research notes public? What would it look like to make our notebooks "open source"?
129th Annual Meeting (January 2-5, 2015): Digital Pedagogy for History: Lightning Round
Using the "lightning round" method of spreading ideas in the digital humanities, this experimental panel features one-minute expositions on innovative projects and cool ideas in digital history for teaching and learning. Five or more panelists will be invited to register via Twitter at the meeting. Audience members will also be invited to join the lightning round.
129th Annual Meeting (January 2-5, 2015): Digital Scholarship, Academic Careers, and Tenure
The digital revolution is disrupting long-established systems within the academy for tenure, promotion, and careers, offering both new opportunities and remarkable challenges for the next generation of historians. The AHA, in response, recently charged a committee to draft guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship in T&P. This roundtable will provide a ground-level discussion of the role of digital scholarship in early-career scholars, as session panelists share how digital scholarship fit into their work on the tenure clock, offered them alternative academic careers based on their digital projects, and the nature of peer review after the digital turn. They will also discuss how the MLA‘s publication of guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship could be applied to historians.
Amazon.com: The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890: Steven Hahn: Books
Despite the vast changes in plantation agriculture following the Civil War and Reconstruction, the lot of small farmers was little improved. Examining the nonplantation region of upcountry Georgia as a microcosm of the South, Steven Hahn showed how farmers were buffeted by such forces as the unravelling of antebellum household economy, the development of market forces, the growth of a new class of merchants-landlords, and rising tensions between town and countryside--and how their resentments fueld the Populist movement at the end of the 19th century.
Lincoln Mullen Home
I am an assistant professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, working on digital history and the history of American religions.
W. Caleb McDaniel
My name is W. Caleb McDaniel. I‘m an assistant professor of history at Rice University and a scholar of the nineteenth-century United States. I am also a Board Member and social media director for Historians Against Slavery.
Village Vanguard | History
Of New York's great jazz rooms, the Village Vanguard has the edge in terms of historical pedigree, sound, unique physical space, and ever-broadening booking policy, representing jazz across many generations and aesthetic viewpoints.
Machines in the Valley
Machines in the Valley is a digital history project that serves as a companion to Jason's dissertation.
Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.
...more
25min
December 23, 2014 Happy Holidays 2014
The First Draft will be taking a short break for the holidays, but we look forward to recording new episodes in January. We are grateful for your support. Thank you for listening.

Happy holidays,
Elijah, Jason, and Paul
...more
1min
December 12, 2014S2E5: The Things We Desire to Build
Show Notes
Big data - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Big data is an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process them using traditional data processing applications.
Welcome to Apache Hadoop
The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-available service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.
Neo4j, the World’s Leading Graph Database
Neo Technology, creators of Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database, today announced that for the first time it has been positioned in the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems (DBMS). Neo Technology is the only graph database to meet the report’s stringent qualification requirements.
Geography of the Post
The U.S. postal system was the nation's largest communications network in the nineteenth century. By the close of the century the U.S. Post had extended its reach into nearly every city, town, and hamlet in the country. No other public institution was so ubiquitous and so central to everyday life; dropping off a letter or checking for mail at the local post office was a ritual shared by millions of Americans from Connecticut to Colorado. This visualization maps the spread of the postal network on its western periphery by charting the opening and closing of more than 14,000 post offices west of the hundredth meridian.
Postal Geography and the Golden West | Cameron Blevins
I want to tell you a story. It’s a story about gold, the American West, and the way we narrate history. But first let me explain why I’m telling you this story. I’m in the midst of writing a dissertation about how the U.S. Post shaped development in the West. The project is a work of geography as much as history.
Research Design and Geography of the Post · Jason Heppler
After more than a year of work, Geography of the Post is live. I wanted to take a moment at the project’s launch to reflect back on the design decisions we made with the project and to document these changes.
The First Draft Podcast S1E6: The Pragmatic Tyranny of Building Digital Artifacts
Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler, and Paul Zenke discuss Jason’s experiences working on the Geography of the Post project, D3.js, and the challenges of designing, and critically engaging with, interactive scholarly works.
Western History Association - Home
The WHA strives to be a congenial home for the study and teaching of all aspects of North American Wests, frontiers, homelands, and borderlands. Our mission is to cultivate the broadest appreciation of this diverse history.
Welcome to the Social Science History Association
The Social Science History Association is an interdisciplinary group of scholars that shares interests in social life and theory; historiography, and historical and social-scientific methodologies. SSHA might be best seen as a coalition of distinctive scholarly communities. Our substantive intellectual work ranges from everyday life in the medieval world and sometimes earlier -- to contemporary global politics, but we are united in our historicized approach to understanding human events, explaining social processes, and developing innovative theory.
Jerome McGann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jerome John McGann (born July 22, 1937) is an American academic and textual scholar whose work focuses on the history of literature and culture from the late eighteenth-century to the present.
Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web: Jerome McGann: Amazon.com: Books
Jerome McGann has been at the forefront of the digital revolution in the humanities. His pioneering critical projects on the World Wide Web have redefined traditional notions about interpreting literature. In this trailblazing book, McGann explores the profound implications digital media have for the core critical tasks of the humanities. Drawing on his work as editor of the acclaimed hypertext project The Rossetti Archive, he sets the foundation for a new critical practice for the digital age. Digital media, he demonstrates, can do much more than organize access to great works of literature and art. Beyond their acknowledged editorial and archival capabilities, digital media are also critical tools of unprecedented power. In McGann’s practical vision, digital tools give scholars a flexible, dynamic means for interpreting expressive works especially those that combine text and image. Radiant Textuality demonstrates eloquently how new technologies can deepen our understanding of complex, multi-layered works of the human imagination in ways never before thought possible.
GIS Day 2014 | Stanford University Libraries
The event will include a series of lightning talks featuring Stanford faculty and staff, GIS research, student demonstrations of current GIS projects, and a Where in the World contest. Drinks and snacks will be provided.
Elijah Meeks (emeeks) on Github
Elijah's New Book D3.js in Action
D3.js in Action is a practical tutorial for creating interactive graphics and data driven applications using D3.js. You'll start with in-depth explanations of D3's out-of-the-box layouts, along with dozens of practical use cases that align with different types of visualizations. Then, you'll explore practical techniques for content creation, animation, and representing dynamic data including interactive graphics and data streamed live over the web. The final chapters show you how to use D3's rich interaction model as the foundation for a complete web application. In the end, you'll be ready to integrate D3.js into your web development process and transform any site into a more engaging and sophisticated user experience.
Dennis Green "They are what we thought they were, and we let them off the hook!" - YouTube
Higher Education Video Game Alliance
Our mission is to create a platform for higher education leaders which will underscore the cultural, scientific, and economic importance of video game programs in colleges and universities. The key is to create a robust network of resources including unified advocacy, policymaker engagement, media coverage, and external funding in order to incubate and harness the impact of this community in a 21st century learning environment.
Practice: Game Design in Detail An NYU Conference
PRACTICE is an annual event that takes a close look at the concrete challenges of game design, bridging dialog across industries. Where else can a console developer discuss level design with a tabletop RPG writer? Or an iPhone puzzle creator debate economy balancing with collectable card game designer? Or a professional sports official share secrets with an experimental indie game artist? No other conference brings together such a diverse group of game designers for high-level dialog.
Jonathan Blow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jonathan Blow (born 1971) is an American independent video game programmer and designer. He is best known as the creator of Braid, which was released in 2008 and received critical acclaim. He is currently developing The Witness, to be released in 2014.
Braid
Braid is a platform game in a painterly style where you manipulate the flow of time to solve puzzles.
Jonathan Blow "names" next title "Game 3," may take 20 years to create - Kill Screen - Videogame Arts & Culture.
During the development of his forthcoming PlayStation 4 title The Witness, game designer Jonathan Blow hit a creative roadblock. Exhausted by the grinding pace of his work thus far, Blow turned to an unlikely place for inspiration: Thomas Pynchon's legendary opus Gravity's Rainbow. "I read this book again," he said during the opening keynote at NYU Game Center's Practice conference this morning, "When I started reading, I had this attitude, 'This is impossible. How will I finish?'"
#practice2014 - Twitter Search
Frank Lantz | NYU | Game Center
Frank Lantz is the Director of the NYU Game Center, he has taught game design for over 12 years at NYU, SVA, and Parsons and his writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications.
Gamergate controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Gamergate controversy began in August 2014 and concerns misogyny and harassment in video game culture. While many supporters of the self-described Gamergate movement say that they are concerned about ethical issues in video game journalism, the overwhelming majority of commentators have said that the movement is rooted in a culture war against women and the diversification of gaming culture.
Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.
...more
27min
November 18, 2014S2E4: The University as Rumpus Room
S2E4: The University as Rumpus Room
In this episode, we are joined by Kenny Ligda, the Academic Technology Specialist for Stanford University's English department. Topics: "Interesting" academic interviews, enjoying literature, alt-ac career tracks, digital humanities and writing, digital humanities methods and copyright, blind sticktoitiveness, and reading and giving voice to all the forgotten books.
Subscribe to our newsletter.
Show Notes
Kenneth Ligda | | Academic Technology Specialists
Kenny is the newest addition to the ATS staff, having come on board in summer of 2013. He earned BAs in English and Danish from the University of Washington, taught ESL in Prague, and earned his PhD in English at Stanford. Prior to starting as ATS, Kenneth pioneered the role of Course Coordinator in the English Department, where he acquired considerable expertise in the goals and methods of the Department's new core curriculum. His central mandate as ATS is online learning.
Kenneth Ligda (@Kligda) | Twitter
Kenny on Twitter
Terry Eagleton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Terence Francis "Terry" Eagleton FBA (born 22 February 1943) is a prominent British literary theorist, critic and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland and Distinguished Visiting Professor of English Literature at The University of Notre Dame.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Definition of a Game - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ludwig Wittgenstein was probably the first academic philosopher to address the definition of the word game. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argued that the elements of games, such as play, rules, and competition, all fail to adequately define what games are. From this, Wittgenstein concluded that people apply the term game to a range of disparate human activities that bear to one another only what one might call family resemblances. As the following game definitions show, this conclusion was not a final one and today many philosophers, like Thomas Hurka, think that Wittgenstein was wrong and that Bernard Suits' definition is a good answer to the problem.
HIST205F: Digital History
This is a hands-on course that introduces students to the use of digital tools and sources to conduct original historical research, analyze and interpret findings, and communicate results. Digital history is an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to bring digital technology into conversation with humanities disciplines and, specifically, seeks to analyze, synthesize, and present knowledge through computational media.
A Guide to Authorial London
Welcome to Authorial London, created to allow you to explore the lives and locations of some of the writers who lived in and around London.
CS+English | Department of English
Stanford is excited to be launching a new CS+English joint major for students who want to think across the divide and create projects that fuse science and the humanities. Increasingly, groundbreaking work in literary studies is being done through technology; simultaneously, the world of computer engineering thrives on the creativity and adaptability taught in literature departments. Stanford is uniquely situated to bring together the Bay Area's rich currents of innovation and imagination, and we are happy to invite you to be the first partners in this new integration of the disciplines.
Literature and Latte - Scrivener Writing Software | Mac OS X | Windows
Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.
The First Draft Podcast S1E9: The Greatest Lie the Writing Devil Ever Told
Jason and Paul discuss writing, note-taking, tagging, and outlining with Tree, Scrivener, Gitit, Evernote, FoldingText, Mendeley, Zotero, Editorial, Markdown, Copy, LaTeX, Pandoc, MacVim, TextMate, BibTeX, and DEVONthink.
The First Draft Podcast S1E8: Liberation Technology
Topics: The increasing accessibility of computational tools and methods, systems, networks, data-driven decision making, the key player problem, neotopology, and pushback from specialists.
T.S. Eliot "Marina" | Genius
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers And woodthrush calling through the fog My daughter.
The Hedgehog and the Fox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Hedgehog and the Fox" is an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin. It was one of Berlin's most popular essays with the general public. Berlin himself said of the essay: "I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something."
Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek - Multimedia Feature - NYTimes.com
The Differences Slavery Made -- Thomas and Ayers -- American Historical Review
This article is an applied experiment in digital scholarship. Over the last decade networked information resources have come to play a large role in the work of historians; most of us have become accustomed to augmenting our library research and professional discussion through digital means. Despite these changes, scholars have only begun to craft scholarship designed specifically for the electronic environment. In this article, we attempt to translate the fundamental components of professional scholarship-evidence, engagement with prior scholarship, and a scholarly argument-into forms that take advantage of the possibilities of electronic media.
The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War
Bonus: George Orwell milking a goat
Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.
...more
38min
October 28, 2014S2E3: Letters to a Young Digital Humanist
Topics: Elijah has big news, leaving the academy, working in industry, developing marketable skills, supporting the DH community from outside the academy, and making your work accessible to secondary audiences.
Show Notes
Netflix - Watch TV Shows Online, Watch Movies Online
Netflix is the world’s leading Internet television network with over 53 million members in nearly 50 countries enjoying more than two billion hours of TV shows and movies per month, including original series. Members can watch as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on nearly any Internet-connected screen. Members can play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or commitments.
Netflix Culture
Freedom & Responsibility.
Bay Area DH (Stanford, CA) - Meetup
BayDH is an organization bringing together academics, journalists, tech industry professionals, artists, designers and anyone else who is interested in exploring the intersection between humanities and technology. The focus is building ties between industry, the academy, and the public to promote digital humanities scholarship.
About | Digital Humanities Specialist
Elijah Meeks works as the digital humanities specialist at Stanford University. The Digital Humanities Specialist position was created to give Stanford faculty access to project design, visualization and software development oriented toward the creation of digital scholarly media. While a formal proposal process is in place for quarterly projects involving scholars or teams of scholars, informal consultation is regularly available.
Tweets about #altac hashtag on Twitter
versatilephd.com | Helping graduate students and PhDs envision, prepare for, and excel in non-academic careers since 1999
Versatile PhD is the oldest, largest online community dedicated to non-academic and non-faculty careers for PhDs in humanities, social science and STEM.
Documenting the reinvention of text: the importance of imperfection, doubt, and failure
The title of this conference-"Transformations of the Book"-has already been called into question here, and it is an instance of the rhetorical trope that has come to characterize much of what we say, write, and read about the subject of electronic text, the World-Wide Web, and information technology in general: the trope is one of change, invention, evolution, with overtones of progress and improvement, and with undertones of inevitability and universality. We meet this trope in mass-media news and advertising about computers and communications, in the promotional literature of our educational institutions, in scholarly books and articles about hypertext and digital libraries, and in grant proposals for electronic scholarly projects which aim, or claim, to break new ground, undertake pilot projects, provide models for the future.
Benjamin M. Schmidt
I am an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and core faculty in the NuLab for Texts, Maps and Networks.
Lincoln Mullen · Home
I am an assistant professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, working on digital history and the history of American religions. You can find a link to just about anything I've worked on in my CV or in the blog archives. Some of my work is described in more detail on the research page, and my syllabi are on the teaching page along with workshop materials. You can write to me at [email protected].
Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.
...more
44min

FAQs about The First Draft:

How many episodes does The First Draft have?

The podcast currently has 22 episodes available.