Breve No. 8
Checking In
Somehow it’s already May, and it’s been an exceptionally busy few months both around RRCHNM and around the farmstead.
Back in April I joined the good folks at the Omohundro Institute along with my collaborators Catharine Dann Roeber and Rebecca Parmer to talk about the launch of The Denig Manuscript project. I hope you’ll give it a listen!
The Death by Numbers project had a big data update and interface update to the database, and we’re about to enter another big push as we enter the summer months.
While I don’t have anything new to show quite yet, Religious Ecologies is also going through a major update as we build out a Django application for the data transcription work (with an aim, in the near future, to explore how we might use generative AI to handle document transcription). More soon.
We soft-launched the La Sfera Project, a digital edition of a manuscript written by the Florentine merchant Goro Dati. It’s a manuscript of poetic form designed to introduce Florentine merchants to natural phenomena, navigation, and the topography of the Mediterranean.
Did I mention I’m now restoring a Farmall H? Here it is before I took it down to pieces. I thought this would be mostly cosmetic, but I’ve decided to tear parts of it down to replace and repair various parts and do some deep cleaning before it gets a new coat of paint. If you want to follow along, I’m blogging about it under my restoration tag.
Our kiddo had a class project to hatch chickens thanks to our amazing county extension office, so we also have a new batch of chicks we’re rearing (and another coop we’re building). We also got our garden planted, expanding this year into corn addition to beans, squash, peas, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, cabbage, Swiss chard, lettuce, and cucumbers.
A Second Newsletter
It might seem silly to start a second newsletter when I barely post under this one, but I’ve launched Tack & Ink as a place to write about my current book project. I’d love if you decided to follow along. I recently wrote about the Republican budget bill and the history behind attempts control the public lands.
I’ll be out in Laramie, Wyoming, for research soon, so I’d anticipate a flurry of new things for Tack & Ink.
“The [Department of Energy] finds that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 and are expected to consume approximately 6.7 to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028.”