Context: I started a new Instagram photo blog project @exploringthefrontier. This is my intro… Art and identity are fundamentally linked. Turning 30 has been a constant reevaluation of my identity between finishing school, having a kid, and finding my home. It’s also a chance to be deliberate in what I nurture in myself, my son, […]
Author Archives: Jaimie Murdock
Photographing Saturn
I’ve made a lot of progress in 2 months with astrophotography. Here’s my best attempt at Saturn from June 17 and then on August 12. What changed? Phone and telescope stayed the same. However, I learned how to use the exposure settings and focus lock on the Pixel 3a’s video mode, meaning that my photos […]
Astronomy
One thing about frontier life is that you can’t always struggle against the environment. New Mexico is hot, dry, and high elevation. Being outdoors in the summer is physically taxing. What about the night though? All the isolation out here makes this one of the best places to go stargazing. At the start of quarantine, […]
HathiTrust Research Center
For the 2016-18 academic years I was on fellowship or affiliated with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC). The work from that time was finally released in late 2018. A brief summary is below. Data Capsules HTRC Data Capsules are virtual machines provisioned for researchers at HathiTrust Member Insitutions that give access to the fulltext and OCR […]
What have I been up to?
Hello from the Land of Enchantment! In October, our family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico – our fourth state in two years. Understandably, blogging has been a bit slower, but we’re finally getting settled, so I’m going to start with some basics before doing research updates and then expanding on some of these things. The […]
Towards Cultural-Scale Models of Full Text
For the past year, Colin and I have been on a HathiTrust Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) Grant. This project has examined how topic models differ between library subject areas. For example, some areas may have a “canon” meaning that a low number of topics selects the same themes, no matter what the corpus size is. […]
Psychonomics 2015
This weekend I was in Chicago for the Psychonomic Society and Society for Computers in Psychology meetings. Emily and I stayed Thursday through Saturday and experienced a record first snow of the season. I hope that our fellow conference-goers made it back safely as well. Chicago is one of the best food towns we’ve ever […]
Darwin’s Semantic Voyage
The preprint of my project “Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science in Darwin’s Reading Notebooks” was released on arXiv on Friday. The paper is joint work with my advisors Colin Allen and Simon DeDeo. This has consumed my life for the past year and I’m incredibly proud of the results. It’s an entertaining read — […]
Thomas Jefferson’s Mind: Polymathic and Polygraphic
This summer I am a Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS) at Monticello writing a grant proposal for the study of Thomas Jefferson’s Mind through his libraries. The day I arrived – May 8, 2015 – was the 200th anniversary of Jefferson’s sale to the Library of Congress of 6,497 volumes for […]
Topic Modeling Tutorial at JCDL2015
Join the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) and InPhO Project for a half-day tutorial on HathiTrust data access and topic modeling at JCDL 2015 in Knoxville, TN on Sunday, June 21, 2015, 9am-12pm! Topic Exploration with the HTRC Data Capsule for Non-Consumptive Research Organizers: Jaimie Murdock, Jiaan Zeng and Robert McDonald Abstract: In this half-day tutorial, […]