A Case for Eyeballs

January 15th 2025

The following is the text I formally submitted to the US Copyright Office as part of a comment on the 2024 proposed expansion to the DMCA exemption for text and data mining. The expansion was granted, ... read more

Eliza Schuyler, Pirate Queen

December 26th 2024

For his 9th birthday, I took my middle kid and theater buddy to see Hamilton in San Francisco. I've listened through it hundreds of times, and watched the recorded performance several more, but seeing it in person is always different... read more

Pick Up the Purple

November 1st 2024

There is a story that comes before every story. I went back to Rebecca Munson's blog looking for mine. I wrote about Rebecca for the Data-Sitters Club [https://datasittersclub.github.io/site/dsc13.html#rebecca-munson]... read more

Gray Hair

May 15th 2024

I found my first gray hair last Friday. At my age, it feels like an echo of puberty anxieties: who hasn't gotten their period yet? Several of my friends are fully and gloriously silver, but I found it curious that I hadn't noticed a single one during my regular hair dye as memorial ritual for Rebecca Munson [https://datasittersclub.github.io/site/dsc13.html#the-power-of-purple-quinn]... read more

The End of the World

March 14th 2024

I teach DH-oriented project management as a tabletop role-playing game, dubbed the #DHRPG [https://dhrpg.github.io/]. Participants each play a different institutional role than their own: one undergrad playing a librarian... read more

Alla

January 19th 2024

There were several years [https://quinndombrowski.com/blog/2020/03/21/working-conditions/] when I read a lot of "Captain Underpants", years before the kids could read the books themselves, and before they lost interest... read more

Sorry This Is So Late (Mourning Braids)

January 8th 2024

The downside of always weaving data is that there's less place to just screw around with technique. I tried introducing a few leno twists into the end of my Gideon the Ninth weaving, but they didn't really work out like I'd hoped... read more

Weaving Spanish Moss

January 2nd 2024

With winter break starting so late this year, we went to central Florida to visit my father. On one of the first days, we took the kids to a park where the trees were lined with Spanish moss. I've always loved Spanish moss... read more

The Locked Loom 1: Gideon the Ninth

December 21st 2023

I've declared this academic year the Year of the Loom at the Textile Makerspace [https://textilemakerspace.stanford.edu/]. Last March I replaced my desk with a floor loom without knowing the first thing about them... read more

Finding 'close enough' text

September 7th 2023

For people new to text analysis, it can be hard to wrap your head around the gap between what's completely obvious to you as a human and what's easily detectible by a computer. Especially when working with humanities data... read more