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It’s snowing here in Pittsburgh–been coming down for hours in a fine powder, resulting in a monochromatic morning. Just like everywhere else in the country, there hasn’t been much real winter here this season. I’m pretty sure that this is only the third or fourth substantial coating so far. The slow start to the day has allowed me to continue with some thoughts from my travels yesterday.

I’ve driven the route from DC to Pittsburgh at least half a dozen times for the last 17 years or so. I’ve come to know the landscape of Western Maryland and West Virginia along Route 68 fairly well. Unlike the mess and stress that is the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I find this a remarkably renewing drive. The landscape itself has a lot to do with it. The route literally cuts through the mountains rising from Frederick to Sidling Hill and then Town Hill and across to Garrett County and on to Morgantown. As a result, I get a good deal of time with dairy and evergreen farms and occasional mining sites that roll along the horizon to the left and right, punctuated by the sheared layers of rock that rise up on the edges of the highway as it slices through the mountains. Some days this is a brilliant green scene of new vibrancy, but at this time of year, it is a scene with a muted pallet–browns and greys, scrub and trees stripped of their foliage. And, that’s just the way I like it. The barrenness of the winter landscape leaves me space to think.

Just as it should be, particularly given the occasion for my journey. I was on my way to hear Maya Lin speak about her art, architecture, and memorials at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Her talk was the launch event for the installation of her current traveling exhibit at the Heinz Architectural Center. I’d seen the remarkable works in the exhibit when it was at the Corcoran a few years ago. True to form, it is art of the landscape, reflecting actual places in the world, both above and below the surface of the land and the water line, made of wood, particle board, recycled silver, wire, and pins. And, her talk was a discussion of the ways that landscapes and environments are constantly in flux, and how her work tries to illuminate the spaces of absence and void more than anything else.

Lin’s theme for the evening rolled into an introduction of her new project: whatismissing.net, which offers us all a chance to think about the ways that we are actively causing pieces of our natural world to disappear. She invites us to pause and question what is missing from our environment, and to remember those elements as a step to making a commitment to change.

Route 68 is a landscape of sparsity and I’m sure that there are legions of species missing in this region. For me, over the course of the last nearly twenty years, it has been a place for my mind to roam, working through difficult places in critical projects and important relationships, meditating on the deeply incarnational aspects of natural world–some of which only appear in the grey. New work emerges from the grey.

Here is the outline for my workshop this morning on project management at THATCamp New England.

Conceptualizing the project

• Collaboration — reach out to others in the field; know the field

Writing the Grant: Necessary fictions

• Follow the guidelines
• Select the staff
• Create the workplan
• Key Deliverables
• Estimating work
• Budgeting: personnel, materials, travel, indirect
  • Office of Sponsored Programs

Get the Grant==>Hooray!! What’s next?

• Redo the workplan — reassess in light of changing technologies and staff availability and skills
• Collaboration — reach out to others in the field; know the field

Team management: Trust

• Protect the staff: administrative concerns, competing demands
• Supply the staff: software, hardware, space
• Meetings (syncronous and asyncronous communication)
  • Individual (how are things going? what can I do for you?)
  • Larger group (where are we? what problems do we foresee? how shall we proceed? concensus building)
  • Small group (paired programming, etc.)
• Tracking systems
  • Github/SVN for tracking coding tasks and issues
  • Basecamp for tracking other project activities and deliverables

PI Responsibilities:

The buck stops with you, so it helps if you are at home with complex organizational systems and detail oriented.

• Budget and Deliverables
• Conflict management
• Individual time management
• Communication with the grant officers
• Communication and work with the institutional systems
  • Administration
  • Office of Sponsored Programs
• Learning enough about all of the elements of the project and the technologies to make decisions comfortably.

Are you a talented designer who is interested in building highly usable, interactive websites for the digital humanities? Are you interested in working with a team of innovative programmers using open source technologies? Well, then the Center for History and New Media might have a job for you. In addition to the wed developer opening we announced last week, we’re hiring a web designer to work on major public and educational projects.

We are looking for a combination of the following skills:

• fluency with current Web design technologies (including ability to hand code HTML, CSS, and JavaScript);
• experience with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator;
• experience with Web accessibility and Web usability standards;
• experience with common open source content management systems (e.g., WordPress, BuddyPress, Drupal, etc.);
• familiarity with Web-database technologies (e.g., MySQL, PHP);
• familiarity with contemporary trends in Web development (e.g., AJAX, DHTML, Rails, HTML5);
• and prior work in history or the digital humanities is preferred.

This is a grant-funded, two-year position at the Center for History and New Media (http://chnm.gmu.edu/), which is well known for innovative work in digital media. Located in Fairfax, Va., CHNM is about 15 miles from Washington, D.C., and accessible by public transportation.

For full consideration, please apply online at http://jobs.gmu.edu for position 10376z; complete the staff application; and upload a cover letter, resume, and a list of three professional references with contact information by November 11, 2010.

For a few more hours, today is Father’s Day, and tomorrow marks the fourth anniversary of my own father’s death. Donald Leon was not an easy man to get to know–not much of a talker and extremely focused on his work. For the past few years I’ve struggled with how to mark his passing, especially as it usually falls so close to Father’s Day. So, yesterday, without a real plan in mind, I got in the car and started to drive toward Southern Maryland. My Dad was born and raised in Bethesda, but my grandmother’s family, the Wildmans, came from St Mary’s County. As a boy, he and his brothers would spend the summer in Leonardtown, sailing and enjoying the water. I’ve never done the work it would take to put together a proper family history, but my understanding is that there are roots through the Wildman family to the enormous clan of Mattinglys who settled in St. Mary’s County well prior to the American Revolution.

Swimming Cows, just for fun

As I made my way down Route 5 toward the tip of the St. Mary’s peninsula, I was reminded that although I have only the most vague sense of my family history in this farm land, I have a much more developed sense of the Catholic and slaveholding history of this place. Though I am by no means an historian of Early America, or of slavery, I spent a good deal time as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student trying to puzzle out the human contradictions of this past. Before and after those years plenty of scholars, most of them Jesuits themselves, have written about these men of God and their slaves. (See my Zotero collection.)

During my first semester as an American Studies student at Georgetown University in the mid-1990s, I’d been introduced to disturbing fact that the early Jesuits who had founded the school owned six plantations in Maryland where they own nearly 300 enslaved Africans. During those years, the American Studies program was engaged in an experiment with digitization and transcription, using subsequent classes of students to grow a digital archive called The Jesuit Plantation Project. The site is in somewhat of a state of disrepair and the metadata on the documents is lacking, but the contents represented my first introduction to this research.

When the first settlers arrived in the area in 1634, included among the them were two Jesuit priests and four slaves. By the 1800s, the Jesuits were firmly established in Maryland and had founded Georgetown College (1789). But, with no support from a local diocesan system–there really wasn’t one yet –, the Jesuits were farmers like everyone else and they used their farms to support their spiritual and educational mission.

St. Ignatius Chapel, what is left of St. Inigoe's Plantation

In 1815, Br. Joseph Mobberly, who managed the farm and slaves at St. Inigoe’s plantation, wrote to the president of Georgetown College counseling that it would be best to sell or free the slaves, arguing “It is better to sell for a time, or to get your people free—1st Because we have their souls to answer for—2nd Because Blacks are more difficult to govern now, than formerly—-and 3rd Because we shall make more & more to our satisfaction” (Mobberly to Grassi, MPA, 204k3, February 15, 1815.) When I made my first visit yesterday to what is left of St. Inigoe’s–St. Ignatius chapel and a cemetery–I was again returned to my puzzlement over the slaveholding Jesuits. Mobberly’s reasons for ending Jesuit slaveholding illuminated the dramatically compromised situation in which the members of the Society of Jesus found themselves. He claimed to be concerned about the spiritual welfare of the people he managed and corporately owned. He also seemed to have no grasp of why those enslaved people would be hard to govern. The raw facts of the economics made the most sense to him; if the Jesuits used hired hands instead of keeping slaves, they would save almost $400 a month.

Eventually, the Society of Jesus agreed with Mobberly that the slaves needed to go–though, not through emancipation. In 1838, the Jesuits sold their 272 slaves to a buyer in Louisiana. The sale brought them nearly $60,000 and relieved them of immediate responsibility for the families who sailed South. Though there were conditions laid out prior to the sale that required guarantees that families would be kept intact, and that the slaves would continue to be able to practice their religion. The hollowness of these conditions should have been immediately clear, but they came back to the Jesuits in print when in 1848 Rev’d Van de Velde wrote with concern about the conditions he witnessed in Louisiana. But, by then, they exercised no real control over the situation.

Revisiting these disturbing exchanges fifteen years after I first read them as an undergraduate makes me wonder if it might be time to find out more about the Mattinglys and Wildmans. I could think of less good ways to get to know my father than to learn how his relatives, who were neighbors of these mission Jesuits, fit into the world of early nineteenth century St. Mary’s County.

He is looking for someone or something that no one will discuss, that he has only inferred, for the unnamed person of thing whose advent or presence has been troubling the company all day.

Then a hand as massive and hard as an elk’s horn, lashed by tough sinews to an arm like the limb of an oak, grabs the boy by the shoulder and drags him back to the wings.

“You know better, young man,” says the giant, well over eight feet tall, to whom the massive hand belongs.

Nicholas Negroponte’s dream to bring cheap laptops to the children of the world will begin with Libya.  Imagine what the world would be like if every child had a wireless connection…..

No, not National Parks (though they seem to be for sale to loggers and oil companies these days), but Rosa Parks. It seems that corporate America has decided to capitalize on the the Civil Rights activist most frequently (and somewhat erroneously) credited with launching the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So now we can add Rosa to the likes of Malcolm, Che and Mao.

What did insomniacs do before the internet?  I’m half convinced that if I didn’t have an internet connection, I’d be most of the way to the great american novel.  Or, maybe only part of the way, because I seem to be waffling between nights of 9 or 10 hours of sleep and nights with nada.  But, more likely than not, I’d be sitting in front of the TV watching reruns of the X-files.

It’s the season when leaves and loves slowly make their way to cold storage. And that means that it’s time for the MLB division playoffs. And small confessions. I’m a person of distant and torn loyalties this fall — none of them having to do with my secret (and most likely now permanent) soft spot for the Red Sox.

Rather, my beloved Yankees are playing the Tigers — calling up my childhood allegience to Jim Leyland, former manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Of course, in the other AL contest, Minnesota is in play — yet another year when I might have to choose between the Bombers and the Twins, which was a frequent and troubling dilemma when I was in graduate school.

But, in the midst of all of these conflicting loyalties, one thing is never in question: The Mets don’t have any right to exist as a Major League team, nonetheless to win the World Series.

Being a student of U.S. Catholicism, and someone who is interested new media, I was intrigued to see the other day that Sean Cardinal O’Malley of Boston is blogging his current trip to Rome. Of course, most U.S. Catholics have no idea what happens inside the secretive walls of the Vatican — and in some senses, we don’t really want to know (if you do, you should read Inside the Vatican by Tom Reese, S.J., the former editor of America).

The design on this blog certainly isn’t the best, but it is a shining example of the burgeoning of Roman Catholic media usage. This engagement with media has long history in the US — from widespread usage of radio by the local chapters of the National Councils of Catholic Men and Women, and fraternal organizations in the 1920s, Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, first on the radio and then on television from the 1920s through the end of the 1960s, and right up to our current Catholic media with radio, and the distinctly conservative Eternal Word Television Network. In fact, the new Archbishop of Washington DC, Donald Wuerl, had a long-running Sunday morning television show during his 18 years as bishop of Pittsburgh.
Clearly we’re bound to see a greater web presence from the U.S. Catholic clergy and hierarchy if Cardinal Sean feels this venture is a successful effort at outreach to his demoralized archdiocese.