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Rob MacDougall

Two-Fisted Historian

Monthly Archives of December 2008

Article

Crouching Data, Hidden Patterns

  • Rob MacDougall,
  • December 21, 2008
  • Permalink

Flowing Data ranks the year’s Best Data Visualizations; two of five come from my visualization crush Amanda Cox.

  • 4 Comments →
  • Filed under: Asides, Visualization
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Article

Pants Extinguished

  • Rob MacDougall,
  • December 18, 2008
  • Permalink

Sweet: Mills Kelly’s why-didn’t-I-think-of-that class on historical hoaxes has completed, and come clean on, their promised hoax.

  • 2 Comments →
  • Filed under: Academia, Concept Courses, History@Play, Teaching
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Article

Vague Memories of America

  • Rob MacDougall,
  • December 13, 2008
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American Memory archives + members of Skinny Puppy + multimedia + post-industrial music = some damn cool I don’t know what. (Douglas Rushkoff explains a bit.)

  • 2 Comments →
  • Filed under: Asides, Old Weird America
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Article

Robo-Theorizing

  • Rob MacDougall,
  • December 11, 2008
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Bill Benzon on Astro Boy and the robot as subaltern. Hat tip to The Constructivist–but which of his blogs to link to?

  • 2 Comments →
  • Filed under: Asides, Japan is Cool, Robots
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Article

The Better Dinosaurs of Our Nature

  • Rob MacDougall,
  • December 9, 2008
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An “alternate history theme park” in which dinosaurs fight in the Civil War. Where was this in 1996?

  • 2 Comments →
  • Filed under: Asides, Old Weird America, Travel
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About Me

Ahoy-hoy! I am an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, Canada, where I teach United States history and study the history of information and communication. My current research involves the history of pseudoscience and crank invention. I'm using computational methods like text mining and adaptive filtering to trace the circulation of "wrong, bad, or weird" science in 19th-century America. The goal is to draw lessons for our own time about the ways communication networks shape the ideas we have and share.

I am the author of The People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and several book chapters and articles. I also co-designed and directed Tecumseh Lies Here, an augmented reality game that commemorates and critiques the history of the War of 1812. And I co-host a bi-weekly podcast that explores the history and culture of the 1970s and 80s through the lens of the classic sitcom, WKRP in Cincinnati. I received a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 2004.

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