A post by Sharon Howard at Early Modern Notes has had me thinking a lot this week about my goals for this site. More than anything, Sharon has made me realize that I might have more than a few readers, so I somehow need to write about things a little more interesting than "blogtinkery...in rather obsessive detail..."

Looking back on my posts, I agree that most of them are about "blogtinkery" than anything else..well, maybe not blogtinkery but certainly more about technology and design than history. I attribute this (mostly) to the fact that my graduate work this semester has focused solely on my New Media minor. I'm taking two classes for that minor: a minor field readings class on digital history scholarship, and Digital History Documentary. I've admittedly read more books, articles, and other publications about digital video editing, weblogging, web semantics, open-access publishing, and internet theory than I have about history.

To be honest, I'm a little nervous about this fact. I'm doing readings course in my Cultural History and Theory minor field in the spring, and I feel I need to prepare a reading list for that. Mike O'Malley is directing the readings course, and we're going to focus on the history and culture of race in nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. I'm also taking the Doctoral Research Seminar, in which I'm going to write about the role of emotion, especially fear, in early twentieth-century segregation law and culture. I'm afraid I'm not doing enough research (and thinking) in these other aspects of my academic interests.

In short, I hope I'm not doing my readers a disservice (or losing the few readers I have) by limiting my posts topically. There's more to me than "blogtinkery", and I need to show my readers this. I appreciate the fact that Sharon, whose Early Modern Notes is absolutely fantastic, would even consider adding a link on her site to ClioWeb, and I thank her for indirectly getting me to think about my goals for this site.