Abby Mullen

Author: abbymullen

  • In Defense of Finding Things in Archives

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    Over the past several months, and probably before that, several historians have been flayed on social media for making claims like “I found this forgotten thing in the archive,” and stories about their finds criticized for calling their work “discovery.” Scholars have (rightly) called out these stories as erasing the work of the archivists in…

  • East Asian Studies Syllabus

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    Spring 2020 East Asian Studies students, here is a link to your syllabus, with hyperlinks to the PDFs. This is also available at https://abbymullen.org/havens-syllabi/. Syllabus

  • World War II in the Pacific Syllabus

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    Students in Professor Havens’s Spring 2020 World War II class, here’s a link to your syllabus. This syllabus is also available at abbymullen.org/havens-syllabi. Click here.

  • Parent-Friendly Professional Development

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    Recently, I asked on Twitter how to make professional development opportunities such as conferences, seminars, and workshops more accessible to parents. I was thinking specifically about summertime development opportunities, which are more likely to be multi-day trips away from home. The responses to my Twitter query confirmed my suspicions: there are no easy answers. Let’s…

  • Opening Day Radio

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    Opening Day, no matter what the weather, is a signal that winter is truly over, and the joyous days of summer are on their way. For me, baseball is a sport meant to be imbibed in one particular way: radio. Don’t get me wrong—going to a ball game in person is a great experience. Everyone…

  • A 21st Century Barbary War

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    When Thomas Jefferson sent a small naval squadron to the Mediterranean in 1801, he intended to intimidate the Barbary regencies into backing down from their claims of tribute in exchange for commercial freedom in the Mediterranean. Negotiations with the Barbary states hadn’t worked over the previous 15 years of American attempts, and the newly built…

  • Passing on the Scissors and the Quill

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    Faithful readers of this blog (all one of you) will notice that I haven’t posted in almost a year. It’s not that I’ve had nothing interesting to say, but rather that I’ve been too busy with those interesting things to write about them for the blog. Here’s a brief rundown. In the summer of 2014,…

  • Civil War Navies Bookworm

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    If you read my last post, you know that this semester I engaged in building a Bookworm using a government document collection. My professor challenged me to try my system for parsing the documents on a different, larger collection of government documents. The collection I chose to work with is the Official Records of the…

  • Text Analysis on the Documents of the Barbary Wars

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    This past semester, I took a graduate seminar in Humanities Data Analysis, taught by Professor Ben Schmidt. This post describes my final project. Stay tuned for more fun Bookworm stuff in the next few days (part 2 on Civil War Navies Bookworm is here).   In the 1920s, the United States government decided to create…

  • Named Entity Extraction: Productive Failure?

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    This past week in my Humanities Data Analysis class, we looked at mapping as data. We explored ggplot2’s map functions, as well as doing some work with ggmap’s geocoding and other things. One thing that we just barely explored was automatically extracting place names through named entity recognition. It is possible to do named entity…