UC Davis Literatures in English Blog

RESOURCE: Shakespeare in the Parlor

2011-12-09T08:54:00.001-08:00

Shakespeare in the Parlor

http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Exhibitions/Printsinparlor/shakespeare/index.htm

Shakespeare's works were quite popular within the United States from the time of the early colonies, but the first illustrated version of the bard's works did not appear until the 1840s. Between 1844 and 1847 Gulian C. Verplanck's "Shakespeare Plays" was published, complete with elaborate illustrations. This digital collection from the American Antiquarian Society brings together a range of illustrations of Shakespeare's works from a literary annual and gift books in the nineteenth century. The materials here are divided into different themes, including "Imagining the Man", "Comedies", "Women", and "Re-using Shakespeare". Visitors can click through each theme to learn about these various illustrations, which include depictions of Miranda, Juliet, and scenes from The Merry Wives. The exhibit is rounded out by a bibliography and an "About" area.

RESOURCE: English Companion

2011-05-06T12:16:00.001-07:00

English Companion

http://englishcompanion.ning.com/

Where do English teachers go to ask questions and get help? Well, one online destination is the English Companion site. Visitors can sign up, and look through online groups that include "Digital Collaboration", "AP Lit and Language", and "Teaching Shakespeare". They can also participate in the online forums, which include forum threads like "Themed Units for Middle School" and "Interactive Notebooks". There are also a number of instructional applications and even a Twitter feed here. This site and its applications are compatible with all operating systems.

NEWS: 25,000 EEBO-TCP Texts Now Live

2011-04-25T23:40:00.001-07:00

The University of Michigan Library is pleased to announce the completion of the first production phase of the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. On Wednesday, September 23, 2009, EEBO-TCP updated the Early English Books Online text collection with its 25, 355th book (view the text collection at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/).

Since 1999, the TCP has been forging a groundbreaking collaborative relationship between scholars, commercial publishers, and university libraries to undertake the important work of producing fully-searchable, TEI-compliant SGML/XML enhanced text editions from digital image collections, including ProQuest’s EEBO (as well as Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Readex’s Evans Early American Imprint).

Reaching this ambitious goal relied on the tireless effort of many, across a range of fields:

EEBO-TCP partner institutions deserve special gratitude for their trust and support. Ultimately, 148 individual universities and colleges came together to help ensure EEBO-TCP texts were produced efficiently and affordably. In doing so, they distributed much of the financial load for this effort across a community and demonstrated how powerful cooperative agreements can be. Future generations of scholars (at partner institutions and beyond) will benefit greatly from their investment. ProQuest’s diligent and conscientious team was instrumental to TCP’s success, in supplying the book images themselves for conversion but also in recognizing the importance of reliably converted text. In the TCP’s foundational phases and its production routine, The Oxford University Digital Library administration and staff have provided guidance and insight at every turn. Likewise, the Michigan Library administration and staff have been the project’s bedrock in both shaping and carrying out the vision of the TCP. All told, each partnering component of the Text Creation Partnership has proven essential.

Having successfully delivered its 25,000 book, EEBO-TCP is now proceeding with its second phase of production, during which it aims to convert the remaining 44,000 unique monographs in the EEBO image collection. So far, 62 individual universities and colleges have committed to this second production phase. Additionally, a consortial arrangement has been struck with the JISC, which represents most UK institutions of higher learning.

RESOURCE: Three Percent

2011-04-15T09:04:00.000-07:00

Three Percent

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/

Launched in the summer of 2007, the Three Percent website is designed to be a "destination for readers, editors, and translators interested in finding out about modern and contemporary international literature." The "three percent" in question refers to the fact that only 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation. The site includes translations and reviews by students at the University of Rochester, and there are also a number of prominent guest reviewers and commentators. On their homepage, visitors can check out their "Recent Reviews" area, and then look over their "Upcoming Translations Events". Also, the site contains links to their RSS feeds and copies of their in-house newsletter. Visitors can also receive additional information and inspiration via the "Reading the World" podcast and their extensive lists of related weblogs, literary journals, and publishers.

RESOURCE: Mark Twain

2011-03-20T15:25:00.001-07:00

Mark Twain

http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/index.html

What better way to know Mark Twain than through his writings? Well, a fine documentary film by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan is a good place to start. This website is designed to complement their film on Twain which originally appeared on PBS. First-time visitors should start by clicking on the "Interactive Scrapbook" area. Here visitors can take a look through texts, photos, illustrations, and clippings from Twain's time that tell his own personal story and that of American in the late 19th century. Moving on, visitors can browse through some of his writings, take a look at a chronology of Twain's life, and look at a selection of related links. The educational resources here are top-notch, and teachers will find activities such as "A Writer's Inspiration" and "Tall Tales and Dark Sides" that can be used in a variety of history, journalism, or writing courses

RESOURCE: Evolving English: Podcasts [iTunes]

2011-03-11T13:49:00.000-08:00

Evolving English: Podcasts [iTunes]

http://www.bl.uk/whatson/podcasts/exhibition/english/index.html

The British Library knows that the English language is far from a static entity, and in their exhibition "Evolving English" they have gathered a number of guests to talk about the world of English and its contemporary usage. There are five podcasts available and they present a cornucopia of material on the evolution of the English language, including: "How do jokes work?", "English: the World's Language?", and "Voices of Rap and Hip Hop". The "How do jokes work?" podcast is a good place to start and the panelists include C.P. Lee, Barry Cryer, and Tim Vine. The material is insightful, although visitors should note that the podcast on rap and hip hop occasionally uses rather strong language.

RESOURCE: Invitation to World Literature

2011-01-14T14:28:00.000-08:00

Invitation to World Literature

http://www.learner.org/courses/worldlit/

Some readers may not need an invitation to world literature, but this very interesting and thoughtful website created by Annenberg Media offers the welcoming embrace of such works as the Bhagavad Gita and the epic of Gilgamesh. The site complements a 13-part video series, which offers up literature from "a range of eras, places, cultures, languages, and traditions." Your host for this adventure is Professor David Damrosch, and performers and artists such as Kristin Chenoweth, Philip Glass, and Wole Soyinka join him. The texts explored here include "My Name is Red" by Orhan Pamuk, "Candide" by Voltaire, and "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe. For each text, visitors can watch the 30-minute corresponding program, read selections from each work, and also explore the historical and cultural context of each work through interactive maps and other features.

RESOURCE: Electronic Poetry Center

2010-09-17T08:39:00.000-07:00

Electronic Poetry Center

http://epc.buffalo.edu/

Created in 1995 by Loss Peque�o Glazier, the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) serves as a "central gateway to resources in electronic poetry and poetics at the University of Buffalo, the University of Pennsylvania's PennSound, UBU web, and the Web at large." The EPC site makes a wide range of material dealing with digital and innovative poetry available to the general public. The homepage is quite easy to navigate, and visitors can look in on features like "2000 Years of Mayan Literature", "Emerging Language Practices", and a set of related recommended links. The link to "PennSound" is a real find, and here visitors can listen to poets read their latest works, courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Much of the material on the site is also available in Spanish.

RESOURCE: BBC British Novelists Archive Collection

2010-08-31T14:46:00.000-07:00

BBC British Novelists Archive Collection

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/

The BBC is increasingly finding ways to exploit and make more freely available its vast collection of visual and aural content. The latest example of this is its British Novelists Archive Collection. This is a complement to a BBC TV series, In Their Own Words: British Novelists. But whereas the series of necessity relies on short clips of interviews with leading authors as it charts the history of the 20th century British novel, this website is an archive of complete interviews and talks. These vary in length from five minutes up to an hour, and in year of broadcast from 1937 (Virginia Woolf) to 2009 (Zadie Smith.

RESOURCE: Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History

2010-04-16T09:55:00.000-07:00

Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/

Reading has been around a long time, but as Robert Darnton of Harvard University suggests, "Reading has become one of the hottest subjects in the humanities, perhaps because it seems especially intriguing now that so much of it has shifted from the printed page to the computer screen." It's a nice introduction to this online exploration of the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as found in the holdings of the Harvard Libraries. Within this collection visitors can look at personally annotated books owned by Keats and Melville and glance over the historical textbooks that document the pedagogical basis for reading instruction during the past several centuries. Visitors can use topical headings like "Learning to Read" and "Reading Collectively" as a point of entry into these items. One section that shouldn't be missed is the "Book Clubs and Associations" area, as it features records from the Cambridge Book Club and recommended works from a number of other groups. All told, the collection includes over 250,000 pages of text, and it's a site that visitors will definitely want to visit more than once.

RESOURCE: Looking Glass for the Mind: 350 Years of Books for Children

2010-02-26T09:45:00.001-08:00

Looking Glass for the Mind: 350 Years of Books for Children

http://content.lib.washington.edu/childrensweb/exhibit.html

The University of Washington Digital Collection of children's books starts off with a wonderful piece that touches on the beloved memories children's books bring back for so many, but also on the reasons why a university library would collect children's books. Several of the reasons given regard what children's books can teach us: printing and book illustration history, the "study of the gradual changes in familiar tales to reflect changes in societal acceptance and sensibilities," social and ethnic history, the historical role of women, and shifting views on education. After the homepage is the index to the exhibit with an introduction, a brief history of the first children's book publishers. To the left is the "Index" of topics that the books cover. Visitors will find a multitude, including "Fables", "Grammar, Spelling, Elocution & Rhetoric", "Math & Money", "Activity Books", and "Prejudice & Bigotry". Under the topic "Fables", visitors should check out The Baby's Own Aesop, illustrated by Walter Crane, who began an illustrating apprenticeship at the age of fourteen.

RESOURCE: Brecht's Works in English: A Bibliography

2009-12-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

Brecht's Works in English: A Bibliography

http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/BrechtGuide/

In the United States, Bertolt Brecht is perhaps best known as the composer of the Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill, which gave birth to the popular song known in English as "Mack the Knife". He is generally regarded as a tremendously prolific playwright, poet, and theatre director, and his works have been translated into a host of different productions and settings during the 20th and 21st centuries. This bibliography of Brecht's works in English contains over 2600 bibliographical entries and is a cooperative project between the International Brecht Society and the Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv in Berlin. The bibliography is hosted by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, though it should be noted that the database is not a record of the holdings of the University of Wisconsin Libraries. Visitors can scan down the homepage to access specific citation sets for Brecht's journals, essays, interviews, letters, plays, poems, and songs. The site is rounded out by a list of links to related materials, including the German Studies collection at the University of Wisconsin and the International Brecht Society.

RESOURCE: I Know Poe

2009-10-18T22:10:00.001-07:00

I Know Poe

http://www.iknowpoe.com/

Do you know Poe? Edgar Allen, that is. The Library of Virginia and The Poe Museum do, and they are inviting visitors to learn more about the man, the myth, the legend here at this collaborative exhibition website. Four icons greet the visitor: a raven, a swinging blade, a hot-air balloon, and a sinister looking cat. Clicking on the raven takes visitors to the "About the Man" area. Illustrated by primary documents from Poe's life (such as drafts of poems and highlights from the Southern Literary Messenger), this section serves as a fine introduction. One rather compelling fact described in this section is that Poe's best-selling book during his lifetime was in fact a guide to conchology, appropriately titled "The Conchologist's First Book". Moving on, visitors who click on the sinister cat section, formally titled "Explore the Myth", will find commentaries on some of the popular myths surrounding Poe. Visitors shouldn't miss the "Learn & Play" area (symbolized by the hot air balloon), as it contains the highly entertaining "I Know Poe Game Show"

RESOURCE: Off the Page

2009-10-11T13:49:00.001-07:00

Off the Page

http://poetry.eprints.org/

Listening to poets is always enjoyable, and this collection of poetry readings is quite a pip. The site contains performances from the past five decades, and visitors can listen to dozens of British poets read a host of different works. On the homepage, visitors can browse through these offerings via the areas "Poet", "Date", and "Location". The earliest recordings here include the Scottish modernist Hugh MacDiarmid reading "Moonstruck", "Stony Limits", and "The Eemis Stane". Other poets represented in this collection include Allen Fisher, Caroline Bergvall, Harriet Tarlo, and Attila the Stockbroker. The site also includes a set of links to other online audio collections, performance organizations, and online performance archives.

RESOURCE: Internet Archive: Naropa Poetics Audio Archives

2009-10-11T13:48:00.000-07:00

Internet Archive: Naropa Poetics Audio Archives

http://www.archive.org/details/naropa

Founded in 1974, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University has sponsored thousands of talks, lectures, and readings over the past four decades. The school was started by poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg, and they managed to bring important leading figures of the U.S. literary avant-garde to talk with students and others. The Internet Archive has created this very engaging archive of over 830 items, including readings and lectures from the school's various gatherings. The funding for the project came from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the GRAMMY Foundation. Visitors can check out the "Spotlight Item" on the left-hand side of the page, then take a look at the most downloaded items to the right. Some of the talks include a reading of "Howl" by Ginsberg, a lecture on public discourse by William S. Burroughs, and recordings from a number of conferences dedicated to the work of Jack Kerouac.

RESOURCE: The Literature of Prescription: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

2009-10-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

The Literature of Prescription: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/literatureofprescription/

Those visitors unfamiliar with the unsettling and terrifying short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper", by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are fortunate that this National Library of Medicine website provides a PDF of the story in its original form that first appeared in 1892 in The New England Magazine. At the bottom of the homepage, visitors need just to click on the image of a page underneath the heading Digital Documents, to read the dozen page short story. The story shed light on the treatment of women by the medical establishment, especially in regard to mental health issues. The "Education" tab near the top of the page, offers several high school lesson plans and a higher education module, for use with the exhibition. The high school lesson plans are for an English class and a Health Education class, and are about women and medicine, and mental health, past and present. The higher education module takes a look at 'The Troubled Mind in Medicine and Society"

RESOURCE: National Book Critics Circle (NBCC)

2009-07-17T09:01:00.000-07:00

National Book Critics Circle (NBCC)

http://bookcritics.org/

The NBCC, founded in 1974, is a non-profit organization consisting of more than 900 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns. In recent years, the NBCC has made efforts to become a truly national organization by offering forums in locations nationwide. The centerpiece of NBCC activities is the annual awards for the best book in six categories: autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

RESOURCE: Bibliography for Work in Comparative Literature and Culture

2009-05-27T21:35:00.000-07:00

Bibliography for Work in Comparative Literature and Culture

Bibliography for Work in Comparative Literature and Culture (PDF; 530 KB)

By Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, University of Alberta. Global in scope. 44 pages.

Source: CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (via Purdue ePubs)

From: http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/05/25/bibliography-for-work-in-comparative-literature-and-culture/

ANNOUNCEMENT: Future Fire Magazine Seeking Feminist Science Fiction Entries

2009-04-21T13:26:00.000-07:00

The Future Fire magazine ( http://futurefire.net ) is accepting submissions for a themed Feminist Science Fiction issue toward the end of this year or the beginning of 2010 (as long as it takes us to acquire the requisite number of stories). By "feminist" we do not mean stories necessarily written by women or featuring female protagonists; what we are interested in are science fiction (or speculative) stories that address issues of gender, sexual identity and sexuality; stories that take the "radical idea that women are human beings" and do something about it; stories that can engage, empower, educate, and inspire men and women alike. And of course stories that challenge our expectations, that avoid cliché, that are beautiful and useful, that are social, political, and speculative cyberfiction.

Please follow the usual submission guidelines ( http://futurefire.net/about/contrib.html ), and indicate in your cover letter that this is a submission for the Feminist Science Fiction special issue. Stories submitted to the general pile will be considered for the feminist themed issue, and stories submitted to the theme will be considered for the intervening issues. This will in no way affect our selection criteria or standards: we shall still purchase only the best stories we receive.

For more background, see the editorial to issue #15 at http://futurefire.net/2009.15/

RESOURCE: Multicultural Literature in the United States Today

2009-04-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

The United States is enriched culturally by immigrants from many nations. This edition of eJournal USA focuses on distinguished American writers from various ethnic backgrounds who add immeasurably to mutual understanding and appreciation through tales of their native lands and their experiences as Americans.

[http://www.america.gov/media/pdf/ejs/0209.pdf#popup]

From: http://www.america.gov/publications/ejournalusa/0209lit.html

NEWS: Humanists must plan their digital future

2009-04-01T11:01:00.000-07:00

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i30/30b00601.htm

From the issue dated April 3, 2009

Blind Spots

Humanists must plan their digital future

By JOHANNA DRUCKER

Stanford University is going through the difficult and highly fraught process of figuring out a plan for the library of the future. Coming on the heels of the "bookless library," touted as the vision for a new engineering library, a preliminary proposal in 2007 to tear down the seismically unsafe Meyer Library and digitize and house off campus most of its 600,000 volumes produced a cry of protest. The utopian ideal, imposed from above, might have met with less resistance had faculty members been involved in the planning from the start. But as charged responses mounted, the administration announced it would delay razing the library. Last fall a faculty committee of the Academic Council proposed its own plan for rethinking the library to the Faculty Senate, which has accepted it with a call for further rethinking by various university groups of how to put the plan into effect.

The new faculty plan is characterized by a key shift in emphasis that is both less charged and more pointed. Rather than envision a "library of the future," it discusses the "future of the library," stressing continuity with an old entity rather than the creation of something brand-new. The distinction exposes what is at stake.

What is at stake here is symptomatic of a national crisis. Libraries have long been characterized as the heart of the research university, the center for scholarship. No one disputes that the aggregated sum of information and material available online, even primary material, has shifted the library's identity. Scholars no longer only visit archives in person; they access library material with immediacy (and increased mediation) online. The need to deal with space crunches and shrinking resources while keeping units critical to a university's mission fully functional is a familiar tale. In California, even at well-endowed Stanford, handling the risks of earthquakes increases the urgency. Buildings have to come down, be replaced, or be repurposed, and libraries are caught wondering how to deal with books. Is this a temporary transition between one traditional library space and a new, updated one? Or do these pressures create an opportunity — or an excuse — to restructure the library? Are all books destined to be condemned to remote storage practically on arrival from their presses, to be read at terminals

What to do?

As the Stanford case illustrates, the vision of the library of the future has been launched first in the sciences, pushed by the conviction that technical information will become more readily and conveniently accessed online — and that the future has arrived. A job advertisement in 2007 for a new head librarian of Stanford's Engineering Library, for example, stated that the new unit would be "a library, but in the most advanced definition of that term, and ultimately, as the literatures of engineering disciplines move to digital form, it is envisioned as a bookless facility." Not surprisingly, when the plan to tear down Meyer and replace it with an academic computing service was announced, alarm rose. Too much of the renowned East Asian collection would be available only by sending a page for a book, critics said. Humanists objected that the model of the sciences did not fit their needs. Then came the faculty proposal.

The Stanford faculty recommendations are telling for several reasons, which is why I've bothered to begin my discussion there (or, here, as I enjoy the hospitality of the Stanford Humanities Center as a digital humanities fellow). The faculty committee has made a series of highly reasonable and well-argued proposals. Guiding them is a belief, correct in my opinion and that of most humanists, that books aren't going away, we need them and shall continue to do so for a long time to come, and we cannot pit digital tools against book culture. We must accept the hybrid world of scholarly work and earnestly endeavor to support it.

Among the proposals are also processes for deciding what can or should not be stored remotely and other matters of policy about access and cataloging that would occur whether digital technology was in the mix or not. All envision an expanded service role for new technology that increases efficiency (delivery time for off-site materials) and capabilities (scanned title pages and indices, enhanced cataloging, and enriched metadata). But the sections that stick out include visions of technical solutions to current problems that fall into what I characterize as the "hand-waving magic wand" approach to the future.

Two to-do-list items are particularly striking in the way they point out a critical — and in my opinion terrifying — gap in assigning and accepting responsibility. The faculty report identifies the need for Research Portals and a Browsing Model Project. Both would be ambitious and desirable and would serve scholars of all disciplinary orientations admirably. So where is the problem?

The assumption is that the design and realization of those experimental work environments will occur through the combined efforts of Stanford's applied-technology specialists and its library. The research portals are described as "virtual spaces devoted to research center modules comprised of research portals customized to specific projects, on-line data storage for the materials gathered, and database design for accessing the material in complex ways." The browsing-model project is seen as "a working model in which the experience and intellectual yield of physically browsing books are replicated in an environment comprised of both paper and electronic materials. This will probably involve intense graphics and three-dimensional imaging." The faculty committee explained: "We believe that building such a model will convince skeptical faculty about the potential of working with new technologies, and force the library to deliver services that have, up to now, been mainly promises for the future." Even if orchestrating such holographic information fields were readily possible, how should they be designed to support scholarship?

The question cannot be answered in the abstract. The details that will bedevil this and other schemes for the next age of scholarly work and design of the environments to support it are not trivial. And here I come to the crux of my argument. The design of new environments for performing scholarly work cannot be left to the technical staff and to library professionals. The library is a crucial partner in planning and envisioning the future of preserving, using, even creating scholarly resources. So are the technology professionals. But in an analogy with building construction, they are the architects and the contractors. The creation of archives, analytic tools, and statistical analyses of aggregate data in the humanities (and in some other scholarly fields) requires the combined expertise of technical, professional, and scholarly personnel.

The task of modeling an environment for scholarship (not just individual projects, but an environment, with a suite of tools for access, use, and research activity) is not a responsibility that can be offloaded onto libraries or technical staffs. I cannot say this strongly or clearly enough: The design of digital tools for scholarship is an intellectual responsibility, not a technical task. After all, what will such "research portals" do? What kinds of work will they be designed to support? Editing? Annotation? Aggregation of leaves of manuscripts scattered at remote institutions? Collaborative writing? Close readings? Data mining? Information display? Multimedia writing? Networked conversation? Publishing? Those are enormous questions, to which no scholar would have the same set of answers as another. No scholar would have the same requirements. But creating boutique, custom solutions on a project-by-project basis is not practical, and the labor involved is too costly. The scope of the task ahead is nothing short of modeling scholarly activity anew in digital media. To answer that challenge, humanists have to do more than wave their hands at the technical professionals.

Scholars in the humanities have been particularly remiss in taking seriously the role they need to play in this project. For years when I was at the University of Virginia, where the library took the lead on digital-humanities projects, serving as home, sponsor, mentor, and friend to the many research institutes that helped break new ground and establish now-standard practices, faculty members involved in those activities came up repeatedly against a wall of resistance from within their ranks. Humanities, arts, and social-science colleagues repeatedly dismissed digital projects as work for the library community. Most considered the creation of digital materials a technical matter of access, a thing "they" should do and take care of for "us." That attitude contains a grotesque misunderstanding of the basic problem: Unless we scholars are involved in designing the working environments of our digital future, we will find ourselves in a future that doesn't work, without the methods and materials essential to our undertakings. Returning to the architecture analogy, you shouldn't build a new house without dialogue between architect and client. Would you let a contractor determine basic space allocation? Technical experts and library professionals are not mind readers, even in the futuristic film worlds of sci-fi. Design must emerge from the context of use.

Examples of how and why "we" have to play an active role in the design of the scholarly environments of the future abound in the experience of digital humanists — and are more common in the daily experience of scholars trying to perform basic research and writing tasks than many realize. For instance, a number of us who had an opportunity to be part of town meetings reviewing the recommendations for dealing with the shortage of space at the Library of Congress some years ago came up against a basic issue: What version of a work should be digitized as representative of a work? Is Leo Tolstoy's original Russian text of War and Peace sufficient or irrelevant for future generations? Will those generations prefer access to the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation? Or to the more recent translation by Anthony Briggs? Should we digitize the sanitized version of Mark Twain's classics, purged of language now offensive to readers, or the originals that allow the historical distance of culture and vocabulary to register?
In a similar vein, what if another library's only version of Euclid is a copy of Stephen Thomas Hawtrey's An Introduction to the Elements of Euclid used by Bertrand Russell's brother Frank to introduce the future philosopher to its mysteries of mathematics? If the copy is tattered, missing pages, or has other marks showing it was used by a childishly eager Russell, should that bit of history be put aside for the benefits of scanning a clean, new copy of a 10th-grade geometry textbook? In the 2007 article "Inheritance and Loss? A Brief Survey of Google Books," Paul Duguid mordantly observed the shortfalls in Google's plans to digitize library books. He emphasized that the intellectual tasks of vetting editions and assessing scholarly value for generations to come have to be taken into account from the very design of the project, not reverse engineered later.

The technician might suggest that the cleanest, clearest copy that is most legible in OCR (optical character recognition) and automated search technologies provides the best return on the digitizing investment. With those criteria, selection is guided by technical requirements and constraints designed into the system. That is not "just" an issue of selection but a fundamental feature of functionality and capability, in other words, the design of the digital environment. The typographical features of the long "s" or radical experiments in graphic layout used by the 20th-century avant-garde — markers of their time and place of production — can be quickly sacrificed in a choice of "legible" (i.e., standardized) fonts. The migration of typeset texts into ASCII streams has been an issue of contention in literary and biographical studies since the advent of the Internet. Such debates underscore the fact that properties of texts are informational, not incidental, to many scholarly projects.

That brings me back to the core of my argument: the problems of designing the environments themselves. What functions do we want a research portal to provide? Three-dimensional imaging and intense graphics are built for scientists and the gaming-entertainment complex. They are radical remediations of traditional forms and formats. All have built-in assumptions about rendering "information" in visual and tractable form. The assumptions of humanists about what can be measured and how are different. They need to bring to bear the same critical interpretation of rhetorical and performative features that are brought to the study of aesthetic texts. Scholars working with the quantitative analysis of cultural materials recognize immediately that the graphical display — granularity, the sequencing of information, or the use of bar charts versus line graphs — of the supposed "information" they are "mining" represent rhetorical variables.

The metaphors of mining are as mechanistic as old concepts of the New Critics about "getting" meaning from a work — as if it could be extracted in buckets and removed, usually by students relieved to be able to leave the nasty, troubling body of the text behind. But of course, we want to be troubled: It is precisely the capacity for "troubling" that makes a text engaging, provocative, productive. Knowledge does not exist outside of circumstances of use or independent of its material means of expression. The history of literary and cultural studies in the last 50 years is a sequence of critical interventions in the assumption that a text is a static thing.

Many humanities principles developed in hard-fought critical battles of the last decades are absent in the design of digital contexts. Here is a short list: the subjectivity of interpretation, theoretical conceptions of texts as events (not things), cross-cultural perspectives that reveal the ideological workings of power, recognition of the fundamentally social nature of knowledge production, an intersubjective, mediated model of knowledge as something constituted, not just transmitted. For too long, the digital humanities, the advanced research arm of humanistic scholarly dialogue with computational methods, has taken its rules and cues from digital exigencies.

If we are interested in creating in our work with digital technologies the subjective, inflected, and annotated processes central to humanistic inquiry, we must be committed to designing the digital systems and tools for our future work. Nothing less than the way we understand knowledge and our tasks as scholars are at stake. Software and hardware only put into effect the models structured into their design.

Moreover, university administrators need to see such work as more valuable than they have to date. Faculty members and graduate students committed to remodeling knowledge with innovative approaches to scholarship have to be supported. With rare exceptions, the work, too easily seen as tool-building, has occurred at the edges of digital projects and is usually financed with grants. That does not result in approaches that can be generalized beyond specific projects.
Unless scholars in the humanities help design and model the environments in which they will work, they will not be able to use them. Tools developed for PlayStation and PowerPoint, Word, and Excel will be as appropriate to our intellectual labors as a Playskool workbench is to the chores of a real plumber. I once bought a very beautiful portable Olivetti typewriter because an artist friend of mine said it was so elegantly designed that it had been immediately put into the Museum of Modern Art collection. The problem? It wasn't designed for typing. Any keyboardist with any skill at all constantly clogged its keys. A thing of beauty, it was a pain forever. I finally threw it from the fourth-floor tower of Wurster Hall at the University of California at Berkeley. Try doing that with the interface to your university library. Now reflect on who is responsible for getting it to work as an environment that supports scholarship.

We face a critical juncture. Leaving it to "them" is unfair, wrongheaded, and irresponsible. Them is us.

Johanna Drucker is a professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles.

This year she is a Digital Humanities Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

http://chronicle.comSection: The Chronicle ReviewVolume 55, Issue 30, Page B6

ANNOUNCEMENT: Calisphere -- share your University of California-created web sites with us

2009-03-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

Do you have a web site you’d like to share that has been created by a UC campus faculty member, librarian, or researcher? Would you like to raise the visibility of a web site you’ve created? Is it an online exhibit, curated collection, or thematically-based grouping of materials? Does the web site feature resources such as photographs, maps, historical documents, current articles and research, multimedia, electronic books, or other online resources?

Let us know! We’d like to add it to Calisphere.

Context

Calisphere, managed by the California Digital Library (CDL), provides public access to primary source materials and freely available UC-created web sites. Calisphere offers more than 150,000 digitized items—including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts—selected from the libraries, archives and museums of the UC campuses, and from cultural heritage organizations across California. Calisphere is also a gateway to UC-created web sites that reflect the diverse interests and scholarship of UC, including the humanities, social sciences, math, and science resources. To date, we have published citations to over 500 websites—and we’d like your help to expand our registry.

Who uses Calisphere?

Calisphere is freely available to the public and is used by a broad range of people including UC students, K-12 educators and the general public. By incorporating UC sites in Calisphere, we increase their visibility and make them more broadly available.

Send Us Your URLs

Here’s how.

RESOURCE: The Beat Review

2009-03-20T09:51:00.000-07:00

The Beat Review

http://www.wooster.edu/beatstudies/reviews/default.html

Interest in the work of the so-called "Beat" writers has continued unabated for well over half a century, and The Beat Review publishes a great deal of material on their legacy. Based at the College of Wooster, The Beat Review contains information on new Beat scholarship and other Beat works. The publication is peer-reviewed, and visitors are welcome to submit their own reviews and review suggestions to the editor. The first issue was published in the summer of 2007, and the Review tends to be published three to four times a year. It's easy to get a sense of their work by looking over a sample issue, which typically contains approximately six or seven critical reviews of works on people like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac. Finally, visitors can also learn about signing up to join the Beat Studies Association if they so desire.

RESOURCE: Digital Wordsworth

2009-02-27T09:39:00.001-08:00

Digital Wordsworth

http://www.digitalwordsworth.org/

Created as part of a unique collaboration between Lancaster University and the Arts & Humanities Research Council, this site brings together manuscript materials for two important texts by William Wordsworth: Prelude and Home at Grasmere. The focus of the project is to explore "the importance of place to the writing of poetry", and it's a novel and interesting way to think about the creative process. The intent of the project is "to open up an understanding of the relationship between actual physical place and imagined, textual space in the context of the poem and the making of the manuscript." First-time visitors should take a look at the "How to Use This Site" area to learn about how they can best navigate the site. Along with containing the text of both works, visitors can look at different maps of the places discussed in these works, learn about Wordsworth's movements around these places when he was writing, and look at historical maps. Overall, this site is well-thought out and it may serve as a model for those looking to explore the relationship between real and imagined places in literature.

RESOURCE: Shakespeare's Staging

2009-02-20T08:16:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare's Staging

http://shakespeare.berkeley.edu/

The University of California at Berkeley's English Department has undertaken the enormous task of presenting "a survey of current information, opinions and visuals about...the original nature of Shakespearean performance during his lifetime, and of its development through four centuries thereafter." Visitors can click on "Performance Galleries" at the top of the homepage to be taken to ten albums of over 900 images. Some of the topics of the albums that you can link to are "Productions from the Sixteenth through the Twentieth Century", "Productions in Britain 1960-1998", and "Unusual Representations of Shakespeare Performances". The albums contain items such as playbills, photos and drawings of performances, and photos of the rebuilt Globe Theatre. On the far left side of the homepage, visitors can click on "Videos" to view a documentary series about Elizabethan life, as well as excerpts of performances staged by the Shakespeare Program of UC Berkeley at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. The videos can be viewed by "Latest", "Most Viewed", "Highest Rated", and "Featured". Visitors interested in other websites that explore Shakespeare performance will want to click on "Relevant Websites" on the far left side of the homepage, to access a link that has 27 Shakespeare performance related websites.

ANNOUNCEMENT: UCLA's Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts

2009-02-13T10:08:00.001-08:00

I share this post from Marta Brunner, my counterpart at UCLA.

"The Chronicle for Higher Education posted a story in the Wired Campus column about UCLA faculty member Matthew Fisher's (English) new project creating a Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts. The Chronicle article is available online at http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3606/a-digital-window-on-the-medieval-world and is also copied below."

February 10, 2009
A Digital Window on the Medieval World

Thousands of medieval manuscripts have been digitized by libraries around the world. The trick has been finding them. Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, thought up a solution: the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts, a centralized online archive of holdings around the world.

For decades, even centuries, scholars have had to find their way around library holdings using shelfmarks, unique identifying numbers assigned to each document — a kind of Dewey Decimal System without a unifying organizational principle, according to Mr. Fisher. The catalog will pull many of those records into one spot, so that researchers who cannot hop on a plane to faraway libraries can still get their hands, virtually, on manuscripts they want to work with.

So far Mr. Fisher and his team have found as many as 5,000 digitized manuscripts they want to include. As of February 9, 1,024 of those had been entered in the catalog. Two grad students help vet each entry and figure out what categories it belongs in. Mr. Fisher acknowledges that for now the archive focuses mostly on Western European and North American holdings, but he hopes to marshal the scholarly expertise to bring in more records from other parts of the world.

Eventually, the site will have a collaborative layer of some sort, so that scholars can share their expertise with other researchers and with libraries, which do not always have the most accurate information for each manuscript, according to Mr. Fisher. He’d like the catalog to provide a general set of digital tools, too, so that similar databases can be built in other fields.

But how many people really want to know where they can get a peek at, say, the Gospel of John presented to Charlemagne around 800 and now lodged in the monastery of St. Gall, in Switzerland? Quite a few. Since the site went live in December, it has gotten more than 5,000 hits a month. It even scored a mention on the Web site of the Society for Creative Anachronism. —Jennifer Howard

The catalogue website can be seen at http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/. We hope you have a chance to explore this new tool and that it will contribute to your research.

RESOURCE: Charles Olson's Melville Project

2009-02-13T09:10:00.000-08:00

http://charlesolson.uconn.edu/Works_in_the_Collection/Melville_Project/index.htm

Noted poet and literary theorist Charles Olson began investigating the life and work of Herman Melville during his time as a graduate student at Wesleyan University in the 1930s. Olson began to realize then that there were hundreds of Melville's former books scattered around the country. He began to locate these books and transcribe information about each volume (including Melville's original marginalia) onto 5 x 7-inch note cards. Unfortunately, many of the note cards were damaged years later, but the University of Connecticut later purchased Olson's papers and set to work on repairing and conserving the cards. This most welcome digital collection is part of their work, and visitors with a penchant for Melville will want to browse through the hundreds of cards offered here. Each note card features a text transcription, a pdf of each card, and a zoom feature. Visitors can also manipulate the image to look at different segments, and they may also wish to perform a full-text search across all of the transcriptions.

ANNOUNCEMENT: 19th century UK pamplets in JSTOR

2009-02-05T12:13:00.000-08:00

JSTOR just announced that it is providing University of California Libraries free access to its new 19th Century British Pamphlets collection until June 30, 2009. This pamphlet collection includes the Cowen Tracts (1603-1898), the (John) Hume Tracts (1769-1949) and the Knowsley Pamphlet Collection (1792-1868). If you want to browse the pamphlet collection, you can open JSTOR and just type in the name of the collection in the search box.

RESOURCE: Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Bibliography

2009-02-05T12:09:00.000-08:00

I share this post from Marta Brunner, my counterpart at UCLA.

"Those of you who are writing dissertations and theses, along with those of you who may be advising students who are writings such things, may have given at least passing thought to the idea of the format in which that final document will be submitted, evaluated, and disseminated. There are numerous discussions afoot regarding the need for a shift toward electronic dissertations and theses. In some cases, these discussions center on the practicalities of having electronic rather than (or in addition to) paper copies to facilitate dissemination and preservation. In other cases, the question is somewhat more radical, asking what new forms may emerge to challenge the convention of a linear, text-based, book-length argument that prevails in most humanities and social science disciplines.

To get a handle on these discussions, you can consult the latest version of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography by Charles W. Bailey, Jr."

NEWS: Victorian novels like Pride and Prejudice teach us how to behave

2009-01-16T10:38:00.000-08:00

Victorian novels like Pride and Prejudice teach us how to behave

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/4239733/Victorian-novels-like-Pride-and-Prejudice-teach-us-how-to-behave.html

NEWS: Research posits that Victorian novels may have aided the cause of altruism and fairness in society

2009-01-16T10:37:00.000-08:00

Victorian novels helped us evolve into better people, say psychologists

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/14/victorian-novels-evolution-altruism

RESOURCE: International War Veterans' Poetry Archives

2009-01-16T10:32:00.000-08:00

International War Veterans' Poetry Archives

http://iwvpa.net/index.php

Created by and for war veterans, this website contains poetry and short stories that are not only written about war veterans, but they are also written by them. The submissions can be from veterans of any nation, but must pertain to war, veterans, or the consequences of war. The website also includes resources for veterans who want to connect with other veterans and for those saddled with the unique challenges associated with being a veteran. "The Index of Authors" section at the top of the page will lead visitors to author pages and their writings. Some have photos, and others have extensive biographical essays. Visitors can find everything new added to the site, by month and year, going all the way back to 2001, by clicking on "Recent Additions" at the top of the page. The "Writing Resources" link at the top of the page has some great links to general writing sources, and to specific veteran writing resources, such as "Voice of the Vet: Veterans Writing Project", which takes place weekly at the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago. "Recommended Links", found at the top of the page, offers a slew of sites that honor veterans, help veterans, inform veterans, remember veterans, and tell the stories of veterans.

ANNOUNCEMENT: The American Literatures Initiative

2008-12-29T20:25:00.000-08:00

The American Literatures Initiative is a new collaborative book publishing program, supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to create new opportunities for publication in under-served and emerging areas of the humanities.

This new five-press publishing collaboration—New York University Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press—will confront the publishing crisis in literature and literary studies, where the annual number of university press books has declined steeply in recent years, placing younger scholars at a disadvantage when writing their first books.

The American Literatures Initiative, which will launch in January, 2008, will be an innovative, entrepreneurial, cooperative effort to expand the number of books published in literary studies and increase audience reach by using common resources available to the five Presses through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Each press will continue to acquire and develop titles according to its own needs and editorial criteria looking for high-quality first books by promising scholars, seeking out the best scholarly work about English-language literatures of Central and North America and the Caribbean.

The innovative aspects of the initiative include:

first books by scholars
royalty advances paid to authors for work accepted for publication
a shared, centralized, editorial office managing the production of the books and ensuring high quality copyediting and design
a collaborative, high profile, and aggressive marketing program consisting of major academic journal and other media advertisements, direct mail and e-marketing campaigns, publicity, academic conference exhibits, and award submissions

An additional goal of the initiative is the creation of a sustainable model of scholarly publishing in the humanities. The collaborative production model will create permanent efficiencies and will also enable the Presses to experiment with innovative print and electronic publishing models.

“The project has the potential to give literary scholars an important vehicle to publish the kind of research that currently does not have adequate publishing outlets,” said Rosemary G. Feal, Executive Director of the Modern Language Association.

“It’s a twenty-first century approach to this problem through a collaborative strategy designed to engage publishers, faculty members, and administrators. The fact that each press will be able to maintain its individuality and utilize its own strengths, while at the same time cooperating with other presses, is a unique and laudable feature.”

For more information on the American Literatures Initiative, visit www.americanliteratures.org, the web site of the participating Presses, or NYU Press, the lead press in this collaborative venture.

Editorial statement of the Presses in the American Literatures Initiative:

New York University Press (www.nyupress.org), Eric Zinner, Editor-in-Chief

We will pursue innovative work in American literary studies emerging in the “long” nineteenth century—from the Revolutionary period through early modernism—focused on the relationship of literary production to the world-shaping events of this period.

Fordham University Press (www.fordhampress.com), Robert Oppedisano, Director

We are particularly interested in scholarship that rigorously extends disciplinary boundaries, especially among philosophy, religion, and literature and that showcases in fresh ways the methods of close reading.

Rutgers University Press (rutgerspress.rutgers.edu), Leslie Mitchner, Editor-in-Chief

We are most eager to find titles that cross lines among ethnic groups and minorities and open up discussion beyond a particular identity group.

Temple University Press (www.temple.edu/tempress), Janet Francendese, Editor-in-Chief

We will maintain our focus on race and ethnicity, emphasizing the literary production of relatively new immigrant groups or groups whose numbers are growing as a result of new waves of immigration.

University of Virginia Press (www.upress.virginia.edu), Cathie Brettschneider, Humanities Editor

We welcome submissions for our series, New World Studies, which publishes interdisciplinary, multilingual research that seeks to redefine the cultural map of the Americas, encompassing the Caribbean and continental North, Central, and South America. We also consider work in twentieth-century American literature, Black American literature and culture, and ethnic and postcolonial studies in language and literature.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Joint MLA / Teagle Foundation Report

2008-12-25T23:59:00.000-08:00

Coherence, Literature, Languages

When literature and language professors gather in San Francisco this weekend for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, one topic on the agenda is the state of the undergraduate major in English and foreign languages. A report prepared jointly by the MLA and the Teagle Foundation outlines a series of goals for these undergraduate programs — at least one of which the report calls “radical.”

That stance is that all English majors should have the language skills to study literature in another language — and that foreign language majors be able to study literature in English. Other key emphases of the report — which focuses on themes, not specific course assignments — are not likely to find much opposition among the MLA rank and file. For example, the report stresses the importance of literature and of coherence as students in the major move from course to course.

On the question of foreign languages, the Teagle/MLA panel offered a mix of philosophical and practical reasons for making sure that English majors can read in other languages.

“We are committed to the notion that all students who major in our departments should know English and at least one other language. This is a radical stance, and it is not one with which students — and faculty members — can always comply with ease,” the report says. “Our political and social lives are not ‘English only’ domestically or internationally. The value of fluency in multiple languages cannot be overstated in the 21st century, when the emergent conditions of life bring more of us more often into circumstances that, on the one hand, ask us to travel through the complex terrain of a globalized economy and, on the other, bring far-flung local parochialisms to our doors through the vastly expanded reach of new communications technologies.

“Students who study languages other than English are achieving not merely formal communication but also sophistication with the nuances of culture — both in the sense of culture as art, music, and poetics and the broader sense of culture as way of life. The translator, international lawyer, or banker who successfully conducts business in a language other than his or her native tongue shows linguistic capacity and cultural understanding, something a university education in languages is uniquely capable of instilling.”

The recommendation goes both ways in the report: it applies to those studying English and foreign languages. “We believe that students who major in foreign languages should be required to have a good command of English and some knowledge of English and American literature; likewise, English majors should be required to learn another language and become familiar with literature in another language,” the report says. The study rejects the idea that translations suffice for such study. “While readings in translation of world literature can broaden understanding of other cultures, translations do not necessarily induce deep or subtle sensibilities toward the stranger within our community or far distant from our shores,” the report says.

Further, it suggests that literary study — not just communication — must be central in measuring language knowledge. “The pedagogical emphasis in recent decades on language for communication seems sometimes to entail the willingness to accept approximations of pronunciation, grammar, and syntax, so long as the intended idea is more or less conveyed,” the report says. “This notion of efficiency may be adequate for non-academic language teaching programs,” the MLA/Teagle panel says, but college students majoring in a language also need to understand issues of aesthetics, and “the correspondence between sharpness of thought and aptness of expression.”

As the report acknowledges, many English departments do not come close to requiring proficiency in a foreign language. The most recent data on requirements for the English major come from an MLA survey in 1984-5, which found that English majors were required to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language in 61 percent of programs. In two thirds of those programs, the requirement was institutional; in one third, departmental. The 61 percent figure was a decline from 81 percent in a 1967-8 survey.

While current data do not exist about language requirements for English majors, statistics on requirements for all undergraduates suggest that the MLA/Teagle group may have a way to go to achieve its goals and that requirements may be looser now than in 1984-5. A May report from the American Council on Education found that fewer than one in five colleges or universities had any foreign language requirement for undergraduates — let alone one of proficiency.

Some of the other themes of the new report:

Coherence of course sequences and requirements. While not endorsing any particular course or approach to course requirements, the panel calls for an approach that is “integrated” and “structured,” and where students proceed from course to course in ways that reflect an intentional progression designed by departmental leaders. “The requirements for a major should amount to more than a list of courses, the prevailing model now at some institutions; requirements should form a series of course options that combine to fulfill curricular objectives,” the report says. “The aim should be to develop students’ linguistic abilities, acquaint students with representative cultural examples through a designated body of works, and engage them with specific concepts, ideas, issues, cultural traditions, and traditions of inquiry. In addition to dispensing knowledge of the field, the course of study in English and other modern languages should also make improving writing and analytic skills two of its central tasks.”

The primacy of the study of literature. “The role of literature needs to be emphasized. Sustained, deep engagements with literary works and literary language open perceptions of structure, texture, and the layering of meanings that challenge superficial comprehension, expand understanding, and hone analytic skills,” the report says. “While we advocate incorporating into the major the study of a variety of texts, we insist that the most beneficial among these are literary works, which offer their readers a rich and challenging — and therefore rewarding — object of study. Our cybernetic world has brought us speed and ease of information retrieval; even where the screen has replaced paper, however, language still remains the main mode of communication. Those who learn to read slowly and carefully and to write clearly and precisely will also acquire the nimbleness and visual perceptions associated with working in an electronic environment.”

Inclusion of all faculty ranks in decisions and teaching. Consistent with a recent MLA report on the growing use of adjuncts, the Teagle study stresses both the importance of including non-tenure track professors in making curricular decisions and including those on the tenure track in teaching introductory courses. “We strongly believe that all teaching faculty members, regardless of rank and status, are stakeholders in the educational mission of the department. All should be involved in the organization of the curriculum,” the report says. “Moreover, to attract students to a major, departments should showcase their best and most experienced professorial-rank faculty members in general education courses and not reserve them for specialized courses only. Withholding professorial-rank faculty members from general education courses accentuates the disparity between non-tenure-line faculty members (including graduate assistants) who often teach first-year and general education courses and tenure-line professors who offer students a more integrated educational experience.”

The panel that wrote the report was led by Michael Holquist, a professor of comparative literature at Yale University who is a former president of the MLA. Among the literary scholars on the panel were two sitting college presidents: Carol T. Christ of Smith College (who started her career teaching English) and Joan Hinde Stewart of Hamilton College (who started her career teaching French).

— Scott Jaschik

The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/23/teagle.

NEWS: "Read it and weep" The economic news couldn't be worse for the book industry. Now insiders are asking how literature will survive

2008-12-25T23:54:00.000-08:00

I'm passing this sobering article along...thought that you all might be interested

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/12/23/publishing/index.html

RESOURCE: Two on W.H. Auden

2008-12-19T23:16:00.000-08:00

The Auden Society http://audensociety.org/

Poets: W.H. Auden http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/120

After his death in 1973, W.H. Auden was feted in many quarters, and his reputation as one of the most important poets of the 20th century remains secure. The first link will take users to the homepage of the W.H. Auden Society, which works to preserve his legacy and to inform curious readers about his work in general. The helpful materials on this site are contained with seven sections, which include "Books", "Poems", "Recordings", and "News". The "Books" area contains a complete list of Auden's works, along with his plays and libretti. "News" contains information about news stories recently done on Auden, and the "Criticism" area contains a rather thorough listing of introductory studies on Auden, biographies, and concordances. The second link leads to brief, yet delightful collection of Auden's works offered by the Academy of American Poets. The site starts off with a brief biography of Auden, and continues on with the text of eleven poems by the master himself. The real treat is that visitors can also listen to Auden read three of his own works, such as "First Things First" and "On the Circuit".

RESOURCE: Walt Whitman Archive

2008-12-17T09:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Whitman, America's most influential poet and one of the four or five most innovative and significant writers in United States history, is the most challenging of all American authors in terms of the textual difficulties his work presents. He left behind an enormous amount of written material, and his major life work, Leaves of Grass, went through six very different editions, each of which was issued in a number of formats, creating a book that is probably best studied as numerous distinct creations rather than as a single revised work. His many notebooks, manuscript fragments, prose essays, letters, and voluminous journalistic articles all offer key cultural and biographical contexts for his poetry. The Archive sets out to incorporate as much of this material as possible, drawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the United States and around the world. The Archive is directed by Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Ed Folsom (University of Iowa).

ANNOUNCEMENT: The MLA Report on the Academic Workforce in English

2008-12-17T09:21:00.000-08:00

The MLA Report on the Academic Workforce in English

http://www.mla.org/pdf/workforce_rpt02.pdf

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 1: Key facts and kudos

Part 2: Complaints and concerns

Part 3: Interview with Paul Lauter

RESOURCE: Companion to Digital Literary Studies

2008-10-21T16:16:00.000-07:00

Please note Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman, and now freely available online.

NEWS: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wins Nobel Prize for literature

2008-10-21T16:13:00.000-07:00

Never read Le Clézio? We have a number of his books at the University Library!

Planning ahead for Fall

2008-09-03T17:34:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are in town and already planning your classes for Fall Quarter, please consider sharing your syllabi or at least your reading lists with me, or the librarian with whom you work most closely. Doing so will: 1. help ensure that the library has at least one copy of the materials your students will be reading, and 2. better enable the library to build our literature collections in ways that complement the teaching and research done at UCD. I assure you that I will not share your syllabi without permission.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Google book search bibliography

2008-06-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

The Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 2 is now available from Digital Scholarship. This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

ANNOUNCEMENT: New MLA style manual released

2008-05-12T18:04:00.000-07:00

MLA has just announced the release of the third edition of its longstanding style manual, the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. According to an announcement by MLA President Rosemary Feal, “This new edition of the MLA Style Manual introduces revisions and refinements of MLA documentation style, and this updated style will be used in MLA publications starting in January 2009. Authors of articles, books, theses, dissertations, and other scholarly works in MLA style should use the guidelines in this volume.”

ANNOUNCEMENT: Open Humanities Press officially launched

2008-05-12T17:59:00.000-07:00

LAUNCH OF OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS – Open Access expands to humanities disciplines with a bold new publishing initiative in critical and cultural theory

Brussels, Belgium – On May 12, 2008, the Open Humanities Press (OHP) will launch with 7 of the leading Open Access journals in critical and cultural theory. A non-profit, international grass-roots initiative, OHP marks a watershed in the growing embrace of Open Access in the humanities.

“OHP is a bold and timely venture” said J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, a long-time supporter of the Open Access movement and OHP board member.

“It is designed to make peer-reviewed scholarly and critical works in a number of humanistic disciplines and cross-disciplines available free online. Initially primarily concerned with journals, OHP may ultimately also include book-length writings. This project is an admirable response to the current crisis in scholarly publishing and to the rapid shift from print media to electronic media. This shift, and OHP’s response to it, are facets of what has been called ‘critical climate change.’”

“The future of scholarly publishing lies in Open Access” agreed Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University and fellow member of OHP’s editorial advisory board. “Scholars in the future should give careful consideration to the where they publish, since their goal should be to make the products of their research as widely available as possible, to people throughout the world. Open Humanities Press is a most welcome initiative that will help us move in this direction.”

OHP will give new confidence to humanities academics who wish to make their work freely accessible but have concerns about the academic standards of online publishing. In addition to being peer-reviewed, all OHP journals undergo rigorous vetting by an editorial board of leading humanities scholars.

OHP’s board includes Alain Badiou, Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, Donna Haraway, Professor of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation, UC Irvine, Gayatri Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director for Public Knowledge and Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University, who has been leading the public debate on the crisis of academic publishing in the humanities.

“Open-access publishing in serious, peer-reviewed online scholarly journals is one of the keys to solving a financial crisis that has afflicted university libraries everywhere and has had a chilling effect on virtually every academic discipline” said Greenblatt.“Making scholarly work available without charge on the internet has offered hope for the natural sciences and now offers hope in the humanities.”

With initial offerings in continental philosophy, cultural studies, new media, film and literary criticism, OHP serves researchers and students as the Open Access gateway for editorially-vetted scholarly literature in the humanities. The first journals to become part of OHP are Cosmos and History, Culture Machine, Fibreculture, Film-Philosophy, International Journal of Zizek Studies, Parrhesia and Vectors.

“But it’s not simply a matter of what Open Access can do for the humanities” added Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University, co-editor of Culture Machine and one of the co-founders of OHP. “It is also a case of what can the humanities do for Open Access. Researchers, editors and publishers in the humanities have developed very different professional cultures and intellectual practices to the STMs who have dominated the discussion around Open Access to date. OHP is ideally positioned to explore some of the exciting new challenges and perspectives in scholarly communication that are being opened up for Open Access as it is increasingly adopted within the humanities.”

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Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at www.openhumanitiespress.org.

NEWS: Are digital course packs fair use?

2008-04-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

Are digital course packs fair use? Well...take a look at this development, taken from Peter Suber’s open access blog:

Katie Hafner, Publishers Sue Georgia State on Digital Reading Matter, New York Times, April 16, 2008. Excerpt:

Three prominent academic publishers are suing Georgia State University, contending that the school is violating copyright laws by providing course reading material to students in digital format without seeking permission from the publishers or paying licensing fees.

In a complaint filed Tuesday in United States District Court in Atlanta, the publishers — Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications — sued four university officials, asserting “systematic, widespread and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works” by Georgia State, which the university distributes through its Web site.

The lawsuit...may be the first of its kind....

The case centers on so-called course packs, compilations of reading materials from various books and journals. The lawsuit contends that in many cases, professors are providing students with multiple chapters of a given work, in violation of the "fair use" provision of copyright law. The publishers are seeking an order that the defendants secure permissions and pay licensing fees to the copyright owners....

R. Bruce Rich, a partner in the law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, which is representing the plaintiffs, said that...Georgia State officials “indicated their view that all of their practices are covered under the fair use doctrine.” ...

Legal precedents exist for cases involving course packs from photocopied material, but experts say the lawsuit against Georgia State is the first to be filed over electronic course packs....

“Publishers have created a market for course materials that is very similar to the market for luxury goods,” said [Susan Crawford, visiting professor at Yale Law School]. “There is only one version available, and at a very high price.” ...

“In academic publishing, we need to find the digital services people really want,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco. “I wonder if this will turn out to be an ‘attack the innovator’ suit like the peer-to-peer suits for the music industry. Sometimes a bit of slack can help us all discover a winning formula."

Comment. This is not about OA, so I won't be covering the case in detail. It's about TA and the fair use of TA literature. But there are several reasons why I wanted to cover the first appearance of what will clearly be an important case. (1) I want to set myself up to blog future twists and turns, or commentary, with strong OA connections. (2) The case may show how far photocopying precedents will be applied to digitization cases. (3) The case could change or clarify fair use for non-commercial educational purposes. Any such change or clarification would affect fair use for TA literature, but also fair use for free online literature that had removed price barriers but not permission barriers. (4) It may show the weight of the first fair-use factor ("the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes") relative to the fourth ("the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work"), or in short, the relative weight of university interests and publisher interests.

RESOURCE: The Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies

2008-04-14T18:06:00.000-07:00

I call your attention to The Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies. The Labyrinth provides free, organized access to electronic resources in medieval studies through a World Wide Web server at Georgetown University.

The Labyrinth's easy-to-use menus and links provide connections to databases, services, texts, and images on other servers around the world. This project not only provides an organizational structure for electronic resources in medieval studies, but also serves as a model for similar, collaborative projects in other fields of study. The Labyrinth project is open-ended and is designed to grow and change with new developments in technology and in medieval studies.

http://labyrinth.georgetown.edu/

RESOURCE: Shakespeare plays coming soon on the web

2008-04-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

Libraries to create Shakespeare web resource

The Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC are to put all 75 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays from before 1641 online.

The quartos are the earliest printed editions of the plays and are the closest to what Shakespeare actually wrote still in existence.

The project is intended to give the public greater acccess to the plays and downloading of the quartos will begin next month.

Online users will be able to compare and study the texts, which are the earliest sources for the 37 plays Shakespeare is known to have written.

“There will be countless new ways for scholars, teachers, and students to examine the quarto texts, particularly of ‘Hamlet’,” Folger library director Gail Kern Paster told Reuters.

“You find out all sorts of things - about how the copies went through the press, and also about the printing process,” she added.

From: http://www.rte.ie/arts/2008/0327/shakespeare.html

ANNOUNCEMENT: Postdoctoral fellowship for humanists

2008-04-14T11:04:00.001-07:00

The Council on Library and Information Resources offers an excellent postdoctoral fellowship for recent/upcoming PhDs in the humanities (including interdisciplinary fields and “soft” social sciences such as history): the Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellowship in Scholarly Information Resources.

The deadline for 2008 applications has been extended. Past recipients of this fellowship have gone on to tenure-track faculty positions in their fields or embarked upon careers in academic librarianship.

For more information, visit the fellowship website at http://www.clir.org/fellowships/postdoc/postdoc.html.

ANNOUNCEMENT: University of Chicago Press Online Journals

2008-04-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

The University of California now has systemwide access to the

University of Chicago Press Online Journals

This resource includes full access to some 14 humanities journals and many more social science and hard science journals.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Research competency guidelines for literatures in English

2008-04-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

In September 2007, the Literatures in English Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) published its “Research Competency Guidelines for Literatures in English: Outcomes for Undergraduate English or American Literature Majors.”

The guidelines are meant to facilitate collaboration between faculty and librarians to the end of producing undergraduate English majors with research skills relevant to their field of study. The outcomes include:

“I. Understand the structure of information within the field of literary research,”

II. Identify and use key literary research tools to locate relevant information,”

III. Plan effective search strategies and modify search strategies as needed,”

IV. Recognize and make appropriate use of library services in the research process,”

V. Understand that some information sources are more authoritative than others and demonstrate critical thinking in the research process,

VI. Understand the technical and ethical issues involved in writing research essays,” and

VII. Locate information about the literary profession itself.”

(Excerpted from: ACRL Literatures in English Section Planning Committee. “Research Competency Guidelines for Literatures in English. ” College and Research Libraries News September 2007: 526-529.)

RESOURCE: Mark Twain Project Online

2008-04-14T10:28:00.000-07:00

The University of California just announced its launch of the Mark Twain Project Online (http://marktwainproject.org/).

Here is the press release just issued:

For Immediate Release:

November 1, 2007

For More Information:
Laura Cerruti, University of California Press 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley CA 94704 (510) 643-9793, laura.cerruti at ucpress dot edu

University of California launches Mark Twain Project OnlineAccess to texts, notes, and facsimiles available online at no charge to institutions or individuals

BERKELEY, Calif. - November 1, 2007 - University of California is pleased to announce the launch of the beta version of Mark Twain Project Online (www.marktwainproject.org), a digital critical edition of the writings of Mark Twain.

Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO) applies innovative technology to more than four decades of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.

MTPO is a joint undertaking of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, the California Digital Library, and University of California Press. It is funded in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Mark Twain Project, and is supported by a number of institutions and individuals. The Mark Twain Foundation, a perpetual charitable trust that possesses the publication rights to all of Mark Twain’s writings, has given UC Press and Mark Twain Project Online exclusive rights to publish copyright-protected writings by Mark Twain, both in print and electronically.

At beta launch, the site will include more than twenty-three hundred letters written between 1853 and 1880, including nearly 100 facsimiles of originals. Users will also be able to search for information about Mark Twain’s complete correspondence across his entire life, including letters to him and his family. In future years, the site will release more of the nearly ten thousand known letters, including many never-before published; electronic editions of many of Mark Twain’s most famous literary works; the most complete catalog of Mark Twain’s writings currently available; and, in 2010, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, never before published in its complete form.

“Mark Twain Project Online is an extraordinary resource for scholars, teachers, and ordinary readers. Materials that previously could be examined only by scholars fortunate enough to be able to visit the Mark Twain Project in The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley will now be available worldwide to anyone with an interest in Mark Twain-and that’s a cause for celebration, ” Shelley Fisher Fishkin, author of Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture, said.

The customizable interface provides a powerful reading and research experience. The site offers users unprecedented access to authoritative transcriptions of Mark Twain’s writings and to compare those transcriptions side by side with facsimiles when available. Researchers can gather and store digital citations and links to selected documents, images, and other resources. These features are supported, in large part, by the California Digital Library’s eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) and the ongoing work of The Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI).

Mark Twain Project Online demonstrates the great advantages of digital presentation and will be a model for future digital scholarly work. “The Mark Twain Project Online is an exciting initiative that will make a fundamental literary and biographical archive available to scholars and students. MTPO offers easy access through a sophisticated web interface and growing and comprehensive scope. This project has the potential to become a model for Web accessibility to foundational scholarly resources,” Richard Terdiman, author of Body and Story: The Ethics and Practice of Theoretical Conflict, said.

For more information about Mark Twain Project Online, including more about the making of this landmark online publication, please visit http://www.marktwainproject.org