I am very interested in politics, both US and European. I have a blog, reflectionsonfrance.com, which is about politics in France. At first I was writing simply to express myself on current issues; then I became interested in the digital sources themselves, including youtube videos and twitter, as historical evidence.
I am also on twitter, and I follow many French political figures, who tweet clips of their speeches or television appearances. Their tweets allow me to track down other traces of them, including online newspapers as well as fuller postings of interviews. I don’t tweet in any systematic way; I respond (too often, I think) to US politicians and to animal videos, but do not, at this point, really engage in academic twitter.
I was on leave this past semester and was planning a trip to archives in France; the pandemic made that trip impossible, and so I switched my project at the last minute to contemporary French history, inspired by my blog. Now I am figuring out how to use digital sources in a traditional historical monograph; that has become my current project, and also a way of thinking about recent history and the role of the historian in interpreting current events.
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