Friday's Notes

Patricia Cohen's series on the digital humanities:"Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities' Riches," NYT, 16 November;"Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers," NYT, 4 December; and"In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture," NYT, 16 December.

John Ferling,"Myths of the American Revolution," Smithsonian, January, identifies and debunks seven of them.

Two weeks ago, I posted Hans Rusling's dramatic visualization of"Longevity & Wealth/200 Countries for 200 Years." University of Oklahoma economist Kevin Grier points to its misleading flaw."... have you looked at the horizontal axis of his chart?" he asks.

The distance between $400 and $4000 is the same as the distance between $4000 and $40000. That is incredibly misleading. Properly plotted on a linear scale, it would be clear that there was way way way LESS income inequality in 1810 or that magic year of 1948 than there is in 2010. We are NOT living in an"age of convergence" with respect to per-capita incomes.

Hat tip.

Carolyn See reviews Hazel Rowley's Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage for the Washington Post, 16 December.

Manan Ahmed,"Recall America's imperial past, understand its present," The National, 17 December, reviews Robert D. Kaplan's Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power.