Open History Project Update #1
This past April I launched the crowdfunding campaign for my Open History of American Education project. The campaign finished in May and was a total success!
Much appreciation to all the 46 people who helped out! The donations followed a clear power law distribution, with 80% of the funding coming from just 8 people, and 50% of the funding coming from just 2 people. In that sense this whole thing was less “crowd” funded and more “a dinner table full of patrons” funded.
I honestly had a ton of uncertainty about how things would work out and was thrilled to see people excited to support me working on this. I'd never done this kind of fundraising before, and the $12K was a big part of making my finances work out for the year, so hallelujah!
At the same time, it didn’t end up being enough for me to put aside other work long enough to make sure I finished the project on my original timelines. I had loosely intended to have the website up by the end of the summer, and to definitely be done with the whole project by the end of 2024. Right now the website is only mostly done, and there’s still a lot more reading and annotating and fact-checking left to do. I’m also spending the rest of this year full time working on an AI project for work, and won’t be attending to this project again till January. C'est la vie.
In the meantime, for those invested in the fruition of The Open History of American Education, and for those curious about how my life’s been, here’s what’s been happening since May!
Right as the crowdfunding was wrapping up in May I went full time on putting together a magic cabaret show that had a week long run in Pittsburgh. It was my first time performing in a venue like that (most of my previous work as a magician had been doing close-up magic table hopping in restaurants or busking), and it was weird and fun adapting to a 70 person theater. Also, it was the most I’ve been paid so far for magic, $1,500 for the week!
I spent the summer in NYC while my gf did a coding boot-camp at Fractal Tech. Most of my time went to the Gatto project, probably split half and half between web dev work and research and writing. I found out that making a custom PDF web component is a lot more involved than I expected, though I still think it’ll be worth it. The basic setup for the content management system part of the project is the following home-brewed pipeline:
Convert the PDF of the book to plain-text → organize the plain-text files as a Logseq repo → use Logseq to annotate the book content, highlight quotes from PDFs, and link those in with the content → write some custom grammars to parse the annotations and highlights to build the static website with → profit (jk, profit was step one, the money’s already in the bank).
It’s not the most plug-n-play setup, but it’s the simplest thing I could figure out that would get me what I needed. At some point I’d like to factor out the PDF highlights component of this project into something I can also use for my personal blog.
In September I switched gears back to other paid work, flying out to SF to collab with some friends on a project that had been cooking on the back-burner for a while and was finally ready to ramp up. The general idea is making AI assistants to help mediate difficult conversations. I’m spending all my time on that right now, trying to get out a demo by New Years.
A few people have asked me “If I’m really curious, should I just start reading Underground History or should I wait for you to finish your edition?” I’d say just start reading! I’m intentionally designing the web book to enable a more Choose Your Own Adventure style reading so it’ll be a lot easier to hop around to the parts you’re most interested in and it won’t be like just rereading the whole book.
And that’s the update! Stay Lucky