Now that my degree is finished and I’m letting my dissertation sit for a bit before I start revising it for the book, I am finally in a position to begin a new project. I’m stepping out of my normal focus on prose and lyric to work on performance in Cymbeline.

The tools I use every day tend to become personal. Not just because of the time I’ve invested learning to use them and getting them set up the way I like them, but also because of the way they interact with my personal history. While I have technical reasons for using the tools that I do, I’d be deluding myself if I didn’t also recognize that the choices I’ve made over the years are as much a product of personal circumstances than they are of technical superiority.

In an effort to fill in some gaps in my programming knowledge, I’ve started working through a couple of introductory programming books. Learning Python the Hard Way is especially intriguing because it gives a series of examples for you to type out verbatim.¹ Your job is to do so, make sure that the example works correctly, proof the code, and then figure out what it does. The book does have some explanations, but it’s based largely on the idea that you should use reasoning skills and actually figure it out.

Welcome to my new blog at Sidney’s Bowtie. I’ve been experimenting with a variety of different blog platforms for quite sometime. Initially, the debate was between WordPress and Drupal, but then I discovered Octopress. It’s taken me some time to get it set up the way I’d like, but I think I’m finally getting up to speed.

I see this as a forum for my observations on tools, practices, and philosophies that I run across in my exploration of digital humanities.