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.

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.

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.

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.

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.