Lincoln Mullen's blog

Shadows and Solid Things: A History of Religion and Archaeology in the Modern World by Kris Zimmitti will be published this November. Kris writes beautifully and has an important tale to tell about how the study of the past through archaeology collided with mythic understandings of Bible times. If you’ve ever looked at a map in the back of a study Bible, wondered how long it took Joshua to march around Jericho, or looked at a line drawing of an ancient building in Sunday School, then this is…

Part of the fun of collaborating with other people—and perhaps especially with graduate students—is that they think of things you never would have. So here is an American Religious Ecologies zine (PDF), put together by Shae Corey who was a graduate student on the project. Shae put this together for a conference on DC history, and she also wrote up a blog post for RRCHNM about how to create a zine. It’s a useful and fun overview of the project, focusing specifically on identifying the…

The American Historical Association and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media jointly award the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History. Applications for the 2026 prize are now open with a due date of May 15. This is the signal prize in digital history. The Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History is sponsored jointly by the AHA and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University (GMU). It was developed by…

Paul Ford and Rich Ziade at the Aboard podcast have a good reminder that good software requires design—and thinking about it as a product—and not just functionality. In my world of DH projects, too many projects are just CRUD apps around a database. While I am optimistic about the possibilities of building with LLMs, we need (I need) more product thinking: not what is most obvious from the database or sources, but what do users actually want to do with our projects.