So, the report: finally clear and sunny today after a long, cold, rainy week. When I was riding to work the other day, another Gallaudet staff member complained that she was still wearing winter clothes -- and it's the middle of May! The weather this year has been odd, and I am fervently praying that this means a mild summer, not the drippingly humid underworld of last year. We'll see.
This week, I took one of my own recommendations (found in this post, back in March) and read Heresy: A Thriller by S.J. Parrish. Yes, I admit it; the New Book Cart Day recommendations don't necessarily mean I've read the book itself. I do read their book reviews, though, and usually go for some of the most interesting finds, and when I do get around to reading them, I'm invariably proven correct.
That was the case for Heresy. It's every bit as interesting as its basic premise sounds; although it doesn't actually focus on the debate between the main character, Giordano Bruno, and the rector of Oxford, Underhill, about cosmology (an actual historical event), it does focus on the murders (which are fictional), creating a case that's both spooky and utterly ordinary for Elizabethan England. Most of the murders are locked-room mysteries; speculation is rampant about the supernatural nature of the killer. Bruno has to cut through all of this twaddle and ferret out the real murderer, who turns out to be wrapped up in a Papist conspiracy in a Britain ruled by an Anglican monarch and where Catholicism is severely -- and publicly -- punished.
A major part of Heresy's appeal is the believability of the environment that Parrish creates; you really feel like you're there in 16th-Century Oxford. It rains all the time, there's mud everywhere, and Catte Street is a major destination of the Oxford dons (for this to make sense, consider the word "cathouse"). A bunch of foreign aristocrats are running around and Philip Sidney, a well-known author, poet, and diplomat, groans at the idea of entertaining them. In the meantime, Bruno displays the intelligence, wit, and cutting sarcasm for which the actual historical figure is especially noted, befriending the lower class instead of currying favors with his noble patrons. This helps him win out in the end and save a few lives.
In general, it's crazy gripping; I finished it in a couple of days because the suspense kept building up in classic detective-novel fashion. It also introduces you to the ideas that were extant at the time, like Aristotelian notions about the structure of the heavens, the class system, and life at one of the West's oldest universities. For more information about the real Giordano Bruno, Wikipedia's a good place to start. Fascinating guy!
So it's summertime now. This means that there isn't a whole lot of new Library stuff I can report on at the moment; we have several major projects (or at least I do) in the works, but they don't bear a lot of public scrutiny until they're done. I'll report on those later on in the summer, as we get closer to the fall.
In the meantime, from this point on, at least until early-to-middle August, you can expect some more posts that explore our holdings. Instead of expounding at great length on how to perform searches or locate various items in the stacks, those posts will be general overviews of what those items are: What do we have? Why do we have them? What are they about? Why are they interesting? For questions on how to find them, refer to the following posts:
- How to find books, films, and other items in the catalog
- How to find electronic journals
- How to get into e-Journals, databases, and other ALADIN functions from off-campus
So this week, I'll take a look at some of our more interesting (and obscure) electronic journals. They're interesting for reasons beyond simple research; not only do they represent the breadth of the research available to folks who work or go to school at Gallaudet, but they also represent its depth. Just bear in mind that many of them are accessible as part of an overall package we subscribe to, so it's not as though we're spending money specifically on topics that don't always come up in the average discussion -- they're sort of the fringe benefits, and what benefits they are!
Here goes:
Nineteenth-Century Literature (ProQuest)
Almost immediately contradicting what I said in the previous paragraph, this is a resource that's tremendously useful for most of the students in our English classes; in fact, last year, the English department's Capstone presentations revolved around crime in Victorian literature, which dovetails neatly with this journal. It covers everything, American and British literature, as well as the literary culture emerging in India under the Raj. You get analyses of Emily Dickinson compared to contemporary writers, Victorian-era vampire literature quite aside from Bram Stoker's Dracula, and studies about modern-day argument as a rhetorical strategy based on Parliamentary proceedings of the 19th Century. It's good reading and very useful research.
Renaissance Quarterly (Ebscohost)
Don't worry; I'll move on from the literary and artistic stuff soon enough. It just happens to be my specialty, so this is the kind of thing that catches my eye. Anyway, RQ goes even further back than Nineteenth-Century Literature and is more multidisciplinary; one article published this year examines Albertus Magnus, a 13th-Century monk who was the subject of attempted canonization as a saint three centuries later; one significant obstacle preventing this was the fact that he was a well-known magician. Not the Siegfried & Roy kind of magician; I'm talking full-on Merlin's-beard, Harry-Potter stuff.
Philosophy of Science (Ebscohost)
I like the title, but I'm not sure about the stuff it has in it. What is 'multiple realization,' why does it matter, and how come people are arguing about it? Heck, it's just fun to read stuff that you're pretty sure is English but which makes no sense. If, however, you're genuinely interested in the systematic exploration of the epistemological processes behind scientific discovery, this might be the journal for you. Incidentally, multiple realization, based on my reading of a random article, appears to be the various applications of a basic kind of science -- kind of like astrophysics, nuclear physics and orbital mechanics, which are different ways in which the underlying discipline of applying physical laws is realized. One cool example I found: it's like two different kinds of corkscrews. They both get the cork out of the bottle, but do it in two different ways.
Journal of American Folklore (Project MUSE)
Interesting title to begin with, fascinating subject matter. For example, when your friend tells a joke at a dinner party, you may have noticed that some people think it's hilarious, while others don't think it's funny at all. Why is that? Apparently, "unlaughter" serves as a means of delineating boundaries between social groups; people who identify with one group may find a specific joke funny, while those who identify with a different group find nothing funny about it. The 2006 fracas over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons in Denmark, albeit extreme, serves as a good example of this. Apparently, this is significant research, because folklorists and those who study humor have focused mostly on the guy telling the joke, not the people who have to listen to it.
Religion and American Culture (ProQuest)
It sort of goes without saying that religion plays a large part in our culture -- especially in politics -- these days, but was it always that way? Well, yes; we can trace the history of the current wave of colonization of the New World directly to a group of religious refugees. Things aren't quite so simple, though; the modern-day evangelical movement notwithstanding, there have been other groups in the United States whose spiritual beliefs have shaped our history, such as a group of Japanese Buddhists who engendered the San Francisco poetry renaissance in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to the hippie movement, which ... well, you get the idea.
Supreme Court Review (LexisNexis)
The Supreme Court Review is a collection of summaries of Supreme Court judgments, released annually, that critically analyzes the decisions made by the Supreme Court each year, places them in historical, social, and political contexts, and offers a useful primer on the decisions which are made on the behalf of both the people and the government. The analyses in the Review are written by historians, political scientists, law professors, judges, economists, and policy planners. The annual summaries are fascinating to read; you really get an idea of how the Court works, the personalities of the justices, and the impacts their decisions can have.
Journal of Aesthetic Education (Project MUSE)
Now there's an esoteric name. "Aesthetic education" refers mostly to the fine arts, as well as theater; you see articles about art and porn, conceptual models of stagecraft, and the pedagogy of Rembrandt. Highly useful for academic work in fairly rarefied disciplines or upper-level undergraduate or graduate work in theater or art history; engrossing if you're just a museum and theater buff like me.
Journal of Nietzsche Studies (Project MUSE)
Yup, Nietzsche (of "God is dead" fame) gets his very own journal. One article I came across grabbed my attention right way: Francis Fukuyama, a writer who said that we reached "the end of history" in 1989 with the failure of the Soviet Union, is compared with Nietzsche in terms of their social philosophies. Nietzsche has typically been associated with the American left because of his refusal to subscribe to moral absolutism; morality, he says, is a human projection on nature. However, the right has appropriated him because of his support for traditional institutions as being essential to a functioning society. However, Nietzsche implied that the ultimate effect of modernity is the death of thymos, or human spiritedness -- which is why he's usually associated with nihilists, those depressing people who wear black and look anemic all the time. Fukuyama argues that this is not necessarily true, which places him in opposition to his own political mainstream.
Okay, I admit this is probably not very interesting to you. But I studied Fukuyama in my undergraduate years and had plenty of friends who considered themselves Nietzschean at the time, so it's a long-standing interest for me.
Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society (Ebscohost)
Judaism is one of the world's oldest religions still in practice today, and its influence remains strong. Israel is one of the most technologically-advanced societies in the world, and Jewish thought, humor, and philosophy are an important part of American culture. Just look at Woody Allen, for crying out loud. This journal's a good read, examining everything from intermarriage in 20th-Century America to a debate over an ancient law set down before the rise of the Roman Empire, which is characteristic of a system of belief that values interpretation much more highly than most.
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (ProQuest)
One of the oldest and most-respected feminist journals in the country, Frontiers covers a broad range of topics in the context of feminist theory, women's history, and philosophical thought on gender, with a focus on drawing in material that attracts people outside of academic disciplines. For instance, there's a lot of poetry, art, and criticism of work in various media. One article I found that was especially interesting was a review of a feminist methodologist's discussion of the concept of "paradigm" in scientific research and its epistemological implications; specifically, the establishment of a normalized science places boundaries around it that imply that science is a "special" kind of knowledge that is hegemonic in nature, ignoring "the Other/the Rest." As a layman, I'm inclined to think so myself -- science is special! -- but it's an engrossing argument.
Okay ... that's enough for now. Please bear in mind that the stuff I've covered here isn't just a drop in the bucket; it's a drop in the ocean. This post represents a vanishingly small cross-section of the volume of information that's available in the Library. The famous Library of Alexandria didn't have nearly as much in it. And it's all available to Gallaudet students, staff, and faculty for free.
Again, I'd like to remind you: If you have any questions, please feel free to contact a librarian! Here's the page again, in case you're worn out from this little adventure through our electronic offerings!
Next week, a look at e-books as the first of a two-parter: Part 1 will talk about what they are and what purpose they serve, while Part 2 will look at some of what's available.
Question of the Week
I want to show a film as part of a campus event, but I heard I had to make sure things were okay with the copyright. Can the Library help me with that?
Yes, we can. Sarah Hamrick, our Director of Library Public Services, is very knowledgeable of common copyright issues and can offer suggestions on what to do to make sure everything's legal and above-board. You can e-mail us at library.help@gallaudet.edu for in-depth help or come in and ask at the Service Desk!
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