In January, I wrote Thoughts on Code Year, Codecademy, and Learning to Code because I have a visceral reaction to “hey! everyone code!” and it’s not a good one…despite the facts that I sell a lot of books that provide some foundation for learning some things about some programming and markup languages (that last sentence is accurate enough to appease all the people who think books like mine, and especially mine, suck).

I’m just going to restate this: everyone who wants to should learn to code. But they also damn well better know why — there has to be some goal besides “I want to be able to print ‘hello world’ in seven different languages”.

And if people want to learn to code so as to set themselves on a path to becoming a professional or an expert, then they also need to understand that any book (mine included), website, webinar, badge system, or anything else that isn’t actually working in some apprentice craftsman type of environment is just one teeny tiny step along the path. And note I didn’t say “forward” because sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes books, websites, webinars, badge systems, etc are lateral or backwards moves.

Blah blah blah.

And go read what Jeff Atwood has to say, because it’s smart and true, and honestly? It’s a heck of a lot like what educators have been saying about all this—that would be “educators”, not “Codecademy and Codecademy-knock off creators”.

As a new public beta (only 19 days old at the time of writing), it has a very brief FAQ and the specifics of the site scope are not written in stone; it’s a site and a community still defining itself. In general, however, The Workplace is for “members of the workforce navigating the professional setting.”

Sounds broad, I know. And it is! It’s also important to note that while a lot of the current users spend a lot of time at Programmers SE, Project Management SE, and UX SE—this is not an IT or software-development specific site. It’s not even specific to office jobs, although it’s true a lot of the questions skew that way because most community members have office jobs.

Some of the more popular tags for questions are résumé, hiring-process, career-development, and work-environment, to name but a few (of over a hundred).

Not only is it a nice place to be—plenty of space for questions and answers, helpful quasi-moderators (we don’t have official ones yet), low-key and useful—let me reiterate how useful it will be to all of the folks who want the Digital Preservation proposal to make it through the commitment stage: proposals need to have a number of users with at least 200 reputation on other SE sites, to show that there’s a core group of users who know how StackExchange works.

Come to The Workplace and get your feet wet! We’re friendly.

Before going any further, it’s important to note that the emphasis in the title should be on the word work, not the word shit—the latter implies a bunch of pointy-haired bosses doling out tasks from the Big Bucket of Scutwork you just know they keep under their desks. Instead, DHH’s point in the post is that when you hear an employee say “Oh, that’s not my job,” you have some managerial work to do.

Departmental hedges grow fast and tall if not trimmed with vigor. It’s the natural path unless you take steps to fight it.

Taking steps to eliminate the “that’s not my job” attitude is crucial; no one should ever consider themselves too good to do any job that makes the company go.

In my company, there is a natural split between the people who do technical development work and the people who handle large amounts of paper (which end up as electronic documents). Both are important to the forward progress of the company, but there are skillsets among both groups that do not overlap. People in each group are not inherently better than people in the other, but of course the efficiency and quality of the work would differ depending on who did it—case in point, I can create web apps in my sleep, but if you ask me to work a scanner of any sort, I will stare at it for an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out which way to put the paper in (and don’t ever ask me to print on letterhead, because it’ll never work). But we know we have the right people because if shit had to get done, people would try to find a way to do it. All of them, from the CEO on down the tree.

Sure, there might be fallout, but I’d rather deal with the fallout of monkeypatched code and its ilk than deal with the ongoing management problem of people with delusions of grandeur or who overly value turf.

To my mind, there’s also a related issue of the very real need to ensure that the people who are doing particular tasks are free to do those tasks. It’s not building hedges (or silos) to have people dedicated to tasks such as systems administration and engineering so that developers are free to, well, develop. I would argue that filling gaps with people possessing the right skillsets to ensure continual forward momentum (smoothly) is actually an ongoing hedge-trimming activity.

But I usually have another publication in mind when I’m listening to these conversations. I’m going to quote liberally from it and then let’s play a little game.

To cite but one example, the so-called information’ explosion has affected all areas of knowledge, scientific and humanistic alike, making analyses both increasingly complex and time-consuming.

…

An overriding problem, or challenge, if you will, is the integration of this new knowledge into the existing world of scholarship as well as the dissemination of these new ideas and concepts within the intellectual community. at large. Here again, one turns inevitably to the computer. In fact, we have now reached the point where even an anthropologist speaks about the heritage of a culture being stored in physical objects such as books and computer tapes! More important, however, is the existence of data processing and information retrieval as a new and useful tool of tremendous potential; a fact that must be recognized and accepted by the nonscientific community of scholars.

…

Unfortunately there is a great deal of suspicion, fear, and ignorance on the part of the humanist concerning the computer and its legitimate role in scholarship. Some see the machine as eventually making decisions that man himself should make. Others find sinister implications in every technological advance, maintaining the attitude that the humanities and technology don’t mix. Finally there are those who, ignorant of mathematics, fear they are totally and forever incapable of comprehending the computer and therefore dismiss it. Although no one would suggest burning .at the stake the maker of a computerized concordance, as was almost the fate of the first person to make a complete concordance of the English Bible in 1544, the computer-oriented humanist does face some formidable oppositions.

…

Historians have faced a new impetus for the application of social science research techniques to the analysis of historical political data. The InterUniversity Consortium for Political Research at Ann Arbor is amassing a vast amount of raw data transferred to tape storage on American political history. In addition to the formation of a data repository committee, with close ties to the American Historical Association, is the development of an automated data retrieval system to make available to historians and politicat scientists alike large bodies of information.

…

However, it is in the area of textual analysis that computer-oriented research in literature shows exceptional and exciting promise for the future. The massive comparison of text where there are several or even dozens of sources presents an almost insurmountable problem for the scholar. To compare in complete detail as few as 40 manuscripts might take the better part of a lifetime. It is this type of activity that cries for the use of data processing techniques.

…

In quite another application of computer techniques in the analysis of musical style, a program can be written to search for meaningful patterns and relationships which; because of the number and quality of variables, might remain obscured and undiscovered if left to the human brain. From these very patterns, the researcher can then develop new and significant hypotheses. An interesting example of this is the proposal of Professor Jan La Rue of New York University to evolve machine language to describe stylistic phenomena in 18th century symphonies, thereby permitting complex correlations and comparisons far beyond the reach of the hand tabulation.

…

The projects I have just described to you represent but a few highlight from the growing roster of scholars using the computer in humanistic research. A list of such activities published last spring by the American Council of Learned Societies reveals well over a hundred individuals involved with the tools of data processing.19 When compared to the state of the sciences versus the computer some 10 years ago, the prognosis for the future is good indeed.

…

…within a short time, I believe a knowledge of data processing will become part of the “common baggage” of research tools and techniques required of every graduate student in the liberal arts. I am even tempted to go a step further and state that with the increasing number of courses in programming being offered at our universities the time may come when some students in the humanities may be as fluent in programming as in writing English composition. Certainly, the computer is fast becoming an important and indispensable research tool for faculty and students alike.

With all due respect to Jerry McGann, whose books fill my shelves and I re-read for fun because they are beautiful, the particular article from which I quoted above was the single most wonderful and hopeful article I read when I was a graduate student. It is full of individual stories of faculty and their digital humanities projects, and discusses the same dreams, desires, and issues that my friends and their colleagues discuss every day.

Go ahead and guess when it was written. 2005? 2000? 1994 when the World Wide Web was shiny and new?

Keep going.

E. A. Bowles, “The Role of the Computer in Humanistic Scholarship,” AFIPS, pp.269, 1965 Proceedings of the Fall Joint Computer Conference, 1965.

1965.

Less yack, more hack indeed.

I’m pleased as punch to tell you all that I’m now the Executive Vice President of Product and Technology at Interfolio.

Specifically, it’s my job to lead the already-intact and highly capable Development and Product Management teams in the design, development, implementation, maintenance, and analysis of software applications, information systems infrastructure, and data management policies and systems. Easy, right? As I told Steve Goldenberg, CEO of Interfolio and My New Boss, “Great! That’s plenty to do. I’ll be here a while.” As part of the company’s strategic leadership team, my focus is the continual alignment of product and technology initiatives as we create and maintain solutions that streamline the application, communication, and review process between institutions of higher education and their applicants.

In other words, it’s my job to make sure that we keep making good stuff to help individuals manage their academic and professional credentials while applying for jobs in higher education, and to help those folks running searches in higher education to make good decisions about who to hire. The image in this post? That’s painted on one of the walls in the office. The development room wall, to be specific.

So, now I get to explain the “August 8, 2009″ date I mentioned in that other post. See, that’s the date that I, erstwhile graduate student who thought for a moment she wanted to get a job in academia, got my own Interfolio dossier account for that season’s job market. From the first moment I began considering a dossier service and poked around the Interfolio web site, I got the sense that these were people who Did The Right Thing by their customers. I wrote about that, among other things about them, in 2010 in a post for ProfHacker in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Because they were generally nice folks who I knew from the Twitters, I wasn’t shy about sending ideas for company products and services whenever, well, whenever I darn well felt like it…and you may or may not see one of those old ideas come to fruition sometime in the near future.

But I’ll tell you what really solidified my desire to work for them—a throw-away comment that Steve said to me the first time I met him in person, when we started working together on our stage 1 and stage 2 DML/Mozilla Open Badges Competition entry (which was unfortunately not selected as a winner, but we will find a way to do). He was talking about how the business works, and I asked something about how the relatively small team got all those darn dossiers out the door during the busy season, and he told a story about cleaning out the US Postal Service of all their Priority Mail envelopes (much to the Postmaster’s chagrin) and that “we’ve driven deliveries to the airport to get them on the last FedEx plane of the night, to make sure we take care of the customer.” That’s the kind of company I want to work for, I re-decided. And here we are!

When I left my last position I wrote in my What’s Next? post that I didn’t know what’s next but I knew it would include the following:

• promoting and leading development in open source where possible, rational, and relevant
• informing, training, and generally evangelizing the role of UX in the software development process
• adhering to solid project management principles for the good of an organization, a product, its developers, and its end users
• helping organizations—especially small and/or technically understaffed—understand software development methodologies and begin to implement something that makes sense for them
• other related things, with gusto

I’m lucky enough to get all of those with this job right out of the gate, except the first one (which you can believe I’m working on…) It’s all very exciting.

In 2009, I wouldn’t have been ready for it. And in 2009, it’s not like I started planning for it or shaped the last couple years of my work specifically to prepare for it (heck, when I interviewed for a position at UVa—different than the one I ended up taking and leaving after a year—I truly thought I’d be there a long time).

The job I want requires me to be able to identify business opportunities, risks, and trends; strategically plan and implement technology to meet short-term and long-term goals; implement and direct development methodologies and mentor developers in their use; provide opportunities for growth and leadership to others in the organization. These are the things I’ve been preparing to do for a long time—not just for the last three years—by doing (and by both succeeding and failing, and learning something from both), and by listening and paying attention to, well, everything I could that’s remotely related to the above.

If there’s one piece of advice that students should have hammered into them—and that’s “students” in the sense of “anyone trying to learn something new, be it in a formal or informal setting”—it’s to find a thread in what you’re learning and yank on it until it leads you outside the classroom, whereupon you best soak up everything you can. (I even said as much somewhere in this old ProfHacker post on mentoring graduate students.)

Excuse me for a moment while I beat this analogy into the ground…

Without a doubt, there’s junk you’ll mop up and squeeze out into the drain and will cause you to want to bleach your sponge or throw it away and use a new one. But then there’s those times you’ll come across a pool of glorious knowledge and you’ll want to soak it up and keep it in a mason jar on the shelf.

No, really. You will. I have mental mason jars labelled “Houston” and “Nowviskie” and “Watters” and “Leon” and “O’Reilly” and “Spolsky” and “Atwood” and “Nielsen” and plenty more. And I get more every day, because I pay attention to everything I can get my grubby little hands on.

When I get that job that I want, it’ll be because I listened and paid attention and made connections between subjects, people, needs, desires, and so on, and I did something with that knowledge. Do something; do anything. Keep pushing. Focus on a goal. Ignore whatever barriers you perceive, or keep banging your head against (YMMV), or find a way around them (hint: often helps to bring others with you, and while some object to the terminology, I’m a fan of flanking attacks). Keep moving forward, and soak up everything.

Yes, when I get that job, I’ll explain where “August 8, 2009″ comes from, and how I knew what I wanted to do for Unnamed Company if I ever carved out the opportunity.

I don’t say things like that lightly. I mean, I’m one of those grumbly old jaded “get offa my lawn, you!” people who has been working and building things on the web for a really long time (18 freaking years, if you’re counting at home). I’ve kept my distance from discussion/Q&A forums and listservs in recent years for a few reasons, boiled down to these: a lot of people are jerks, and a lot of people don’t even try to help themselves—both of these factors just waste everyone’s time, effort, and goodwill, and those are things I let affect me far more than I should.

But given the new year (always a good time to start new things), time on my hands after quitting my job, and a deep desire to get back to my roots (firmly planted outside of academia), I decided to commit time to becoming a good community member at StackExchange. Since I follow both Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) and Joel Spolsky (@spolsky) on Twitter and have read/enjoyed/learned from each of their blogs for a long time, I figured if there was going to be any network that I embedded myself within, it was going to be one that they started.

I joined StackExchange on January 5th, and although I got a positive gut feeling immediately, I wanted to achieve the following goals before calling it “good”:

• Focus my efforts within a small number of communities, matching the areas in which I have the most expertise and get the greatest enjoyment. With more than 80 Q&A sites, which cover many topics of interest to me and in which I have experience, this was no small feat. I settled on StackOverflow, Programmers SE, User Experience SE, and Project Management SE.
• Follow and commit to the success of nascent sites in Area 51, the StackExchange staging area. I am following three proposals in the “define” stage (Presentations, Business Analysis, and Product Management) and am committed to four in the “commit” stage (Technology Recommendations, Management and Leadership, and The Workplace).
• Achieve the Enthusiast badge on each of my four target sites; this badge is awarded for visiting the site for 30 consecutive days.
• Achieve the Deputy badge on at least StackOverflow; this badge is awarded for raising 80 helpful flags for the moderators. Flags are primarily raised when questions are off-topic per each site’s FAQ, are too localized, are too broad, or otherwise need moderator help. Raising flags is one way I contribute to the smooth operation of each community, without the reputation to do more things like vote to close questions. (I actually have the Deputy badge on SO and Programmers SE.)
• Edit, tag, re-tag, and otherwise help out questions where I can, so that they are easier for people to find, understand, and answer.
• Gain at least 200 reputation in each of my four target sites, so that my “combined flair” badge (see sidebar) shows my commitment to each.

I did all of those things, and I am happy to say that my gut instinct was correct. This network is full of serious win, and it starts with the underlying Theory of Moderation plus the core rules of etiquette: be nice and be honest, civility rules, and rudeness is not tolerated.

I’ve read a lot of questions and answers (and posted my own), both in the main and meta sites for each community, and without fail the discourse is remarkably positive, helpful, and in accordance with the operating principles. The nastiest comment I’ve seen (which is to say, it is not nasty at all) would probably be a user providing a link to the most excellent “What Have You Tried?” post by Matt Gemmell, which is (to my mind) a much more constructive answer for a newbie than giving them something to copy and paste that they still won’t understand.

It’s so refreshing not to have to fight through a layer of crap just to help someone out, or to learn from others. Reputation is not something to mess with; it works. Reputation on the network is a measurement of the quality of your questions and answers, the skill with which you communicate information to the community, and how much that community trusts you. The more reputation you earn—and you earn reputation and badges independently of each site—the more privileges you get. The more privileges you get, the more you can help shape (and hold together, when necessary) the community. It’s such a simple concept, yet so very powerful. I know there are other sites based on reputation or points-driven privileges, but I’ve not experienced a situation before my 41 days with StackExchange in which it worked so smoothly and consistently, especially across different sites with their own nuanced FAQs and different moderators (and user bases). This says a lot about the community managers, moderators, and members, across the board.

I spend most of my brainpower reading, responding, and otherwise participating on Programmers SE and UX SE, and I am especially taken by the community at Programmers SE. This has to be a very difficult site to moderate, and there was recently an election to fill moderators slots (I was happy to have reputation enough to vote)—I do not envy the moderators their role, and I am deeply appreciative of the time and effort of all the moderators. It seems that Programmers SE has a history of being a dumping ground for stuff that didn’t fit at StackOverflow, but didn’t otherwise have a home. Despite having what is (to me) a pretty clear list of what is/is not on topic, an enormous number of questions are migrated to Programmers or asked, and are immediately closed. It looks bad to an outsider, I can imagine, but this site has a talented core community of people asking and answering conceptual questions about software development (broadly defined), and who is dedicated to staying on target.

In the sidebar of my website, in the box that includes my StackExchange flair, I have a note that says “Find a StackExchange site that appeals to you, and jump in,” and I really hope you do. It’s not all technical stuff, either—for instance, there’s a SE for English Language & Usage for all you language nerds (and I know a lot of them!), and there’s one for Cooking. I’m telling you, it’s a good list.

Not a day goes by that I don’t read a question and think “Patrick could really go to town on that question” or “Joe would be all over that question at UX SE”, or “No one ever introduce Adam to the Programmers or Mathematics or GIS SE, because he would never leave the Internet“. Also, I know a lot of people in higher ed (and related) who make mention of project management but perhaps have not been exposed to the actual profession, its norms, and its communities of practice; there’s a Project Management SE that is in beta—it could use more members and more questions.

One final note on how useful StackOverflow is to me, personally: it reminds me of the core audience I’m focused on teaching when writing all of my books. As I wrote in “Tech Books: Not Dead!”, my target audience is the absolute beginner. Boy howdy are there a lot of them who post on StackOverflow—many of their questions are rightfully closed as too broad, or low quality (no research effort), or duplicates, and so on. I study the questions they ask, as well as how they’re asking—the terminology they use, the way they construct their questions, what words or concepts they’re missing—to ensure that as I work on new editions of my books, I continue to cover the fundamentals, provide answers to “why am I doing this?”, and give more than their fair share of instruction in context for the student.

So, thank you, StackExchange, for being a great environment for gaining and creating new knowledge. Friends of mine (and readers who are not yet friends), I urge you to participate where you can, within a topic that lights you up. It seems to me that the communities around SE sites are filled with people who are there because the topic is fundamentally important to them, which only makes it a better place for everyone.

Then again, neither does every online learning environment. Do any?

THINGS I BELIEVE:

• Everyone who wants to should learn to code.
  • My answer to the question “Should all majors (not just computer science majors) learn to code?” is “sure”, for some value of “code” (there’s a difference between markup and programming) and in a context that makes sense for the student. I’ve been at schools where “Professional and Technical Writing” is a course required of all upper-division students regardless of major, and were I to teach that again I would spend some time on “code or be coded”, probably more in the context of understanding the “rhetoric of information” than code, though. Oh hey, I just remembered I wrote something to that effect in 2009.
• When someone is “learning to code,” the only outcome of Lesson the First should be to understand what you’re learning and why.
  • The ideal outcome of Lesson the Second would be to understand how what you’re learning is or is not (or when/when is not) applicable in your life and current or future career
• Learning to code (learning anything) requires scaffolding.
• Teaching code (teaching anything) requires careful consideration of scaffolding and when to add and remove it.
• Teaching code (teaching anything) through imitation (type this! now type that!) without context or mentorship (for some value of mentorship: one-on-one, group, virtual, StackExchange or its ilk, etc.) is as bad of an idea as sending someone to France who has sat in High School French class but who has only memorized enough phrases to ask for the location of the bathroom.
• Pedagogy should be rewarded.
• Badges alone, while fun and useful in some contexts, are not pedagogy.

Given all of the above, I find myself in the situation of watching a considerable number of people I know (virtually or otherwise) get really, really excited about Code Year and the learning platform and curriculum developed by Codecademy, while I am really, really not.

I was trying to figure out just why my internal reaction was so negative, and then I came across this tweet by Dan Morel (note that I abhor the use of the word “retarded” and Morel himself said he should have used a different word):

What Morel’s quote reminded me is the fact that there is a not-insignificant number of people out there with jobs like “programmer” or “developer” who themselves don’t actually know how to code; they may have taken initiative on their own (a good thing!) and gone through a tutorial (or read a book, mine included), or took took a semester or two in Java or whatever language, maybe memorized some concepts, keywords, and typical sample interview questions, and managed to get a job as a developer. Or, they were in a position at a organization that decided it needed a “coder,” this person dabbled in some things, they were given a task to do, the task was done (for some value of done, meaning not knowing if it was a secure, scalable, safe, tested product), and they moved up the chain or to a different organization into a developer group and learned that they didn’t actually know development norms. These are things that happen, and they happen more than you think. People in my field have been discussing these situations for, well, as long as I’ve been in it, and I have seen at least one, if not both, examples in just about every organization I’ve worked with.

You may say that these situations are all the fault of HR or hiring managers, or managers in general, and sure, that’s the case in a lot of situations (here’s another plug for not hiring programmers based on puzzles, API quizzes, math riddles, or other parlor tricks). But the heart of the matter is still that there are a bunch of people out there with delusions of grandeur thinking they can code when they can’t. Code Year, and the Codecademy approach—based on what I’ve seen of it at this stage in their game—is not going to help that situation at all.

For two months I’ve been trying to come with a response to Audrey Watters’s post “Codecademy and the Future of (Not) Learning to Code” that wasn’t just OMG I SO AGREE WITH YOU.

I can’t. Because I do agree with her, and the key issue is pedagogy.

You know what I hope more than anything in the world? That the $2.5M and other venture money that Codecademy got goes predominantly toward pedagogy and user experience. Yes, the interface is shiny and the badges are neat, but no, it is not teaching you how to code. It is teaching you how to call-and-response, and is not particularly helpful in explaining why you’re responding, why they’re calling, or—most importantly—how to become a composer.

I’ve silently watched many people start the lessons, ask the right questions (“why am I doing X?”, “what happens when I do Y instead of X?”, “how does X and Z fit together?”, “how does Z compare to A?”, “wait, all I’m doing is typing what you’re telling me to type?”), and end up saying “well, I just earned 5 badges and don’t know what the heck that was all about or how it relates to [insert completely reasonable things here].” That is not an acceptable outcome for any learning venture, online or otherwise.

Learning anything without context is hardly learning. I wish that Code Year was 2013 and 2012 was “some smart people with good ideas and a lot of money built took the time to build great pedagogically-driven tool to really solve an existing problem for folks who want and need training in this area.”

“But Julie,” you may say, “you’re really into code and stuff. You care deeply about the term and how it’s used, and you care deeply about finding ways to teach people in ways that make sense to them. Surely you can just chill out and be cool with 500,000 people learning JavaScript online?”

Sure. I can be cool about it. I think it’s beyond awesome that 500,000 people want to try something new and that new thing involves code. I was just as excited when I saw “engage the arts and humanities” on Matthew Might’s “12 resolutions for programmers” list.

The thing is, like Audrey said:

You can look at something like Instagram in contrast, another “hot new startup” that boasts some 5 million users and over 100 million photos. You can ask, “how many of those photos are actually crap?” and the answer is probably “it doesn’t matter.”
But when you ask “how many of those 500,000 Codecademy users actually learned any JavaScript?”, the answer is actually really important.

Edited to add, months later: If you read this post and think my point is “you should buy my books”, you’re quite wrong. If you’re looking for a recommendation about where to learn X, Y, Z, I can’t give it to you because I don’t know you, and everyone learns differently and has different goals (also stated in the post). The point of this post is the pedagogical implications and pedagogy of Codecademy specifically (ca. Jan 2012) and things like it in general.

To wit, we:

• go for daily walks
• eat dinner at 5pm
• carry a lot of ibuprofin (it’s kinda like aspirin!)
• wear comfortable shoes
• eat a lot of soup
• watch a lot of crime dramas
• drink a lot of tea
• carry a lot of tissues
• eat a high fiber diet
• love pickles and olives (maybe that was just my grandmother?)
• play a lot of dominoes…AND Yahtzee
• are great believers in daily pill cases set up a week ahead of time

I think the only thing we’re missing is the hard candy in a peacock glass dish, which we shall set out post haste!

What else are we missing?

I thoroughly enjoyed Pearl’s work, despite being in the perfect position to nitpick it to death since I work on Grounds and have held in my hands and read original accounts of the shooting and John Davis’s death courtesy of the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library. But there’s no nitpicking from me—just praise, and the fervent desire that you all go take that dollar that’s been burning a hole in your pocket and spend it on this story.

While reading “The Professor’s Assassin” (available as a download from Amazon and numerous other outlets) you’ll be introduced to one William Barton Rogers, the future founder of MIT. This tidbit is important, as the novella is a prequel to The Technologists, a novel that focuses on the first class of students at MIT and, well, a fictional, yet historically-grounded, mystery. Intrigued? The book has its own trailer…and it’s about science and technology…in the nineteenth century. What’s not to love?

sort of interesting note: Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club was one of the only books I read for pleasure during my PhD work in c19 American Lit.