This past week, I committed a grave sin. I've done it before, but often for reasons having to do figuring out how to best expand the collection. This time, though, I just wanted to read it and we didn't have the book, so I ...
Well, I ... I ordered it from another university.
Okay, I'm kidding. Truth is, the availability of so many books from so many good universities is one of the Gallaudet University Library's many benefits, and I feel no real shame in taking full advantage of it. In this case, it was Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, a collection of Richard Feynman's personal letters, edited by his daughter.
If you don't know who Richard Feynman (pronounced FINE-man) is, shame on you. He was one of the most significant and well-respected physicists of his time, which actually comprised the majority of the 20th Century -- he was born in 1918 and died in 1988. He started out fairly young, earning his doctorate at Princeton and working at Los Alamos in his 20s, helping the military figure out how to build an atomic bomb during World War II, then moved on to figuring out the fundamentals of several very important aspects of quantum physics. He went on to become one of Caltech's most popular teachers, won a Nobel Prize for some of his work in 1965, and was one of the investigators of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.
It all sounds relatively pedestrian until you dig into the details of his life, which Perfectly Reasonable Deviations lets you do. For instance, he was also a widely-known bongo player. Mad about bongos, actually. He played them all over the world and once joked that people knew him better for his drumming than his physics. He had two great loves of his life; his first wife died in the 1940s of tuberculosis while he was working at Los Alamos, and he met (and married) his second wife on the spur of the moment in the 1960s and she was with him when he died in 1988, just shy of 70 years old. In the twenty years that separated both wives, though, it is said that he was very popular with the young ladies.
This might sound odd to you, but he was also one of the first scientist-celebrities. Albert Einstein made headlines, but this guy made movies. His Lectures on Physics sold millions of copies on tape and in print, and he had his own television miniseries, where he just stood there and talked about physics. People ate it up; he was a brilliant and engaging teacher who was able to explain some of the most exotic concepts known to modern science (at that time, anyway) to complete laymen. He was the first Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, and Neil deGrasse Tyson in terms of his recognizability, though much closer to Stephen Hawking in his contributions to quantum physics.
He also had a bit of a Mr. Wizard sensibility; he demonstrated to a Congressional hearing that the Challenger disaster was due in large part to frozen O-rings failing to protect the Shuttle from the superheated gases propelling it upward. How? By dropping a piece of O-ring material in a Styrofoam cup of ice water, then showing how the cold temperature made the O-ring return to its proper shape much more slowly than it should have, a vital characteristic when you don't want multibillion-dollar spacecraft exploding and people dying.
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations emphasizes his popular appeal quite a bit; it includes dozens of fan letters from a wide range of people, from car mechanics to British housewives, all thanking him for making it all perfectly clear to them and asking him questions one wouldn't expect to hear outside of a graduate-level physics course.
Of course, the larger message of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations is subtle: Although Feynman became busier and busier and more and more famous over the fifty-year period covered in the book, he answered almost every single letter personally, albeit occasionally with apologies for taking so much time to respond. His responses nevertheless show that he took the time to read them, think about them, and do his best to answer any questions that came up. And they certainly came up; he responded to questions about anything from the quirks of particle behavior to a father's worries about his science-loving son. The overall impression is one of a very smart, very funny guy who treated complete strangers with the utmost grace.
It's highly recommended if you're curious about the life and mind of one of modern science's seminal figures. No lab-coat-bedecked geek here!
And now, as another brilliant 20th-Century mind once said, on with the opera.
Did you know that Gallaudet University has had a library since 1864? We'll be celebrating our 150th birthday in 2014. One of the biggest advantages of our longevity is that we've had time to collect some truly interesting items, including the occasional 19th-Century specimen.
Those older books can be pretty fragile, though; we do have plenty of cool stuff dating from 1950 up to now. Let's take a look, starting with the magical stuff (literally) and moving to the just plain interesting:
A History of Magic and Experimental Science
This one kind of breaks the rule -- the first volume was published in 1923, but the last was published in 1958. The title constitutes an interesting juxtaposition, doesn't it? In general, this series of historical investigations covers the transition from superstition and magical thinking to the scientific method, starting with the Roman Empire (Volume 1, The first thirteen centuries of our era) and ending with the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment (Volume 8, The seventeenth century). It's a fascinating look at the history of our civilization and the foundations of the rationalism so venerated in some circles today.
The Magician, the Witch, and the Law
Another historical tome, this one focuses more specifically on medieval witchcraft and the effect it had on society and the legal code -- such as it was in a feudal age. It examines how magic in general influenced public thinking, analyzing public discourse and how leaders took advantage of the superstitious to achieve their own ends -- and how the witches and magicians of the time took advantage of this same credulity to achieve their own. It also goes into some detail about how medieval witchery clashed with the Inquisition and the tragic results.
Magic: A Reference Guide
Because I am hilarious like that, we'll wrap up the conjuration with a book on prestidigitation: stage magic. This book is a terrific look into how something that may appear on stage to be utterly unexplainable is actually totally rational; it's all a matter of manipulating objects, the audience, and the situation. It's a fascinating read!
How to Enjoy Ballet
I have no real interest in ballet or learning how to enjoy it, but isn't the title great? In all seriousness, ballet is one of the most difficult forms of dancing; it's highly reliant on a combination of technically-adept execution and aesthetic appeal. Not only are there specific moves, foot placements, and arm positions, but a dancer needs to be able to follow the music and transition from one position to another as smoothly and elegantly as possible. Like figure-skating, it's a much-misunderstood but extremely complex form of expression, and some people need help understanding it. This book is a great place to start!
Contemporary Hermeneutics
It's not the most welcoming of titles, I agree; "hermeneutics" is generally defined as the science of exegesis, particularly of spiritual writings. In this book, though, it's placed in an architectural context on a continuum from Pre-Classicism all the way up to Ecoism. It discusses how buildings are interpreted, often in terms of the prevailing beliefs of the time. For example, Thomas Jefferson's mansion in Virginia, Monticello, was designed in the Palladian tradition, which was heavily reliant on geometry, symmetry, and the designs of ancient Greek temples. That one of our founding fathers chose to build a house that resembled, in some ways, a three-thousand-year-old temple suggests that he saw some essential similarities between ancient Greek society and the civilization he was trying to build. It's a very fascinating book, especially when you get up into the incredible mishmash of architectural philosophies represented by early-20th-Century New York.
Soviet Economic Progress: Because of, or in Spite of, the Government
Part of the reason I find this book interesting is the perception I have of US-USSR relations around 1957, when this book was published. It just feels as though both countries were completely closed off to one another, their motives inscrutable to us, ours untrustworthy to them. Intellectually, though -- and partly because of this book -- I understand that that simply wasn't true. In fact, in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, reviewed above, there are several letters between Dr. Feynman and the Soviets as he repeatedly declines their invitations to participate in a symposium in Leningrad. There was plenty of information exchange between both countries, regardless of how hostile both governments were toward one another.
After Hamelin
This one's a lot newer; published in 2000, it's a novel about an old woman who tells a story about the Pied Piper of Hamelin. If you're not familiar with the story, the town of Hamelin had a serious rat problem, and they hired the Pied Piper to use his magical pipe to lure all the rats away. However, when he was done, the town refused to pay him, so in revenge, he pulled out his pipe and took all the children away, and they were never seen again. That's the basic story as most people know it; in After Hamelin, the old woman reveals a new fact: one child stayed behind. The Pied Piper couldn't lure her away because she was deaf! Terrific book.
Face Reading
This is a cool book! It relies on the art of physiognomy: determining aspects of personality based on one's facial shape and features. It's an ancient Chinese art (one of many, it sometimes seems) known as siang mien. Your ears can predict your future (how does that work for deaf people, I wonder ... ), and various facial features can impute information about one's sexuality, success in relationships, and the outcome of each year of a person's life. There's some bona-fide medical stuff in there too: some diseases are indicated, first and foremost, by changes in facial characteristics, like the loss of eyebrow hair, changes in the shape of the nose, lip coloration, and the structure of the eye.
I think we'll stop here -- it's an interesting mishmash of stuff I've dug up. There are many more books like these throughout the collection; an hour's worth of browsing can yield some serious serendipity if you're after the weird and offbeat.
As a reminder: Next week, no post. I'll be at the big, giant ALA conference. The following week, you'll get an on-the-ground report from your friendly neighborhood librarian!
Question of the Week
The Library printer I was using jammed! What do I do?
The first thing you should do is tell the person who's working at the Service Desk so he or she can fix it. If you're really pressed for time, you can also switch to the other printer. That's why we have two; sometimes things don't work quite right with one, so we have the other one as a backup.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
New fiction
And our summer marches on!
I've been curious about Joe Hill's books for a few months now, so I checked out The Heart-Shaped Box and Horns and clipped through them in a single weekend; they're that quick and easy to read. They aren't small books, though -- they're full-fledged novels with really terrific characters and absorbing plots.
The Heart-Shaped Box was essentially Hill's debut novel, and it made major waves when it came out last year. This is because it's supremely creepy and doesn't spare any ultraviolence. An aging rock star named Judas Coyne -- a combination of Elvis, Mick Jagger, Ozzy Osbourne, and anyone from ZZ Top -- is a gothy sort who lives with a young lady half his age in a farmhouse somewhere in New York. He collects creepy things, like a human skull belonging to someone who was trepanned (a process where a hole is drilled in the skull of a live person to cure ills -- not as widely practiced these days), coffins, and a dead man's suit.
The dead man's suit, in particular, is the basic premise of the novel. The rock star's assistant gets an e-mail telling him about the suit, which is up for auction online, and of course, Coyne can't resist, especially when he finds out that there's a ghost attached.
Unfortunately, it turns out to be true. And it's done in a disturbing way that still makes me nervous. The night after he gets the suit (wrapped in a heart-shaped box, hence the title), he wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking he heard something. He walks down the hall, past an old man sitting in a rocking chair, goes downstairs and looks around a little bit, but nothing's out of order. He goes back up the stairs, walks past the old man sitting in the rocking chair, and goes into his room. Then something strikes him as odd, and he looks back into the hall, which has become very cold, but there's nothing -- and nobody -- there. And so it begins ...
Horns is a little more straightforward. It's less creepy and more of a surrealist revenge fantasy. This guy goes on a major bender, completely blacks out a full night, and wakes up the next morning in his own bed, much the worse for wear. He goes into the bathroom, glances at himself in the mirror, and discovers that he's grown a pair of small horns for no apparent reason. He discovers a few new talents he's picked up with the horns: first, nobody notices that he has horns -- and they always forget he was ever there after the conversation ends. Second, when he talks to people, the horns make them confess all of their most secret sins, and he can make them do things. Third, when he touches someone, he picks up their entire past, including some of the darkest things they've ever done. And snakes really, really like him.
Of course, I still haven't mentioned the most important part, other than the horns: His girlfriend was violently murdered a year previously, and he's the main suspect. All the evidence that might have cleared his name was destroyed in a mysterious fire, and his girlfriend was beloved by their hometown, so he's nearly universally hated. I was expecting this to be almost a mystery, the main character spending most of the novel trying to find the killer's name and then facing off with him in an apocalyptic showdown. However, he discovers the real murderer's name within the first couple of chapters, and the rest of the novel is concerned chiefly with hunting down and cornering the killer and exacting vengeance. All throughout the book, the horns keep growing and his skin begins to change ...
Well, read the book. It's a fantastic read, possibly (slightly) better than The Heart-Shaped Box.
Anyway,I've spent most of this week locked up in my office working on stuff, which I will explain more about later in the summer, I promise. I've also been planning for the American Library Association's big, giant annual conference, which is here in DC in a couple of weeks. I'm excited; I've been a bona-fide librarian for two years now and I'm finally going to the conference. I'll skip that week's post (Friday, June 25) and report to you all the following week! In the meantime, here's a list of fun new fiction that's come in over the last couple months to hold you over until I can focus on something more substantive!
The Infinities
A most decidedly unusual book, this novel tells the story of a dying mathematician (hence, the title -- partly) and his family, who are holding vigil over him on a hot summer afternoon. However, his family is not alone in participating in the end of his life; all around them are little gods, in the classical Greek sense (the other part of the title's meaning), who move around and through the family seen and unseen and wickedly stir up a seething cauldron of trouble.
Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal
The title takes things a bit literally; the author/narrator spends some time with the Hamburger King, one of the most influential businessmen on the planet, while he machinates his way through his empire, subordinates, friends, and relatives. Funny, eccentric, and highly satirical, this novel, translated from French, sort of makes you think about all the ways in which we all endure servitude and even, in some cases, enjoy it.
Beatrice and Virgil
Yann Martel, author of the bestselling Life of Pi, brings us another animal-themed novel; Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a howler monkey, are the centers of a play-within-a-novel written by a taxidermist. The main character is an author who seems rather similar to Martel, sucked into the taxidermist's bizarre inner life as he assists in writing the play.
Let the Great World Spin
The 1974 feat of Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker who walked between the towers of the World Trade Center, 110 stories up, becomes the focal point of several different Manhattan stories that intersect at the end of the novel. It's one of those books, but the author pulls it off with such grace you're guaranteed to be thinking about it for weeks afterward.
The November Criminals
This novel pulls off the triple distinction of being a funny stoner novel set in DC. A small-time drug dealer in high school decides to investigate his classmate's murder, but he has a weakness for his own product, which throws a few wrenches in his clever, clever plan. The book can be a little hard to follow, but that's just because the main character is stoned all the time, so is easily distracted by interesting tangents.
Dog Boy
One of those fascinating feral-child stories, a young Russian boy is abandoned by his mother, and he falls in with a pack of stray dogs, which enables him to survive for another two years. The author follows his progress from the hairless outsider of the pack to a trusted alpha dog until his capture by a scientist who hopes to make his name based on the young boy's life. Strange, but it's a wonderful read and avoids the drippy sentimentality one sometimes gets from boy-and-his-dog stories.
The Last Surgeon
A hospital thriller, this novel takes everyone in the operating room during a nastily-botched surgery and kills them off one by one. The survivors -- a nurse, a physician, and the last remaining surgeon -- have to team up and hunt down a hired killer who has a singular talent for making a murder resemble a suicide. Taut and suspenseful, this makes for great light reading.
The Sheen on the Silk
A fascinating historical novel that takes place in the late-13th-Century Byzantine Empire, this book follows Anna, who must investigate the circumstances under which her twin brother was exiled. He's innocent, but is the center of a mysterious conspiracy; Anna dresses up as a eunuch and spends much of the book maneuvering herself closer and closer to the central figures of the story.
Wench
Another historical novel, this one is set in antebellum America, at a resort in Ohio known for its clientele of rich white slave-owners with their slave-mistresses. The novel follows three women who are regulars at the resort and the upheaval in their lives following the arrival of a fourth, who does not hold back from wondering about freedom. That the resort is in Ohio, a free state, complicates matters, as does the fact that one of the slaves is in love with her master and thinks the feeling is mutual. It's a complicated, psychological book.
The Book of Spies
Ivan the Terrible is a legendary figure in Russian -- and indeed global -- history. What few people know is that he was an avid collector of books, one of many characteristics I share with him. Unfortunately, his collection was lost, and since he owned many rare, one-of-a-kind books, those stories were lost as well. Now they've begun to emerge, and are at the center of a sort of worldwide book club composed of a cabal of incredibly wealthy men. Then the CIA finds a link to a bank account associated with terrorism and gets involved ...
That takes care of this week. We got a fantastically good crop of books this year, and I'm very pleased with the results. Next week, we'll take a look at the rest of the collection and some of the more unusual books we have here.
Question of the Week
I saw a bunch of librarians cleaning out the VHS shelves. What's going on? Are you getting rid of all the movies?
We're clearing out the VHS shelves, but we're not getting rid of all the movies, just many of the videotapes. Part of it is because those things are old, rarely checked out, and obsolete. Most of them have degraded significantly since they arrived -- normal for VHS tapes -- and because the format is so outdated, most people end up watching them here in the Library, where there are still VCRs. Another part is just that our collection of Deaf DVDs is expanding, and they need room! That's the life of a library -- over time, some things elbow their way in and other things get pushed out. We're not getting rid of stuff, we're making room for new things. It's been an exciting summer so far!
I've been curious about Joe Hill's books for a few months now, so I checked out The Heart-Shaped Box and Horns and clipped through them in a single weekend; they're that quick and easy to read. They aren't small books, though -- they're full-fledged novels with really terrific characters and absorbing plots.
The Heart-Shaped Box was essentially Hill's debut novel, and it made major waves when it came out last year. This is because it's supremely creepy and doesn't spare any ultraviolence. An aging rock star named Judas Coyne -- a combination of Elvis, Mick Jagger, Ozzy Osbourne, and anyone from ZZ Top -- is a gothy sort who lives with a young lady half his age in a farmhouse somewhere in New York. He collects creepy things, like a human skull belonging to someone who was trepanned (a process where a hole is drilled in the skull of a live person to cure ills -- not as widely practiced these days), coffins, and a dead man's suit.
The dead man's suit, in particular, is the basic premise of the novel. The rock star's assistant gets an e-mail telling him about the suit, which is up for auction online, and of course, Coyne can't resist, especially when he finds out that there's a ghost attached.
Unfortunately, it turns out to be true. And it's done in a disturbing way that still makes me nervous. The night after he gets the suit (wrapped in a heart-shaped box, hence the title), he wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking he heard something. He walks down the hall, past an old man sitting in a rocking chair, goes downstairs and looks around a little bit, but nothing's out of order. He goes back up the stairs, walks past the old man sitting in the rocking chair, and goes into his room. Then something strikes him as odd, and he looks back into the hall, which has become very cold, but there's nothing -- and nobody -- there. And so it begins ...
Horns is a little more straightforward. It's less creepy and more of a surrealist revenge fantasy. This guy goes on a major bender, completely blacks out a full night, and wakes up the next morning in his own bed, much the worse for wear. He goes into the bathroom, glances at himself in the mirror, and discovers that he's grown a pair of small horns for no apparent reason. He discovers a few new talents he's picked up with the horns: first, nobody notices that he has horns -- and they always forget he was ever there after the conversation ends. Second, when he talks to people, the horns make them confess all of their most secret sins, and he can make them do things. Third, when he touches someone, he picks up their entire past, including some of the darkest things they've ever done. And snakes really, really like him.
Of course, I still haven't mentioned the most important part, other than the horns: His girlfriend was violently murdered a year previously, and he's the main suspect. All the evidence that might have cleared his name was destroyed in a mysterious fire, and his girlfriend was beloved by their hometown, so he's nearly universally hated. I was expecting this to be almost a mystery, the main character spending most of the novel trying to find the killer's name and then facing off with him in an apocalyptic showdown. However, he discovers the real murderer's name within the first couple of chapters, and the rest of the novel is concerned chiefly with hunting down and cornering the killer and exacting vengeance. All throughout the book, the horns keep growing and his skin begins to change ...
Well, read the book. It's a fantastic read, possibly (slightly) better than The Heart-Shaped Box.
Anyway,I've spent most of this week locked up in my office working on stuff, which I will explain more about later in the summer, I promise. I've also been planning for the American Library Association's big, giant annual conference, which is here in DC in a couple of weeks. I'm excited; I've been a bona-fide librarian for two years now and I'm finally going to the conference. I'll skip that week's post (Friday, June 25) and report to you all the following week! In the meantime, here's a list of fun new fiction that's come in over the last couple months to hold you over until I can focus on something more substantive!
The Infinities
A most decidedly unusual book, this novel tells the story of a dying mathematician (hence, the title -- partly) and his family, who are holding vigil over him on a hot summer afternoon. However, his family is not alone in participating in the end of his life; all around them are little gods, in the classical Greek sense (the other part of the title's meaning), who move around and through the family seen and unseen and wickedly stir up a seething cauldron of trouble.
Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal
The title takes things a bit literally; the author/narrator spends some time with the Hamburger King, one of the most influential businessmen on the planet, while he machinates his way through his empire, subordinates, friends, and relatives. Funny, eccentric, and highly satirical, this novel, translated from French, sort of makes you think about all the ways in which we all endure servitude and even, in some cases, enjoy it.
Beatrice and Virgil
Yann Martel, author of the bestselling Life of Pi, brings us another animal-themed novel; Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a howler monkey, are the centers of a play-within-a-novel written by a taxidermist. The main character is an author who seems rather similar to Martel, sucked into the taxidermist's bizarre inner life as he assists in writing the play.
Let the Great World Spin
The 1974 feat of Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker who walked between the towers of the World Trade Center, 110 stories up, becomes the focal point of several different Manhattan stories that intersect at the end of the novel. It's one of those books, but the author pulls it off with such grace you're guaranteed to be thinking about it for weeks afterward.
The November Criminals
This novel pulls off the triple distinction of being a funny stoner novel set in DC. A small-time drug dealer in high school decides to investigate his classmate's murder, but he has a weakness for his own product, which throws a few wrenches in his clever, clever plan. The book can be a little hard to follow, but that's just because the main character is stoned all the time, so is easily distracted by interesting tangents.
Dog Boy
One of those fascinating feral-child stories, a young Russian boy is abandoned by his mother, and he falls in with a pack of stray dogs, which enables him to survive for another two years. The author follows his progress from the hairless outsider of the pack to a trusted alpha dog until his capture by a scientist who hopes to make his name based on the young boy's life. Strange, but it's a wonderful read and avoids the drippy sentimentality one sometimes gets from boy-and-his-dog stories.
The Last Surgeon
A hospital thriller, this novel takes everyone in the operating room during a nastily-botched surgery and kills them off one by one. The survivors -- a nurse, a physician, and the last remaining surgeon -- have to team up and hunt down a hired killer who has a singular talent for making a murder resemble a suicide. Taut and suspenseful, this makes for great light reading.
The Sheen on the Silk
A fascinating historical novel that takes place in the late-13th-Century Byzantine Empire, this book follows Anna, who must investigate the circumstances under which her twin brother was exiled. He's innocent, but is the center of a mysterious conspiracy; Anna dresses up as a eunuch and spends much of the book maneuvering herself closer and closer to the central figures of the story.
Wench
Another historical novel, this one is set in antebellum America, at a resort in Ohio known for its clientele of rich white slave-owners with their slave-mistresses. The novel follows three women who are regulars at the resort and the upheaval in their lives following the arrival of a fourth, who does not hold back from wondering about freedom. That the resort is in Ohio, a free state, complicates matters, as does the fact that one of the slaves is in love with her master and thinks the feeling is mutual. It's a complicated, psychological book.
The Book of Spies
Ivan the Terrible is a legendary figure in Russian -- and indeed global -- history. What few people know is that he was an avid collector of books, one of many characteristics I share with him. Unfortunately, his collection was lost, and since he owned many rare, one-of-a-kind books, those stories were lost as well. Now they've begun to emerge, and are at the center of a sort of worldwide book club composed of a cabal of incredibly wealthy men. Then the CIA finds a link to a bank account associated with terrorism and gets involved ...
That takes care of this week. We got a fantastically good crop of books this year, and I'm very pleased with the results. Next week, we'll take a look at the rest of the collection and some of the more unusual books we have here.
Question of the Week
I saw a bunch of librarians cleaning out the VHS shelves. What's going on? Are you getting rid of all the movies?
We're clearing out the VHS shelves, but we're not getting rid of all the movies, just many of the videotapes. Part of it is because those things are old, rarely checked out, and obsolete. Most of them have degraded significantly since they arrived -- normal for VHS tapes -- and because the format is so outdated, most people end up watching them here in the Library, where there are still VCRs. Another part is just that our collection of Deaf DVDs is expanding, and they need room! That's the life of a library -- over time, some things elbow their way in and other things get pushed out. We're not getting rid of stuff, we're making room for new things. It's been an exciting summer so far!
Friday, June 4, 2010
An introduction to our e-books
Summer has arrived, hot and steamy! I remember a month ago, when the temperature just would not rise, wishing things'd heat up a little. Well, I got my wish, and in spades. It's barely June, and already I'm thinking about snow and how it maybe isn't so bad after all.
Haha! I'm kidding! Forget snow.
Let's jump right in. I finished up Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities this past week because I bought a book based on his work -- Tom Wolfe's America: Heroes, Pranksters, and Fools -- and it piqued my curiosity. Bonfire seemed pretty well-thumbed through, and it's one of those titles you're always hearing about, thinking it's something by Maugham or, yes, even Woolf, maybe mid-century or even further back.
Bonfire's actually set in Manhattan of the late 1980s or thereabouts. It follows a few interrelated threads, mostly characters whose lives brush up against a single crime. The perpetrator is a Wall Street bond trader in collusion with his bored-heiress mistress; he picks her up from the airport after one of her many Italian trips, gets lost in the Bronx, and is accosted by a pair of local youths, who happen to be black. They panic, peel out of there, and in the process accidentally hit one of the young men and put him in a coma. The entire book is about the thought processes of three specific people involved in the accident's aftermath: the bond trader wrestling with his guilt; the Bronx assistant district attorney in pursuit of fame; the tabloid reporter chasing after his next drink. Other major players come through all of their lives: the black community leader who stirs up a seething cauldron of race and oppression while covering sins of his own; the heiress from an impoverished background and her drive to fight for freedom; the racist mayor and his staff's hapless observations of all that's going on far below them.
It's a fairly epic story, although you get a little tired of how repetitive some of the characters are, especially where scenes of wealth and privilege are involved. Wolfe lays it on a little thick: two detectives come to visit the bond trader in his opulent Manhattan apartment and gape around at the place. The bond trader thinks they're impressed and a little intimidated at this display of his wealth. Their interrogation done, the two detectives go back to the Bronx and mock the excess over dripping sandwiches. It's constantly driven home to the reader: Manhattan and the Bronx are two different worlds; wealthy WASPs and the Irish/Italian/Puerto Rican/African Americans two different classes. Still, there are some funny moments; the assistant district attorney who's prosecuting the case has a crush on a young woman juror from another case, so takes her out to dinner and extols his own bravery in the face of overwhelming poverty and crime. At the end, they're about to part, and he wonders what's going through her head. Wolfe tells you: She's thinking that those Manhattan men are more trouble than they're worth; you have to listen to two or three hours of His Career before he pays for dinner.
The whole point of the book seems to be completely puncturing the egos of nearly every significant male character. The bond trader gets arrested and is no longer Master of the Universe; the assistant district attorney finds out that the muscles he's so proud of are actually mocked by the women he pursues; the tabloid reporter discovers that his success is more due to luck than any skill on his part -- of which he has none. Nearly all of the characters are despicable and pitiable in some way.
Enjoyable (possibly because of the sheer schadenfreude saturating the book), but it's hard to say that I'd read it again or recommend it to anyone else who doesn't have the patience to slog through dozens of pages of exposition, stream-of-consciousness, and the insides of people's heads.
Now that that's over with -- I hate writing reviews of books that only get as far as "enjoyable" in my mind -- let's turn to e-books. What have we got?
Something like 70,000 of them. To start with. They cover topics from ethnic relations and civilization (whatever that means -- I'll include an example of this topic below) to economics and church history. It's a dizzyingly diverse array of topics, and is a pretty strong argument for having e-books in general. Let's take a look at a quick cross-section:
Talons and teeth: County clerks and runners in the Qing Dynasty
China's one of the oldest continuous civilizations on Earth, and has been a major power in Asia for most of that time. However, this book argues that although the Chinese imperium and its high-level functionaries had great influence, they were far outweighed by people who carried things between county governments. It's like saying that bicycle couriers are more powerful than the President, for instance; this is because those clerks and runners knew full well what they were processing and carrying, and were subject to some truly outstanding corruption. However, little is known about these people; any information we have about them survives through records kept by the highest of the high officials, which suggests something important on its own.
The Singapore Puzzle
It's long been a truism among certain kinds of people that a high degree of personal liberty is essential to keeping the people happy and the state functioning properly. Singapore, however, defies this; one of the most authoritarian governments in the world, it is home to one of the most modern, most prosperous, most successful city-states on the planet. Why is this? Why are people okay with being told not to chew gum, or spit, or smoke in public? Why do corporations agree to work in such restrictive environments, in spite of the laissez-faire capitalism practiced (in comparison anyway) by most of the rest of the developed world?
Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism
I found this one kind of spooky; it's a treatise on the history that exists between Afghanistan and the United States and its outgrowth into international terrorism -- written, rather presciently, in 2000. Even before September 11 occurred, there were warning signs and clashes between the U.S. government and Afghanistan-based terror groups, including Osama bin Laden, involving the first World Trade Center bombings and an incident in Nairobi that placed its imprimatur on relations between both countries. The chapter relating to a direct assault on America covers the history of cooperation between the US and groups in Afghanistan to throw off the Soviet Union concludes with this scary paragraph:
"Perhaps future governments, whether the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, or less powerful and influential nations, will take to heart this important lesson of late twentieth-century history: When you decide to go to war against your main enemy, take a good, long look at the people behind you whom you chose as your friends, allies or mercenary fighters. Look well to see whether these allies already have unsheathed their knives -- and are pointing them at your own back."
The Swedish Table
This is a pretty far-out cookbook; sort of traditional Swedish foods and customs. The recipes are making me hungry (I'm writing this just before lunch, so forgive me for this) -- for instance, Vegetable soup with prosciutto-filled "gnocchi," actually traditional salty potato dumplings called kroppkakor. Or gravlax-and-nasturtium sandwiches with mustard-dill sauce.
Lunch must wait. More to go ...
Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science
I was kind of hoping I'd come across this one. It's controversial! Those are the best books to have in a library, even if it's purely electronic in nature. The author argues that science is, by nature, heresy because it requires objective thinking. This is okay on its own -- we humans are instinctive, feeling creatures that believe in UFOs, ghosts, and angels -- but he takes it a little bit further by noting that of all the ancient civilizations, only Greece developed geometry and number theory. This leads to a set of arguments that assert that the Western world was solely responsible for the discovery of scientific thinking, and that science itself is not an intrinsic aspect of the evolution of civilizations. It's controversial mostly because it disregards quite a few other civilizations before and after the Greeks who independently developed mathematical systems and a logical infrastructure of their own.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Ever wondered about the guy in the deerhunter hat, a pipe in his mouth, and Watson in tow? Wonder no more. I've met people who struggle to get started on reading the Holmes stories because they're never sure which one to start with. I usually say, "They're all good," but that doesn't help them out much, so I steer them toward "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and hope for the best. In this case, there's a little less to worry about; there's a pretty good selection of nine short stories that are usually thought to express the quintessential Holmes, including classics like "The Red-Headed League," "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," and "A Scandal in Bohemia."
Cosmopolitanism in the Americas -- This is the one from "Civilization"!
North and South America, as a whole, represent a study in contrasts. The United States and Canada occupy the majority of North America, and they're places where it's difficult to find a culture that's remained in isolation for very long periods of time. We've pretty well hegemonized gigantic tracts of land, and have become relatively cosmopolitan as a result. Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, on the other hand, represent even larger swaths of people who have relatively little contact with the outside world; although some of the world's largest cities are located in the region (Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, for example), there are still plenty of pockets where the intrusion of the outside world is minimal and cultures, traditions, and norms haven't changed much. However, that's in the process of being turned on its head; what does it mean when the American style of urbanization begins to overtake the jungle? How does it affect the people?
Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power
With a title like that, you know it's got to be good, right? I know, right. The author traces the history of the notion of "intellectual property" back to the case of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. Mr. Whitney had a lousy life; after he took his new invention public, the designs were promptly stolen by local farmers, who then built their own cotton gins. Whitney then began to sue anyone and everyone who built cotton gins similar to, but not exactly like, his design, but it was a long, painful, and expensive struggle -- partly because it was so difficult to prove which came first and partly because precursor designs had already been in use outside the United States, so it wasn't easy for him to claim the cotton gin as his own invention. However, and this is a side to the issue that the author pays attention to, this sort of piracy has gone on for a long time and is one of the biggest contributors to innovation and technological advancement. It's the whole idea of "intellectual property" that's a relatively new thing, and the author explores the ways it's used to both promote innovation and suppress it in the pursuit of profit; most tragically, in the case of HIV drugs in Africa.
Again, as with our journals, this represents only a very tiny drop in the bucket. From the intricacies of ancient Chinese government to industrial thievery in the United States, there's something in nearly every topic; it's hard to think none of these books actually take up any room on the shelf!
Question of the Week
I checked out a book from another university, but I didn't realize they had a different due date. My book was due on May 31, a week after I got it, and now it's late. What gives with the one-week loan period?
It depends. If you're a student, you might be finishing up an Incomplete that's due on that date, and then you're no longer a currently-registered student if you haven't signed up for the summer. If you're a faculty or staff member, it may depend on when your contract expires or a host of other things.
Generally speaking we can solve the problem for you. But when we can't, it's time to go to the lending university and find out what their system thinks you're doing, and work it out as is appropriate. Just get in touch with us, and we'll get you all the contact information you need!
Haha! I'm kidding! Forget snow.
Let's jump right in. I finished up Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities this past week because I bought a book based on his work -- Tom Wolfe's America: Heroes, Pranksters, and Fools -- and it piqued my curiosity. Bonfire seemed pretty well-thumbed through, and it's one of those titles you're always hearing about, thinking it's something by Maugham or, yes, even Woolf, maybe mid-century or even further back.
Bonfire's actually set in Manhattan of the late 1980s or thereabouts. It follows a few interrelated threads, mostly characters whose lives brush up against a single crime. The perpetrator is a Wall Street bond trader in collusion with his bored-heiress mistress; he picks her up from the airport after one of her many Italian trips, gets lost in the Bronx, and is accosted by a pair of local youths, who happen to be black. They panic, peel out of there, and in the process accidentally hit one of the young men and put him in a coma. The entire book is about the thought processes of three specific people involved in the accident's aftermath: the bond trader wrestling with his guilt; the Bronx assistant district attorney in pursuit of fame; the tabloid reporter chasing after his next drink. Other major players come through all of their lives: the black community leader who stirs up a seething cauldron of race and oppression while covering sins of his own; the heiress from an impoverished background and her drive to fight for freedom; the racist mayor and his staff's hapless observations of all that's going on far below them.
It's a fairly epic story, although you get a little tired of how repetitive some of the characters are, especially where scenes of wealth and privilege are involved. Wolfe lays it on a little thick: two detectives come to visit the bond trader in his opulent Manhattan apartment and gape around at the place. The bond trader thinks they're impressed and a little intimidated at this display of his wealth. Their interrogation done, the two detectives go back to the Bronx and mock the excess over dripping sandwiches. It's constantly driven home to the reader: Manhattan and the Bronx are two different worlds; wealthy WASPs and the Irish/Italian/Puerto Rican/African Americans two different classes. Still, there are some funny moments; the assistant district attorney who's prosecuting the case has a crush on a young woman juror from another case, so takes her out to dinner and extols his own bravery in the face of overwhelming poverty and crime. At the end, they're about to part, and he wonders what's going through her head. Wolfe tells you: She's thinking that those Manhattan men are more trouble than they're worth; you have to listen to two or three hours of His Career before he pays for dinner.
The whole point of the book seems to be completely puncturing the egos of nearly every significant male character. The bond trader gets arrested and is no longer Master of the Universe; the assistant district attorney finds out that the muscles he's so proud of are actually mocked by the women he pursues; the tabloid reporter discovers that his success is more due to luck than any skill on his part -- of which he has none. Nearly all of the characters are despicable and pitiable in some way.
Enjoyable (possibly because of the sheer schadenfreude saturating the book), but it's hard to say that I'd read it again or recommend it to anyone else who doesn't have the patience to slog through dozens of pages of exposition, stream-of-consciousness, and the insides of people's heads.
Now that that's over with -- I hate writing reviews of books that only get as far as "enjoyable" in my mind -- let's turn to e-books. What have we got?
Something like 70,000 of them. To start with. They cover topics from ethnic relations and civilization (whatever that means -- I'll include an example of this topic below) to economics and church history. It's a dizzyingly diverse array of topics, and is a pretty strong argument for having e-books in general. Let's take a look at a quick cross-section:
Talons and teeth: County clerks and runners in the Qing Dynasty
China's one of the oldest continuous civilizations on Earth, and has been a major power in Asia for most of that time. However, this book argues that although the Chinese imperium and its high-level functionaries had great influence, they were far outweighed by people who carried things between county governments. It's like saying that bicycle couriers are more powerful than the President, for instance; this is because those clerks and runners knew full well what they were processing and carrying, and were subject to some truly outstanding corruption. However, little is known about these people; any information we have about them survives through records kept by the highest of the high officials, which suggests something important on its own.
The Singapore Puzzle
It's long been a truism among certain kinds of people that a high degree of personal liberty is essential to keeping the people happy and the state functioning properly. Singapore, however, defies this; one of the most authoritarian governments in the world, it is home to one of the most modern, most prosperous, most successful city-states on the planet. Why is this? Why are people okay with being told not to chew gum, or spit, or smoke in public? Why do corporations agree to work in such restrictive environments, in spite of the laissez-faire capitalism practiced (in comparison anyway) by most of the rest of the developed world?
Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism
I found this one kind of spooky; it's a treatise on the history that exists between Afghanistan and the United States and its outgrowth into international terrorism -- written, rather presciently, in 2000. Even before September 11 occurred, there were warning signs and clashes between the U.S. government and Afghanistan-based terror groups, including Osama bin Laden, involving the first World Trade Center bombings and an incident in Nairobi that placed its imprimatur on relations between both countries. The chapter relating to a direct assault on America covers the history of cooperation between the US and groups in Afghanistan to throw off the Soviet Union concludes with this scary paragraph:
"Perhaps future governments, whether the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, or less powerful and influential nations, will take to heart this important lesson of late twentieth-century history: When you decide to go to war against your main enemy, take a good, long look at the people behind you whom you chose as your friends, allies or mercenary fighters. Look well to see whether these allies already have unsheathed their knives -- and are pointing them at your own back."
The Swedish Table
This is a pretty far-out cookbook; sort of traditional Swedish foods and customs. The recipes are making me hungry (I'm writing this just before lunch, so forgive me for this) -- for instance, Vegetable soup with prosciutto-filled "gnocchi," actually traditional salty potato dumplings called kroppkakor. Or gravlax-and-nasturtium sandwiches with mustard-dill sauce.
Lunch must wait. More to go ...
Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science
I was kind of hoping I'd come across this one. It's controversial! Those are the best books to have in a library, even if it's purely electronic in nature. The author argues that science is, by nature, heresy because it requires objective thinking. This is okay on its own -- we humans are instinctive, feeling creatures that believe in UFOs, ghosts, and angels -- but he takes it a little bit further by noting that of all the ancient civilizations, only Greece developed geometry and number theory. This leads to a set of arguments that assert that the Western world was solely responsible for the discovery of scientific thinking, and that science itself is not an intrinsic aspect of the evolution of civilizations. It's controversial mostly because it disregards quite a few other civilizations before and after the Greeks who independently developed mathematical systems and a logical infrastructure of their own.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Ever wondered about the guy in the deerhunter hat, a pipe in his mouth, and Watson in tow? Wonder no more. I've met people who struggle to get started on reading the Holmes stories because they're never sure which one to start with. I usually say, "They're all good," but that doesn't help them out much, so I steer them toward "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and hope for the best. In this case, there's a little less to worry about; there's a pretty good selection of nine short stories that are usually thought to express the quintessential Holmes, including classics like "The Red-Headed League," "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," and "A Scandal in Bohemia."
Cosmopolitanism in the Americas -- This is the one from "Civilization"!
North and South America, as a whole, represent a study in contrasts. The United States and Canada occupy the majority of North America, and they're places where it's difficult to find a culture that's remained in isolation for very long periods of time. We've pretty well hegemonized gigantic tracts of land, and have become relatively cosmopolitan as a result. Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, on the other hand, represent even larger swaths of people who have relatively little contact with the outside world; although some of the world's largest cities are located in the region (Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, for example), there are still plenty of pockets where the intrusion of the outside world is minimal and cultures, traditions, and norms haven't changed much. However, that's in the process of being turned on its head; what does it mean when the American style of urbanization begins to overtake the jungle? How does it affect the people?
Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power
With a title like that, you know it's got to be good, right? I know, right. The author traces the history of the notion of "intellectual property" back to the case of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. Mr. Whitney had a lousy life; after he took his new invention public, the designs were promptly stolen by local farmers, who then built their own cotton gins. Whitney then began to sue anyone and everyone who built cotton gins similar to, but not exactly like, his design, but it was a long, painful, and expensive struggle -- partly because it was so difficult to prove which came first and partly because precursor designs had already been in use outside the United States, so it wasn't easy for him to claim the cotton gin as his own invention. However, and this is a side to the issue that the author pays attention to, this sort of piracy has gone on for a long time and is one of the biggest contributors to innovation and technological advancement. It's the whole idea of "intellectual property" that's a relatively new thing, and the author explores the ways it's used to both promote innovation and suppress it in the pursuit of profit; most tragically, in the case of HIV drugs in Africa.
Again, as with our journals, this represents only a very tiny drop in the bucket. From the intricacies of ancient Chinese government to industrial thievery in the United States, there's something in nearly every topic; it's hard to think none of these books actually take up any room on the shelf!
Question of the Week
I checked out a book from another university, but I didn't realize they had a different due date. My book was due on May 31, a week after I got it, and now it's late. What gives with the one-week loan period?
It depends. If you're a student, you might be finishing up an Incomplete that's due on that date, and then you're no longer a currently-registered student if you haven't signed up for the summer. If you're a faculty or staff member, it may depend on when your contract expires or a host of other things.
Generally speaking we can solve the problem for you. But when we can't, it's time to go to the lending university and find out what their system thinks you're doing, and work it out as is appropriate. Just get in touch with us, and we'll get you all the contact information you need!
Friday, May 28, 2010
E-books: How do they work?
Things have slowed down a lot here at the Library. The sheet where we keep our statistics is much whiter than it used to be, and the building has quieted down considerably. It's kind of nice, but a little dull between projects.
To enliven things a little bit, I read through The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I guess you could call this a young-adult book, which is okay with me, because some of the most interesting novels being written these days are being written for the 11-17 age group (with certain notable exceptions, such as a certain vampire-themed series I won't name here).
I briefly mentioned The Hunger Games in a previous post as a recommendation, but didn't think anything of it beyond a decent premise. Boy, how wrong I was.
It's a terrific book! You've got this young woman, Katniss, who lives in the poorest of 12 districts centered on the Capitol. Her district is the furthest out and is mostly focused on coal mining; starvation is rampant, while the few merchants and business owners live fairly comfortably. There's a healthy black market, to which the Capitol's enforcers turn a blind eye, and Katniss ekes out a basic living for her mother (who hasn't been the same since her husband died) and her younger sister by hunting in a forbidden section of the woods with a boy she's known her entire life. It's not a very good life by the most generous of definitions, but she does all right with what she has. She's a survivor.
In Katniss's country (which stretches from the Capitol, located in present-day Denver, to the Appalachians, where Katniss lives), a yearly event involves a lottery drawing in which teenagers are required to participate. This lottery results in one boy and one girl from each district being sent to the Capitol, where they must participate in the eponymous Hunger Games.
However, something nasty happens; this year just so happens to be the first year Katniss's younger sister, Prim, becomes eligible for the drawing. Because of the way the lottery is set up, the odds of a first-year candidate's name coming up are astronomically low, but Prim is selected. Katniss freaks out and volunteers to go in her little sister's place, which is allowable by an old and little-used rule.
In general, the book between this point and the actual Games itself is by far the most interesting part. That's not to say it's the only interesting part -- all of it is good -- but it's certainly thought-provoking. After volunteering, Katniss is immediately whisked off to the Capitol, where she has her very first encounter with an abundance of food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and money. Meals are intricately detailed, surroundings richly described, clothing exulted in. It's an interesting perspective, because although, of course, this is a different culture than ours, there are enough similarities that lead you to wonder what a diamond miner from the darkest regions of the Congo would think if he saw New York, courtesy of Donald Trump.
Of course, I forgot to mention the boy sent to the Capitol along with Katniss; the son of the local baker, he lives more comfortably than most in their district. The two of them have history -- he did her a significant kindness in one of the darkest periods of a an already-dark life -- but, in the poisonous atmosphere of the Games and the industry surrounding it, she questions his motivations and embarks on a little adventure in paranoia culminating in the Games.
The Games are set up in a very interesting way. A large area of land -- whether woods, desert (unpopular because the competitors die too quickly), mountains, whatever -- is sectioned off, wired with cameras and microphones, and booby-trapped. A cornucopia is put in the middle of the initial staging area, full of important supplies, which the competitors have to scramble for when the starting gun goes off. Of course, a good number of players are killed in the initial scramble, and the rest disperse to ally with one another and strategize their way through the competition. The whole point is to have only one person left alive.
It sounds pretty dark, and it is -- the wealthiest districts train all of their kids for participation in the Hunger Games, while the poorest districts see it as a possible way out of crushing poverty for the survivor. The odds are against the poorer players, though; a lifetime without proper nutrition and medical care works against them. District 12, Katniss's district, though poor, is the sole exception; they see it in its true light as a way of subjugating the population and emphasizing the power of the government centered on the Capitol. Katniss manages to outlive all but a few of the players, but this means she has to fight for her life against the most efficient killers in the Capitol.
I devoted a lot of space in this post to The Hunger Games because it's probably one of the best pure-fiction books I've read so far this year, and that is saying a lot. Recommended!
Now, moving on ...
I said last week that I'd talk a little bit about e-books today. Some folks do get a little confused about how they really work, mostly because, I think, they have an image in their mind of a PDF they can download, save to their computer, cell phone, or e-reader, and carry around with them. At the very least, they can print it out, right?
Not ... really. This would be the point where I embark on a rant about ridiculous proprietary software restrictions and digital rights management and so on and so forth. There's some debate happening right now on the "right" way to distribute published texts electronically for profit, and we won't go into that today (unfortunate, because I had an awesome metaphor all ready to go, involving Lunchables!).
Basically, an e-book is an electronic book; it's generally a text that's been scanned or published digitally in some form. E-books are distributed in a few different ways; some are totally free to read and play around with (like most of Cory Doctorow's work, including Makers and Little Brother, everything in Project Gutenberg, and many things in Google Books), while others require special software and carry restrictions depending on the publisher and distributors.
In the case of the Gallaudet University Library, the e-books available are of the latter kind. Proprietary formats and the protection of the rights of the people producing and distributing the work is more or less typical of academic publishing; if you've ever had to buy textbooks for a class, you know how expensive they can be. This is because of the various contracts at play here; usually, the author has some rights, the university where the author works has some rights, and the publisher has some rights, and they all need to make some money. Fortunately, if you're a Gallaudet student or faculty or staff member, you have free access through the Gallaudet University Library!
Most of the e-books you'll find in our catalog will open inside the distributor's e-reading software; it's usually eBrary, one of our biggest providers. Occasionally, you'll come across a book with both a print copy in our collection and an electronic copy online, which is nice if you're not the only one researching your topic; classmates and other researchers can get access to the same book electronically without competing with one another for a single print resource.
However, we do sometimes have restrictions on use, which are outlined in the e-book's record in ALADIN Discovery. You'll see a note in the Item availability area of a record that'll tell you if you can only view the e-book for two hours at a time, or if only one person can view it at a time. For example, take a look at the record for Everything you need to know about deafness; you'll see under Location in "Item availability" the following:
It's fairly self-explanatory. However, not a lot of our e-books have 2-hour limits or viewing restrictions; the vast majority of our e-book holdings are available through eBrary, and they generally don't restrict viewing of the material. They do, however, limit the ability to print; I've seen e-books that only allow you to print up to 9 pages at a time, while others allow 60 or 100. Again, this is mostly because of licensing and copyright. Still, we do our best to purchase e-books from less-restrictive distributors like eBrary -- that's why so many of our electronic holdings are from them.
Now, access. People usually have a problem with this, because the link to actually get into the book isn't surrounded by flashing lights; it's just one link among quite a few in your average record. However, each record usually has at least two links you can use; one in the URL field near the top of the record and one in "Item availability" near the bottom in the Linked resources field (take a look at the above record for Everything you need to know about deafness to see what I mean). For the most part, if you're on campus, clicking on either link will take you straight to the e-book. If you're off-campus, you'll need to log in in the same way as any of our other electronic resources; this means that if you're not a Gallaudet-affiliated individual with a Gallaudet ID number or Library bar code number, you won't be able to get in.
Once you're in ... well, I will be the first to admit that the e-reader interface is usually less than intuitive. Some people like it, and some people don't; I know faculty who have their own (free) accounts with eBrary, which allows them to save bookmarks and highlighted passages in our e-books to their account, but this feature isn't used very much by students. Still, accounts are free and available to anyone who needs this kind of functionality.
So why do we have e-books at all? First, because they do represent a significant pool of available knowledge that can only benefit our collection. There are plenty of fantastic books in there, especially if you're exploring more esoteric subjects like, for example, proteomics (the large-scale study of proteins, their structures, and their functions). We do have a few print books on the subject, but the majority of our holdings in the field are e-books. Depending on the circumstance, this can mean that access to e-books is superior to access to scholarly articles; most articles are very narrowly focused on specific aspects of a particular field and the general overviews usually contained therein are too brief to offer a useful understanding of the field at large.
Second, they're fairly cheap; we can get a big block of thousands of books at a significantly lower cost than print. Actually publishing books on paper isn't getting any cheaper, while distributing them electronically is. This is a fact of our lives today, and we do benefit from it.
Third, e-books are a terrific way to stay current in your field of research. Print books can sometimes be outdated by the day we get them, two weeks after we ordered them -- another mixed blessing of our age. This way, eBrary or our other e-book providers can swap out outdated books for newer editions almost instantly, thereby ensuring access to up-to-date and in-depth information.
And fourth, they are, on the whole, easier to work with than printed text in some ways. For one, they're searchable; it's much easier to zero in on the exact chapter or passage that you want without having to search through the entire book. E-books can save a lot of time and headaches.
In general, e-books are great resources to have for research purposes. Granted, they're not perfect -- the air is still being massaged out of the pipes of this new mode of access to information -- but their benefits outweigh their inconveniences.
Next week, a more in-depth look at some examples of our e-books. We've got some fun ones!
Question of the Week
I noticed that the way you capitalize book titles is pretty weird. I was always taught that you capitalize every word except prepositions, articles, and conjunctions, but you usually only capitalize the first word and proper nouns -- except for the books you review every week. What's up with that?
What's up with that? Well, I'm weird in general. If that answer isn't enough to satisfy you, try this: I'm an APA guy.
What? That's not good enough? Well ... okay. See, for books I read for pleasure, I usually capitalize them the way I was taught in my English classes growing up, basically the same way you were. However, for academic titles, I've fallen into the habit of using the APA citation style's capitalization rules for book and article titles in references, which usually mandates that you capitalize only the first word, any proper nouns, and the first word in a subtitle. Everything else is in lower case. Journal titles, like the ones I listed in my previous post, have every major word capitalized, also according to APA.
What can I say? Academic indoctrination can be very effective, especially when you've been involved with one university or another for close to a decade. But why the difference between books I read for pleasure and scholarly texts? Call it an idiosyncrasy. Diff'rent strokes ...
To enliven things a little bit, I read through The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I guess you could call this a young-adult book, which is okay with me, because some of the most interesting novels being written these days are being written for the 11-17 age group (with certain notable exceptions, such as a certain vampire-themed series I won't name here).
I briefly mentioned The Hunger Games in a previous post as a recommendation, but didn't think anything of it beyond a decent premise. Boy, how wrong I was.
It's a terrific book! You've got this young woman, Katniss, who lives in the poorest of 12 districts centered on the Capitol. Her district is the furthest out and is mostly focused on coal mining; starvation is rampant, while the few merchants and business owners live fairly comfortably. There's a healthy black market, to which the Capitol's enforcers turn a blind eye, and Katniss ekes out a basic living for her mother (who hasn't been the same since her husband died) and her younger sister by hunting in a forbidden section of the woods with a boy she's known her entire life. It's not a very good life by the most generous of definitions, but she does all right with what she has. She's a survivor.
In Katniss's country (which stretches from the Capitol, located in present-day Denver, to the Appalachians, where Katniss lives), a yearly event involves a lottery drawing in which teenagers are required to participate. This lottery results in one boy and one girl from each district being sent to the Capitol, where they must participate in the eponymous Hunger Games.
However, something nasty happens; this year just so happens to be the first year Katniss's younger sister, Prim, becomes eligible for the drawing. Because of the way the lottery is set up, the odds of a first-year candidate's name coming up are astronomically low, but Prim is selected. Katniss freaks out and volunteers to go in her little sister's place, which is allowable by an old and little-used rule.
In general, the book between this point and the actual Games itself is by far the most interesting part. That's not to say it's the only interesting part -- all of it is good -- but it's certainly thought-provoking. After volunteering, Katniss is immediately whisked off to the Capitol, where she has her very first encounter with an abundance of food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and money. Meals are intricately detailed, surroundings richly described, clothing exulted in. It's an interesting perspective, because although, of course, this is a different culture than ours, there are enough similarities that lead you to wonder what a diamond miner from the darkest regions of the Congo would think if he saw New York, courtesy of Donald Trump.
Of course, I forgot to mention the boy sent to the Capitol along with Katniss; the son of the local baker, he lives more comfortably than most in their district. The two of them have history -- he did her a significant kindness in one of the darkest periods of a an already-dark life -- but, in the poisonous atmosphere of the Games and the industry surrounding it, she questions his motivations and embarks on a little adventure in paranoia culminating in the Games.
The Games are set up in a very interesting way. A large area of land -- whether woods, desert (unpopular because the competitors die too quickly), mountains, whatever -- is sectioned off, wired with cameras and microphones, and booby-trapped. A cornucopia is put in the middle of the initial staging area, full of important supplies, which the competitors have to scramble for when the starting gun goes off. Of course, a good number of players are killed in the initial scramble, and the rest disperse to ally with one another and strategize their way through the competition. The whole point is to have only one person left alive.
It sounds pretty dark, and it is -- the wealthiest districts train all of their kids for participation in the Hunger Games, while the poorest districts see it as a possible way out of crushing poverty for the survivor. The odds are against the poorer players, though; a lifetime without proper nutrition and medical care works against them. District 12, Katniss's district, though poor, is the sole exception; they see it in its true light as a way of subjugating the population and emphasizing the power of the government centered on the Capitol. Katniss manages to outlive all but a few of the players, but this means she has to fight for her life against the most efficient killers in the Capitol.
I devoted a lot of space in this post to The Hunger Games because it's probably one of the best pure-fiction books I've read so far this year, and that is saying a lot. Recommended!
Now, moving on ...
I said last week that I'd talk a little bit about e-books today. Some folks do get a little confused about how they really work, mostly because, I think, they have an image in their mind of a PDF they can download, save to their computer, cell phone, or e-reader, and carry around with them. At the very least, they can print it out, right?
Not ... really. This would be the point where I embark on a rant about ridiculous proprietary software restrictions and digital rights management and so on and so forth. There's some debate happening right now on the "right" way to distribute published texts electronically for profit, and we won't go into that today (unfortunate, because I had an awesome metaphor all ready to go, involving Lunchables!).
Basically, an e-book is an electronic book; it's generally a text that's been scanned or published digitally in some form. E-books are distributed in a few different ways; some are totally free to read and play around with (like most of Cory Doctorow's work, including Makers and Little Brother, everything in Project Gutenberg, and many things in Google Books), while others require special software and carry restrictions depending on the publisher and distributors.
In the case of the Gallaudet University Library, the e-books available are of the latter kind. Proprietary formats and the protection of the rights of the people producing and distributing the work is more or less typical of academic publishing; if you've ever had to buy textbooks for a class, you know how expensive they can be. This is because of the various contracts at play here; usually, the author has some rights, the university where the author works has some rights, and the publisher has some rights, and they all need to make some money. Fortunately, if you're a Gallaudet student or faculty or staff member, you have free access through the Gallaudet University Library!
Most of the e-books you'll find in our catalog will open inside the distributor's e-reading software; it's usually eBrary, one of our biggest providers. Occasionally, you'll come across a book with both a print copy in our collection and an electronic copy online, which is nice if you're not the only one researching your topic; classmates and other researchers can get access to the same book electronically without competing with one another for a single print resource.
However, we do sometimes have restrictions on use, which are outlined in the e-book's record in ALADIN Discovery. You'll see a note in the Item availability area of a record that'll tell you if you can only view the e-book for two hours at a time, or if only one person can view it at a time. For example, take a look at the record for Everything you need to know about deafness; you'll see under Location in "Item availability" the following:
GA: UNIV Electronic Book--Two Hour Limit
It's fairly self-explanatory. However, not a lot of our e-books have 2-hour limits or viewing restrictions; the vast majority of our e-book holdings are available through eBrary, and they generally don't restrict viewing of the material. They do, however, limit the ability to print; I've seen e-books that only allow you to print up to 9 pages at a time, while others allow 60 or 100. Again, this is mostly because of licensing and copyright. Still, we do our best to purchase e-books from less-restrictive distributors like eBrary -- that's why so many of our electronic holdings are from them.
Now, access. People usually have a problem with this, because the link to actually get into the book isn't surrounded by flashing lights; it's just one link among quite a few in your average record. However, each record usually has at least two links you can use; one in the URL field near the top of the record and one in "Item availability" near the bottom in the Linked resources field (take a look at the above record for Everything you need to know about deafness to see what I mean). For the most part, if you're on campus, clicking on either link will take you straight to the e-book. If you're off-campus, you'll need to log in in the same way as any of our other electronic resources; this means that if you're not a Gallaudet-affiliated individual with a Gallaudet ID number or Library bar code number, you won't be able to get in.
Once you're in ... well, I will be the first to admit that the e-reader interface is usually less than intuitive. Some people like it, and some people don't; I know faculty who have their own (free) accounts with eBrary, which allows them to save bookmarks and highlighted passages in our e-books to their account, but this feature isn't used very much by students. Still, accounts are free and available to anyone who needs this kind of functionality.
So why do we have e-books at all? First, because they do represent a significant pool of available knowledge that can only benefit our collection. There are plenty of fantastic books in there, especially if you're exploring more esoteric subjects like, for example, proteomics (the large-scale study of proteins, their structures, and their functions). We do have a few print books on the subject, but the majority of our holdings in the field are e-books. Depending on the circumstance, this can mean that access to e-books is superior to access to scholarly articles; most articles are very narrowly focused on specific aspects of a particular field and the general overviews usually contained therein are too brief to offer a useful understanding of the field at large.
Second, they're fairly cheap; we can get a big block of thousands of books at a significantly lower cost than print. Actually publishing books on paper isn't getting any cheaper, while distributing them electronically is. This is a fact of our lives today, and we do benefit from it.
Third, e-books are a terrific way to stay current in your field of research. Print books can sometimes be outdated by the day we get them, two weeks after we ordered them -- another mixed blessing of our age. This way, eBrary or our other e-book providers can swap out outdated books for newer editions almost instantly, thereby ensuring access to up-to-date and in-depth information.
And fourth, they are, on the whole, easier to work with than printed text in some ways. For one, they're searchable; it's much easier to zero in on the exact chapter or passage that you want without having to search through the entire book. E-books can save a lot of time and headaches.
In general, e-books are great resources to have for research purposes. Granted, they're not perfect -- the air is still being massaged out of the pipes of this new mode of access to information -- but their benefits outweigh their inconveniences.
Next week, a more in-depth look at some examples of our e-books. We've got some fun ones!
Question of the Week
I noticed that the way you capitalize book titles is pretty weird. I was always taught that you capitalize every word except prepositions, articles, and conjunctions, but you usually only capitalize the first word and proper nouns -- except for the books you review every week. What's up with that?
What's up with that? Well, I'm weird in general. If that answer isn't enough to satisfy you, try this: I'm an APA guy.
What? That's not good enough? Well ... okay. See, for books I read for pleasure, I usually capitalize them the way I was taught in my English classes growing up, basically the same way you were. However, for academic titles, I've fallen into the habit of using the APA citation style's capitalization rules for book and article titles in references, which usually mandates that you capitalize only the first word, any proper nouns, and the first word in a subtitle. Everything else is in lower case. Journal titles, like the ones I listed in my previous post, have every major word capitalized, also according to APA.
What can I say? Academic indoctrination can be very effective, especially when you've been involved with one university or another for close to a decade. But why the difference between books I read for pleasure and scholarly texts? Call it an idiosyncrasy. Diff'rent strokes ...
Friday, May 21, 2010
exploring our e-journals
I guess this blog is becoming an amalgam of weather reports, book reviews, library information, and questions. The truth is, I've noticed that many of this blog's readers originate from outside the Washington metropolitan area, some as far-flung as the other side of the world -- hi, guys -- and noting the weather of the week has become a habit. Gallaudet is, after all, an institution in our nation's capital, and has been for almost 150 years, so we have strong ties to our place.
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:
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!
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!
Friday, May 14, 2010
New books for the summer
Another indecisive week for our weather. Cool and rainy, hot and rainy, cool and not rainy, hot and not rainy. I'm kind of over it and would like to pack my jacket away ...
Anyway, to insulate myself from the vicissitudes of our weather, I injected some heat into my life by picking up Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. No nonfiction, no "serious" fiction -- ha -- just flat-out mayhem. It's the story of a magician who is torn away from the woman he loves and tricked into Hell by his friends, where he spends eleven years fighting -- and defeating -- the worst monsters the abyss can throw at him. He finally escapes into modern-day Los Angeles and discovers that things have changed. Not only can one "have Internet" on one's cell phone, but his girlfriend was murdered shortly after his exile, and the leader of the group that sent him to Hell has become something rather godlike.
Upon realizing this -- which involves our main character digging himself out of a grave and immediately robbing a young businessman of all of his money and clothes -- he embarks on what could be called the quintessential rampage and seeks revenge, starting with decapitating one of his old friends within several minutes of his emergence on Earth and keeping the severed head alive for information and abuse as he searches for the people responsible for what has happened to him. Along with an immortal Frenchman, a contemporary punk, a fallen angel, and a few tricks up his sleeve, he tears up LA, leveling city blocks, making friends with the local bartender by tearing apart the neighborhood skinhead extortioners, and discovering the real story behind the creation of the world.
In a nutshell, it's Constantine without the lousy acting and paper-thin plot and with a much, much higher body count. Totally brainless and it doesn't demand anything from you except a little credulity, so it's a good read for when you want a break from the heavy stuff.
As promised, here are a few more breaks from the heavy stuff, fresh off the book-cart and wrapped in today's newspaper:
Graphic Novels
Fables: Legends in Exile
The first installment of the popular Fables series, this volume introduces the reader to the world of the Fables, living storybook characters that have been exiled to our world following a huge war. When I say "living," that's what I mean -- the characters you normally associate with Disney are here turned into gangsters, prostitutes, power-mongers, dictators, and cops, among many other things. The adventure begins with the murder of Rose Red -- Mayor Snow White's sister -- and the subsequent investigation by the Big Bad Wolf. All the volumes are fantastic reads, and we have several available on the shelf.
Y: The Last Man
This series is set after a mysterious plague kills every single male mammal on the face of the Earth -- except two. Yorick and his pet Capuchin monkey, Ampersand, find themselves navigating a world desperate to ensure the perpetuation of the human species, whether through medical advances or sheer bloody-minded conflict. It's fascinating to look at the author's conceptions of a world run by women, and the social upheaval this implies. Gender roles are upended for a certain segment of the population, and interpersonal interaction becomes very different. It's definitely not a graphic novel for chauvinists!
Black Hole
A small town in the 1970s is suddenly afflicted with a mysterious disease of unknown origin. It's a fairly typical premise, except that this particular disease is sexually transmitted among teenagers, and it causes their bodies to mutate in unpredictable ways. The mutations vary from the barely-noticeable, like an extra mouth in your clavicle that can be disguised by a t-shirt, to the dramatic, which can alter your entire appearance and turn you into something that resembles the walking dead. The infected are perfectly healthy (except for The Bug) but are ostracized by their town, for both their physical appearance and what that appearance signifies in terms of their morality, and forced to live in the woods. Black Hole follows the stories of two of those students: a young, attractive woman who sleeps with the wrong boy and finds herself shedding her skin on a weekly basis, and a young man who can't ever seem to get laid -- until he does and grows tentacles out of his sides. It's surreal, sweet, and incredibly disturbing; the art is spooky but the story is engrossing.
Britten and Brülightly
A noirish detective tale, this graphic novel follows Britten, a private-eye who looks French but is actually South American, as he investigates the apparent suicide of his client's husband and uncovers a creepy family conspiracy with ties to organized crime. It's a thin book, but the plot is appropriately moody; so is the art, which is fantastic for this genre. The capper, of course, is that his partner is a talking teabag that lives in his coat.
A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge
A nonfiction graphic novel that tells the story of several New Orleans residents and their lives after Hurricane Katrina, this book is, in a word, incredible. It only takes the author a dozen panels to fully depict what happened to the city in the hurricane. It's an unbelievable representation of one of the worst -- if not the worst -- natural disasters in American history.
Novels
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
More or less self-explanatory. From the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes the story of our 16th President and his secret double life as a vampire slayer -- er, hunter. Based on "secret diaries" given to the author by a major player in the story, this book details the course of Lincoln's life as he discovers that vampires are real, and that his family has had tragic run-ins with them. As he grows older, he begins to hunt them by night while working as a lawyer and politician during the day. After he eventually becomes president, he discovers that Confederate vampires plan to set off a civil war so they can feast on the remains and decides to fight back. Truthfully, it's just a retelling of the real story, with vampires added (guess what John Wilkes Booth really was?), but it's done very well, and ends on a lighter note with Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, which is attended by -- well, read the book!
Backing into Forward: A Memoir
If you've ever read The Phantom Tollbooth, you're familiar with Jules Feiffer's work -- he illustrated the book. He's also been a syndicated cartoonist for over 60 years, although he's mostly done stuff that appears in the likes of the Village Voice more than newspaper comic strips. In any case, his autobiography is fascinating; if you're a fan of Kerouac and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (my review is linked), you'll see elements of both in Backing into Forward. An eminently worthwhile read.
Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang
Chelsea Handler comes back with her third collection of essays, jokes, and stories. After the success of My Horizontal Life and Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, she appears to have been encouraged to write again. And it's funny ... I just wouldn't recommend it for people who aren't into extremely, extremely off-color anecdotes ...
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
One of the most-lauded books of the year (thus far), this novel follows the story of Major Pettigrew, a sort of quintessential Englishman who is struggling against his unscrupulous family to reclaim a heirloom rifle after the death of his younger brother. Although he also struggles to pass his traditional values on to his son -- who can be most kindly described as a "yuppie" -- he falls into an untraditional friendship with a Pakistani shopkeeper from his neighborhood. It all sounds fairly boring but it's done with a terrific dry wit, and as the plot comes to a head, things get exciting. Almost a modern-day comedy of manners with a nice dash of romance.
Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight
The title is fairly fanciful, and so is the book. It tells the story of a few Russian slum residents who cope with the strangeness of post-Soviet life by escaping into their dreams. There isn't much of a plot -- not a whole lot of explosions or misadventures happen -- but the fleshed-out characters and the odd natures of their individual lives make this novel an absorbing read.
Nonfiction
Love Letters of Great Men and Love Letters of Great Women
As promised, these are two collections of love letters from poets, kings, queens, presidents, authors, politicians, and philosophers. Although it can be hard to get over the sappiness of some of those letters, they offer fascinating insights into the minds -- and hearts -- of people whose names live on today. Good stuff if you're into mushy romance or truly outstanding prose from those best-suited to spout expressions of the ineffable.
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens
Written to commemorate the centennial of Clemens's death, this book explores the singularly crowded life of one of America's greatest authors. The book itself is written as a comprehensive overview of both Clemens's life and work, mixing analyses of Huckleberry Finn and other works with an exploration of Clemens's complex attitudes toward slavery, American life, and religion in turn-of-the-century Vienna. It's a good way to get to know the man himself and understand his work in the context in which it was undertaken. He's one of my favorite authors, although that's more because of the person he was than because of his work, and it's a terrific book.
Things That Make Us [sic]: The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar Takes on Madison Avenue, Hollywood, the White House, and the World
From the founder of SPOGG comes this hilarious answer to Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a guide to grammar in the modern-day world. Although I think we can safely say that this premise has been done to death -- I've read six or seven books based on this idea since I started working here a year and a half ago -- Things That Make Us [sic] addresses more interesting stuff like spam, The Princess Bride, LOLcats, and letters sent to David Hasselhoff and George W. Bush. And it's funny; if you've read SPOGG's blog, you have a fairly good idea of how snarky the author can be, and she pulls it off beautifully here.
Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan
Published in conjunction with one of the first American exhibitions of Pakistani contemporary art, this book is gorgeous. It offers an unparalleled look at art in Pakistan today and the issues affecting Pakistani society in the wake of the past several decades of struggle and conflict in the region. It's a good way to overcome preconceived notions about life in Pakistan; complementary essays place the works in important cultural, historical and artistic contexts. It's easy to think of Pakistan in terms of news headlines, but the country -- and its people -- are so much more than that, and this book reflects that and offers a valuable aesthetic perspective.
Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories
Groan-worthy pun notwithstanding, this has to be one of the most fascinating books I've seen recently. The title covers it all; this is a collection of stories associated with important pieces of architecture, which are taken as both settings and symbols of their times, places, and cultures. It's not strictly accurate, though: the book actually ends with a chapter at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, titled "In which everything, and nothing at all, has changed." That should give you an idea of the important overviews both of history and of the importance of place in individual lives offered by this book.
Sixteen books in today's post. I'm tired. No Question of the Week in honor of graduation. I'll see you next week.
Good luck to all of our graduates!
Anyway, to insulate myself from the vicissitudes of our weather, I injected some heat into my life by picking up Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. No nonfiction, no "serious" fiction -- ha -- just flat-out mayhem. It's the story of a magician who is torn away from the woman he loves and tricked into Hell by his friends, where he spends eleven years fighting -- and defeating -- the worst monsters the abyss can throw at him. He finally escapes into modern-day Los Angeles and discovers that things have changed. Not only can one "have Internet" on one's cell phone, but his girlfriend was murdered shortly after his exile, and the leader of the group that sent him to Hell has become something rather godlike.
Upon realizing this -- which involves our main character digging himself out of a grave and immediately robbing a young businessman of all of his money and clothes -- he embarks on what could be called the quintessential rampage and seeks revenge, starting with decapitating one of his old friends within several minutes of his emergence on Earth and keeping the severed head alive for information and abuse as he searches for the people responsible for what has happened to him. Along with an immortal Frenchman, a contemporary punk, a fallen angel, and a few tricks up his sleeve, he tears up LA, leveling city blocks, making friends with the local bartender by tearing apart the neighborhood skinhead extortioners, and discovering the real story behind the creation of the world.
In a nutshell, it's Constantine without the lousy acting and paper-thin plot and with a much, much higher body count. Totally brainless and it doesn't demand anything from you except a little credulity, so it's a good read for when you want a break from the heavy stuff.
As promised, here are a few more breaks from the heavy stuff, fresh off the book-cart and wrapped in today's newspaper:
Graphic Novels
Fables: Legends in Exile
The first installment of the popular Fables series, this volume introduces the reader to the world of the Fables, living storybook characters that have been exiled to our world following a huge war. When I say "living," that's what I mean -- the characters you normally associate with Disney are here turned into gangsters, prostitutes, power-mongers, dictators, and cops, among many other things. The adventure begins with the murder of Rose Red -- Mayor Snow White's sister -- and the subsequent investigation by the Big Bad Wolf. All the volumes are fantastic reads, and we have several available on the shelf.
Y: The Last Man
This series is set after a mysterious plague kills every single male mammal on the face of the Earth -- except two. Yorick and his pet Capuchin monkey, Ampersand, find themselves navigating a world desperate to ensure the perpetuation of the human species, whether through medical advances or sheer bloody-minded conflict. It's fascinating to look at the author's conceptions of a world run by women, and the social upheaval this implies. Gender roles are upended for a certain segment of the population, and interpersonal interaction becomes very different. It's definitely not a graphic novel for chauvinists!
Black Hole
A small town in the 1970s is suddenly afflicted with a mysterious disease of unknown origin. It's a fairly typical premise, except that this particular disease is sexually transmitted among teenagers, and it causes their bodies to mutate in unpredictable ways. The mutations vary from the barely-noticeable, like an extra mouth in your clavicle that can be disguised by a t-shirt, to the dramatic, which can alter your entire appearance and turn you into something that resembles the walking dead. The infected are perfectly healthy (except for The Bug) but are ostracized by their town, for both their physical appearance and what that appearance signifies in terms of their morality, and forced to live in the woods. Black Hole follows the stories of two of those students: a young, attractive woman who sleeps with the wrong boy and finds herself shedding her skin on a weekly basis, and a young man who can't ever seem to get laid -- until he does and grows tentacles out of his sides. It's surreal, sweet, and incredibly disturbing; the art is spooky but the story is engrossing.
Britten and Brülightly
A noirish detective tale, this graphic novel follows Britten, a private-eye who looks French but is actually South American, as he investigates the apparent suicide of his client's husband and uncovers a creepy family conspiracy with ties to organized crime. It's a thin book, but the plot is appropriately moody; so is the art, which is fantastic for this genre. The capper, of course, is that his partner is a talking teabag that lives in his coat.
A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge
A nonfiction graphic novel that tells the story of several New Orleans residents and their lives after Hurricane Katrina, this book is, in a word, incredible. It only takes the author a dozen panels to fully depict what happened to the city in the hurricane. It's an unbelievable representation of one of the worst -- if not the worst -- natural disasters in American history.
Novels
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
More or less self-explanatory. From the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes the story of our 16th President and his secret double life as a vampire slayer -- er, hunter. Based on "secret diaries" given to the author by a major player in the story, this book details the course of Lincoln's life as he discovers that vampires are real, and that his family has had tragic run-ins with them. As he grows older, he begins to hunt them by night while working as a lawyer and politician during the day. After he eventually becomes president, he discovers that Confederate vampires plan to set off a civil war so they can feast on the remains and decides to fight back. Truthfully, it's just a retelling of the real story, with vampires added (guess what John Wilkes Booth really was?), but it's done very well, and ends on a lighter note with Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, which is attended by -- well, read the book!
Backing into Forward: A Memoir
If you've ever read The Phantom Tollbooth, you're familiar with Jules Feiffer's work -- he illustrated the book. He's also been a syndicated cartoonist for over 60 years, although he's mostly done stuff that appears in the likes of the Village Voice more than newspaper comic strips. In any case, his autobiography is fascinating; if you're a fan of Kerouac and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (my review is linked), you'll see elements of both in Backing into Forward. An eminently worthwhile read.
Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang
Chelsea Handler comes back with her third collection of essays, jokes, and stories. After the success of My Horizontal Life and Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, she appears to have been encouraged to write again. And it's funny ... I just wouldn't recommend it for people who aren't into extremely, extremely off-color anecdotes ...
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
One of the most-lauded books of the year (thus far), this novel follows the story of Major Pettigrew, a sort of quintessential Englishman who is struggling against his unscrupulous family to reclaim a heirloom rifle after the death of his younger brother. Although he also struggles to pass his traditional values on to his son -- who can be most kindly described as a "yuppie" -- he falls into an untraditional friendship with a Pakistani shopkeeper from his neighborhood. It all sounds fairly boring but it's done with a terrific dry wit, and as the plot comes to a head, things get exciting. Almost a modern-day comedy of manners with a nice dash of romance.
Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight
The title is fairly fanciful, and so is the book. It tells the story of a few Russian slum residents who cope with the strangeness of post-Soviet life by escaping into their dreams. There isn't much of a plot -- not a whole lot of explosions or misadventures happen -- but the fleshed-out characters and the odd natures of their individual lives make this novel an absorbing read.
Nonfiction
Love Letters of Great Men and Love Letters of Great Women
As promised, these are two collections of love letters from poets, kings, queens, presidents, authors, politicians, and philosophers. Although it can be hard to get over the sappiness of some of those letters, they offer fascinating insights into the minds -- and hearts -- of people whose names live on today. Good stuff if you're into mushy romance or truly outstanding prose from those best-suited to spout expressions of the ineffable.
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens
Written to commemorate the centennial of Clemens's death, this book explores the singularly crowded life of one of America's greatest authors. The book itself is written as a comprehensive overview of both Clemens's life and work, mixing analyses of Huckleberry Finn and other works with an exploration of Clemens's complex attitudes toward slavery, American life, and religion in turn-of-the-century Vienna. It's a good way to get to know the man himself and understand his work in the context in which it was undertaken. He's one of my favorite authors, although that's more because of the person he was than because of his work, and it's a terrific book.
Things That Make Us [sic]: The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar Takes on Madison Avenue, Hollywood, the White House, and the World
From the founder of SPOGG comes this hilarious answer to Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a guide to grammar in the modern-day world. Although I think we can safely say that this premise has been done to death -- I've read six or seven books based on this idea since I started working here a year and a half ago -- Things That Make Us [sic] addresses more interesting stuff like spam, The Princess Bride, LOLcats, and letters sent to David Hasselhoff and George W. Bush. And it's funny; if you've read SPOGG's blog, you have a fairly good idea of how snarky the author can be, and she pulls it off beautifully here.
Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan
Published in conjunction with one of the first American exhibitions of Pakistani contemporary art, this book is gorgeous. It offers an unparalleled look at art in Pakistan today and the issues affecting Pakistani society in the wake of the past several decades of struggle and conflict in the region. It's a good way to overcome preconceived notions about life in Pakistan; complementary essays place the works in important cultural, historical and artistic contexts. It's easy to think of Pakistan in terms of news headlines, but the country -- and its people -- are so much more than that, and this book reflects that and offers a valuable aesthetic perspective.
Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories
Groan-worthy pun notwithstanding, this has to be one of the most fascinating books I've seen recently. The title covers it all; this is a collection of stories associated with important pieces of architecture, which are taken as both settings and symbols of their times, places, and cultures. It's not strictly accurate, though: the book actually ends with a chapter at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, titled "In which everything, and nothing at all, has changed." That should give you an idea of the important overviews both of history and of the importance of place in individual lives offered by this book.
Sixteen books in today's post. I'm tired. No Question of the Week in honor of graduation. I'll see you next week.
Good luck to all of our graduates!
Friday, May 7, 2010
Preview: The advent of summer
Our climate appears to be a little indecisive. Last week, things were chilly for a few days, and this week, we've been living with some truly misbegotten humidity coupled with temperatures in the 80s. I am pretty sure we were supposed to have a spring; possibly it came and went at some point in the wee hours one night last month. And now it's time to sweat ...
Fortunately, there's one nice, low-impact activity one can undertake in the out-of-doors, under the shade of a tree, on a chaise lounge by the pool, or on your beach towel as you slowly sizzle: reading!
People say winter's the best time for undertaking the pursuit of a Good Book -- all those hours spent indoors away from the cold and snow naturally lend themselves to a comfortable chair, some hot chocolate, and the latest bestseller -- but I'm a summer guy myself. The National Arboretum, for instance, close to campus, offers tons of spots to relax in when you're in the mood to get close to nature and all the attendant insects; the hill leading up to the western facade of the Capitol, on the other hand, lets you people-watch at the same time. Or even on the green in the middle of campus, which allows for some quiet time and the chance to socialize with passersby.
During my weird weekend last week, I managed to grab some time to slip through Cory Doctorow's Makers. You might remember my review -- written, not-so-coincidentally, last summer -- of his Little Brother. In this case, though, the rebellion isn't against the government, but against Disney. Doctorow has a thing for Disney; it plays a part in most of his novels. He seems to be pretty conflicted: on the one hand, he's captivated by the magic Disney accomplishes through metric tons of papier-mache, but on the other hand, he hates its corporate soullessness and cutthroat protection of intellectual property.
Anyway, in Makers, we follow the careers of Perry and Lester, two renegade engineers who stumble into some major funding from a business genius and accidentally spawn a movement based on the reuse of junk to create weird contraptions; one item you see consistently throughout the novel is a little humanoid robot made of seashells that makes toast. There's also Lester's obsession with creating difference engines out of various materials, like a basic computer built out of hundreds of used soda cans that can perform arithmetic using brown M&Ms. The emergence of 3D printers that can build almost anything quickly and cheaply really gooses the trend and gets a huge percentage of the American population involved.
There's a whole do-it-yourself aesthetic that creates viable economic communities out of squatter camps full of homeless people, and which leads naturally to a theme-park-style ride built in an abandoned Wal-Mart that collects all the fantastically weird stuff that comes out of this movement and lets people vote different things in or out of each segment of the ride. As the ride phenomenon spreads, its various franchises become networked, so that any changes effected by the participants in one part of the country gets propagated throughout the whole system, and a strangely coherent narrative emerges from this collective subconsciousness.
Of course, Disney hates this; the ride, in all its incarnations across the country, directly competes with Disney World, and even the company's own employees are slowly becoming addicted. As Disney scrambles to compete, revamping Fantasyland into a dark, twisted, Goth theme park, things come to a head when disappointed employees start contributing Disney-trademarked stuff to Perry and Lester's ride and Disney immediately takes the opportunity to file an injunction to shut them down. This leads to a fifteen-year lawsuit, the legal process of which, in a burst of financial innovation, is immediately parceled out and sold off to investors looking for a long-term return.
The book is classic Doctorow. Although the main focus is the do-it-yourself lifestyle and its relationship with innovation, it pulls in a lot of ancillary weirdness that makes the world seem a little more fleshed out. For instance, Lester, morbidly obese at the beginning of the book, suddenly pioneers a new procedure that allows overweight people to slim down and muscle up in a matter of weeks -- as long as they consume 10,000 calories per day. This results in the "fatkins," a class of people who are ridiculously good-looking, constantly consume food, and are incredibly lazy. However, as the book continues along its forty-year arc, tragic physiological consequences begin to emerge, eventually impacting Lester himself and lending the end of the book extra emotional weight (which doesn't have anything to do with whether or not he dies, so I'm certainly not giving anything away here).
In general, three thumbs up!
Now that I'm done gushing -- I'm an avid Doctorow fanboy -- what's going on this summer? In the words of each librarian:
Diana Gates
I will be working on the Deaf LibGuides and pathfinders. We will be identifying videos for a video preservation project. I plan to continue with the Deaf Subject file. As usual, I will wrap up and close my "file" on this year's deaf orders and prepare orders for next year.
Laura Jacobi
Just like Bing Crosby in White Christmas, I'm taking the train to Vermont with my pals for several days of hiking -- a great time to catch up on gossip and reading (alas, not singing like Bing). At the Library, I'll be working on a project to reduce costs by cutting subscriptions to little-used items; training staff and student assistants; and writing LibGuides for Fall courses.
Jim McCarthy
Weeding, weeding, and weeding. I also have a backlog of donated items that will be cleared out this summer. I'll also be working on a slight redesign of library.gallaudet.edu, creating tutorials for some of our resources, and, as always, reading a lot and blogging about it. I also plan to attend the American Library Association conference for the very first time! And maybe get a tan ...
Patrick Oberholtzer
I'll be developing and updating LibGuides for my courses, Weeding, weeding, weeding books and journals, working on the Deaf FAQ Web pages, and attending ALA. I also plan to update and expand my technology and software skills by enrolling in courses in Arlington County Education courses as time permits.
Jane Rutherford
Weeding OLD education books that have not been used in 10 years or more. Cleaning up the general periodical shelves and making sure those records in our ALADIN system are correct and understandable. Preparing to retire the end of August by trashing, redistributing, or taking home the things in my office.
The upshot of what you can expect: Cleaner and more up-to-date shelves, more LibGuides and other online resources, a somewhat redesigned Web page, and one less long-time librarian. We're sorry to see Jane go, but very excited on her behalf -- she's earned her retirement many times over, as you can see from all of our plans for this summer; we don't stop when graduation ends.
Next week, you get to look forward to another list of new books!
Question of the Week
Does the Library have any videophones?
This is a question that's come up a few times in the past few weeks. I'm not sure why; I could have sworn this was general knowledge. Since it doesn't seem to be, here goes: We have four videophones available for public use, all of which are on the first floor. Three of them are in booths next to the men's room, while there's one in a cubicle in the Deaf Library Study Center near the women's bathroom; the cubicle is tucked away in the corner immediately to the right of the entrance to the room and is easy to miss, so look carefully. It's also usually occupied.
Fortunately, there's one nice, low-impact activity one can undertake in the out-of-doors, under the shade of a tree, on a chaise lounge by the pool, or on your beach towel as you slowly sizzle: reading!
People say winter's the best time for undertaking the pursuit of a Good Book -- all those hours spent indoors away from the cold and snow naturally lend themselves to a comfortable chair, some hot chocolate, and the latest bestseller -- but I'm a summer guy myself. The National Arboretum, for instance, close to campus, offers tons of spots to relax in when you're in the mood to get close to nature and all the attendant insects; the hill leading up to the western facade of the Capitol, on the other hand, lets you people-watch at the same time. Or even on the green in the middle of campus, which allows for some quiet time and the chance to socialize with passersby.
During my weird weekend last week, I managed to grab some time to slip through Cory Doctorow's Makers. You might remember my review -- written, not-so-coincidentally, last summer -- of his Little Brother. In this case, though, the rebellion isn't against the government, but against Disney. Doctorow has a thing for Disney; it plays a part in most of his novels. He seems to be pretty conflicted: on the one hand, he's captivated by the magic Disney accomplishes through metric tons of papier-mache, but on the other hand, he hates its corporate soullessness and cutthroat protection of intellectual property.
Anyway, in Makers, we follow the careers of Perry and Lester, two renegade engineers who stumble into some major funding from a business genius and accidentally spawn a movement based on the reuse of junk to create weird contraptions; one item you see consistently throughout the novel is a little humanoid robot made of seashells that makes toast. There's also Lester's obsession with creating difference engines out of various materials, like a basic computer built out of hundreds of used soda cans that can perform arithmetic using brown M&Ms. The emergence of 3D printers that can build almost anything quickly and cheaply really gooses the trend and gets a huge percentage of the American population involved.
There's a whole do-it-yourself aesthetic that creates viable economic communities out of squatter camps full of homeless people, and which leads naturally to a theme-park-style ride built in an abandoned Wal-Mart that collects all the fantastically weird stuff that comes out of this movement and lets people vote different things in or out of each segment of the ride. As the ride phenomenon spreads, its various franchises become networked, so that any changes effected by the participants in one part of the country gets propagated throughout the whole system, and a strangely coherent narrative emerges from this collective subconsciousness.
Of course, Disney hates this; the ride, in all its incarnations across the country, directly competes with Disney World, and even the company's own employees are slowly becoming addicted. As Disney scrambles to compete, revamping Fantasyland into a dark, twisted, Goth theme park, things come to a head when disappointed employees start contributing Disney-trademarked stuff to Perry and Lester's ride and Disney immediately takes the opportunity to file an injunction to shut them down. This leads to a fifteen-year lawsuit, the legal process of which, in a burst of financial innovation, is immediately parceled out and sold off to investors looking for a long-term return.
The book is classic Doctorow. Although the main focus is the do-it-yourself lifestyle and its relationship with innovation, it pulls in a lot of ancillary weirdness that makes the world seem a little more fleshed out. For instance, Lester, morbidly obese at the beginning of the book, suddenly pioneers a new procedure that allows overweight people to slim down and muscle up in a matter of weeks -- as long as they consume 10,000 calories per day. This results in the "fatkins," a class of people who are ridiculously good-looking, constantly consume food, and are incredibly lazy. However, as the book continues along its forty-year arc, tragic physiological consequences begin to emerge, eventually impacting Lester himself and lending the end of the book extra emotional weight (which doesn't have anything to do with whether or not he dies, so I'm certainly not giving anything away here).
In general, three thumbs up!
Now that I'm done gushing -- I'm an avid Doctorow fanboy -- what's going on this summer? In the words of each librarian:
Diana Gates
I will be working on the Deaf LibGuides and pathfinders. We will be identifying videos for a video preservation project. I plan to continue with the Deaf Subject file. As usual, I will wrap up and close my "file" on this year's deaf orders and prepare orders for next year.
Laura Jacobi
Just like Bing Crosby in White Christmas, I'm taking the train to Vermont with my pals for several days of hiking -- a great time to catch up on gossip and reading (alas, not singing like Bing). At the Library, I'll be working on a project to reduce costs by cutting subscriptions to little-used items; training staff and student assistants; and writing LibGuides for Fall courses.
Jim McCarthy
Weeding, weeding, and weeding. I also have a backlog of donated items that will be cleared out this summer. I'll also be working on a slight redesign of library.gallaudet.edu, creating tutorials for some of our resources, and, as always, reading a lot and blogging about it. I also plan to attend the American Library Association conference for the very first time! And maybe get a tan ...
Patrick Oberholtzer
I'll be developing and updating LibGuides for my courses, Weeding, weeding, weeding books and journals, working on the Deaf FAQ Web pages, and attending ALA. I also plan to update and expand my technology and software skills by enrolling in courses in Arlington County Education courses as time permits.
Jane Rutherford
Weeding OLD education books that have not been used in 10 years or more. Cleaning up the general periodical shelves and making sure those records in our ALADIN system are correct and understandable. Preparing to retire the end of August by trashing, redistributing, or taking home the things in my office.
The upshot of what you can expect: Cleaner and more up-to-date shelves, more LibGuides and other online resources, a somewhat redesigned Web page, and one less long-time librarian. We're sorry to see Jane go, but very excited on her behalf -- she's earned her retirement many times over, as you can see from all of our plans for this summer; we don't stop when graduation ends.
Next week, you get to look forward to another list of new books!
Question of the Week
Does the Library have any videophones?
This is a question that's come up a few times in the past few weeks. I'm not sure why; I could have sworn this was general knowledge. Since it doesn't seem to be, here goes: We have four videophones available for public use, all of which are on the first floor. Three of them are in booths next to the men's room, while there's one in a cubicle in the Deaf Library Study Center near the women's bathroom; the cubicle is tucked away in the corner immediately to the right of the entrance to the room and is easy to miss, so look carefully. It's also usually occupied.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Some summer questions and free coffee
The end of the semester is inching ever closer. We're all suffused with fearful anticipation!
To that end, the Library, in its infinite beneficence (and you'd better believe it, buster), is offering free coffee starting this Sunday, April 25, through Wednesday, April 28, from 8-10 p.m. on the first floor by the Service Desk. We offer sweeteners of varying chemical compositions, creamer, stirrers, a little candy, and while they last, free travel mugs!
I'll admit something shameful: we actually offered coffee earlier this week, from Monday until Wednesday. It totally slipped my mind last week when I was writing my post then. Still, our coffee hour does not seem to have suffered in popularity thereby -- it seems we are not the only ones not getting much sleep in the face of finals week.
Speaking of not getting much sleep, I read The World According to Garp by John Irving. That book's a "yikes" all around. It's about T.S. Garp, a fellow who was raised by a woman who impregnated herself upon the carcass of a comatose (and terminal) soldier specifically so she would not have to deal with the father of her child while she raised him, a tactic that roils 1950s America: as she rears Garp, she writes an autobiography that almost becomes her own hagiography and carries her to worldwide fame. With such auspicious origins, it is no wonder that Garp, in a bildungsroman covered by most of the novel, grows up to become a highly-accomplished novelist himself. This part of the story is accompanied by a couple of framed narratives -- nearly the full text of one of Garp's own short stories is incorporated into the book about his life -- that bespeak a certain surrealist sentiment.
In any case, Garp grows up, falls in love, gets married, and fathers children of his own, only to have tragedy strike. Remembering the details of this particular tragedy still makes me shudder. Anyway, it's all very sexy and is a good read in general. Highly recommended, as long as you aren't prudish about some things.
At this point in the semester, I'm going to go ahead and answer a few Significant Questions floating around, mostly regarding the Library, graduation, and the summer.
I got an e-mail from the Library saying I have fines to pay before I can graduate. Is that true?
Yes, it is, especially if you're one of those who have managed to ride your balance into the upper atmosphere. You can't officially graduate without paying your fines. You can walk at graduation, sure, but that's little comfort if, when you're applying for jobs or graduate school, you need an official transcript, which you won't get. If you owe us a lot of money, don't be shy; we're not going to arrest you and throw you into the debtors' prison behind the Echo360 classroom downstairs. Come in and talk to us!
If I come in to pay my fines, what do I need to bring?
Your Gallaudet ID. I can't emphasize this enough; we do not accept driver's licenses, passports, military IDs, baby photos, or your mom's ultrasound. It has to be a current, valid Gallaudet ID. Also, bring cash or a checkbook. We understand that it's a pain in the neck, but we can't take plastic -- cash or check only.
What if I don't bring enough money and have to come back? Can I do that?
Yes, you can do that. You can pay down your balance on any schedule you'd like -- just pay it before graduation. Also, please try to stick to normal business hours, especially if you owe fines at other universities like George Mason or Georgetown -- the librarians that are usually around between 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. are pretty good at sorting these things out.
If I owe fines on books I got through CLS, how do I pay them? Do I have to go to those schools and pay there?
No, you don't. You can pay all of your fines right here.
Last question, I promise: What's up with the summer hours?
They're here! Scroll down to the bottom and take a look. One thing you'll notice are the hours for Reference Librarian service; there won't be a librarian here after 5 p.m. all summer, and weekends will also not have a librarian at all. This is an important thing to keep in mind! If you need help, come in before 5 p.m. Before 4, even, if you think you won't be the only one seeking help. If you still can't make it, get in touch with us via the contact information on this page to make arrangements to meet.
That about wraps it up for this session. No Question of the Week this week; there will also probably not be a post next week, as most of my time then will be consumed by the National Academic Bowl and time off. The following week, though, will see a quick preview of what you may be able to expect upon your return in the fall.
To that end, the Library, in its infinite beneficence (and you'd better believe it, buster), is offering free coffee starting this Sunday, April 25, through Wednesday, April 28, from 8-10 p.m. on the first floor by the Service Desk. We offer sweeteners of varying chemical compositions, creamer, stirrers, a little candy, and while they last, free travel mugs!
I'll admit something shameful: we actually offered coffee earlier this week, from Monday until Wednesday. It totally slipped my mind last week when I was writing my post then. Still, our coffee hour does not seem to have suffered in popularity thereby -- it seems we are not the only ones not getting much sleep in the face of finals week.
Speaking of not getting much sleep, I read The World According to Garp by John Irving. That book's a "yikes" all around. It's about T.S. Garp, a fellow who was raised by a woman who impregnated herself upon the carcass of a comatose (and terminal) soldier specifically so she would not have to deal with the father of her child while she raised him, a tactic that roils 1950s America: as she rears Garp, she writes an autobiography that almost becomes her own hagiography and carries her to worldwide fame. With such auspicious origins, it is no wonder that Garp, in a bildungsroman covered by most of the novel, grows up to become a highly-accomplished novelist himself. This part of the story is accompanied by a couple of framed narratives -- nearly the full text of one of Garp's own short stories is incorporated into the book about his life -- that bespeak a certain surrealist sentiment.
In any case, Garp grows up, falls in love, gets married, and fathers children of his own, only to have tragedy strike. Remembering the details of this particular tragedy still makes me shudder. Anyway, it's all very sexy and is a good read in general. Highly recommended, as long as you aren't prudish about some things.
At this point in the semester, I'm going to go ahead and answer a few Significant Questions floating around, mostly regarding the Library, graduation, and the summer.
I got an e-mail from the Library saying I have fines to pay before I can graduate. Is that true?
Yes, it is, especially if you're one of those who have managed to ride your balance into the upper atmosphere. You can't officially graduate without paying your fines. You can walk at graduation, sure, but that's little comfort if, when you're applying for jobs or graduate school, you need an official transcript, which you won't get. If you owe us a lot of money, don't be shy; we're not going to arrest you and throw you into the debtors' prison behind the Echo360 classroom downstairs. Come in and talk to us!
If I come in to pay my fines, what do I need to bring?
Your Gallaudet ID. I can't emphasize this enough; we do not accept driver's licenses, passports, military IDs, baby photos, or your mom's ultrasound. It has to be a current, valid Gallaudet ID. Also, bring cash or a checkbook. We understand that it's a pain in the neck, but we can't take plastic -- cash or check only.
What if I don't bring enough money and have to come back? Can I do that?
Yes, you can do that. You can pay down your balance on any schedule you'd like -- just pay it before graduation. Also, please try to stick to normal business hours, especially if you owe fines at other universities like George Mason or Georgetown -- the librarians that are usually around between 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. are pretty good at sorting these things out.
If I owe fines on books I got through CLS, how do I pay them? Do I have to go to those schools and pay there?
No, you don't. You can pay all of your fines right here.
Last question, I promise: What's up with the summer hours?
They're here! Scroll down to the bottom and take a look. One thing you'll notice are the hours for Reference Librarian service; there won't be a librarian here after 5 p.m. all summer, and weekends will also not have a librarian at all. This is an important thing to keep in mind! If you need help, come in before 5 p.m. Before 4, even, if you think you won't be the only one seeking help. If you still can't make it, get in touch with us via the contact information on this page to make arrangements to meet.
That about wraps it up for this session. No Question of the Week this week; there will also probably not be a post next week, as most of my time then will be consumed by the National Academic Bowl and time off. The following week, though, will see a quick preview of what you may be able to expect upon your return in the fall.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Why does research take time?
We're just about three weeks away from the end of the Spring semester. Wow. Where'd the time go?
Part of it probably went to all the traveling I did for the Academic Bowl. Chances are good that the rest went into the Library. We've been busy this semester! Summer will be a good time to relax a little bit and focus on other projects that don't have a rapidly-approaching deadline.
Either way, I'm still plugging away at those ol' books. I just finished The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer, and it was an interesting book. Told mostly through flashbacks, the story covers a sort of alternate 20th Century where things are pretty different from our own world. Most of the changes seem to stem from a single person, Prospero Taligent, a mechanical genius who builds robots, flying cars, and other such wonders without going anywhere near an electronic circuit. Because of this, the world of the novel is more technologically advanced than ours, but ours is more scientifically advanced. They haven't discovered the atom, how to manipulate electrons, or progressed much further than basic electrical generation.
It's an interestingly different universe that bears some eerie similarities -- the art world there is an almost exact copy of our own, for instance, with artists being lauded as geniuses for creating large canvases that have only single words painted on each. The effect is a weird sense of bleed-through between our 20th Century and theirs, which is exacerbated when the author himself appears in the novel. There are also a few little jokes, like when one character muses on the possibility of developing a mechanical system that relies on switching between "open" and "closed" in order to think or accomplish tasks -- which is the basis of binary code itself.
Oh, right. I forgot. The plot. The main character is a writer of greeting cards who has a long association with Prospero Taligent and his daughter, Miranda. Prospero is the wealthiest man in the world, but is incapable of relating to an actual human being until he adopts Miranda. Unfortunately, he has an engineer's need for a sense of control and predictability, and as Miranda grows up and begins to rebel, Prospero descends into madness, drives Miranda insane, and drags the main character down with him into a surprising and tragic conclusion. Or maybe it's not tragic; it's so bizarre, really, that I'm not sure what to make of it.
And, of course, all of this takes place in Xeroville, an alternate New York that continually haunts the novel with its decaying gloom. Usually when reading one of those other-dimension novels, it's pretty clear that the premise stems from the basic question: "What if that happened instead of this?" What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, what if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, what if Franz Ferdinand had survived? None of this is clear with Dream of Perpetual Motion; I thought maybe it was the emergence of the Taligent empire, but there are indications that the differences go back further than that, including frequent references to an "age of miracles," where angels and demons shared the world with humans until industrialization came and killed them all. So who knows?
Either way, it's an absorbing novel. It reminds me a lot of Gears of the City in some ways (which I'll get around to reviewing in here someday -- I read faster than I blog).
So last week, I promised you some words about the nature of research in general.
This is mostly because I've encountered some students in the last couple of weeks who are surprised to find out that there is no magic bullet that will bring up everything they need in a single try. When I explain that research takes time, effort, and a little mental footwork, they look at me as though I'm an alien.
Questions regarding my status as an Earthling aside, the students' reaction is both unsurprising and regrettable. Unsurprising because they're used to Google, which has become incredibly good at finding you what you want based on your initial search query. Regrettable because it predisposes those students to give up quickly, turn in substandard work, and contend with either a low or failing grade. Sometimes, if they don't learn how to handle the research process soon enough, they wash out altogether, even though some actually have enough smarts to go pretty far once they have that diploma in hand.
Here's the thing: Academic databases are not Google. Google uses an algorithm that's so secret no other search engine can use it without going through Google, even for academic purposes, and so advanced it nearly qualifies as an artificial general intelligence, relying on contextual clues that most ordinary machines can't understand in order to figure out what you mean.
Okay, so why can't an academic database use Google to run its search, as Gallaudet does when you want to search through its website?
Because to do so, Google's algorithm and ancillary programs -- like the spiders that comb the Web and index everything they come across so it can be searched -- would need to be copied into the (copyrighted and subscription-only) database itself, something Google never permits. Even when you see a Google-based search on a Web site that's not Google, it's using the same resources as google.com; you can see this by clicking on the search I sent you to in the last paragraph and looking in the address bar of your browser. The first thing you see: http://www.google.com.
This is a lot of technical stuff. The upshot: Academic databases just aren't as easy to search as Google, so that's the first reason why it can be a little more difficult to find what you're looking for and why it takes time.
The second reason can be chalked up to vocabulary. There are two different ways your vocabulary can make research take some time:
The nose job example also illustrates the third, and probably most significant, reason why research takes some effort: It requires some detective work. You have to figure out your starting point, and use whatever clues you find to proceed from there, step by step. Sometimes it's easy, especially if you pick a well-studied topic like the Maginot Line in World War II, but when you're working on more esoteric topics -- like the effect of rhinoplasties on a specific psychological model of self-perception -- this strategy is invaluable. However, it's also time-consuming and can take a few hours.
That's why you learn about time management in your First Year Seminar course when you arrive at Gallaudet as a freshman. School takes time, and it always will, especially if you decide you want to do the best work possible.
One final note, and this is something I say to a lot of the courses I present to: There will be times at which you hit a wall. You can't figure out how to proceed any further with your research. Maybe you've run out of terms to try, or there simply isn't anything in the databases you've been looking in. At this point, ask a librarian. It's what we're here for.
Question of the Week
Are you open during the summer?
We're open year-round! Our hours are usually reduced during the summer -- we generally close at 8 p.m., for example -- so things will be a little bit different, but we're open nonetheless. We'll be releasing our summer hours pretty soon; keep an eye on this blog, and I'll let you know when you can find out!
Part of it probably went to all the traveling I did for the Academic Bowl. Chances are good that the rest went into the Library. We've been busy this semester! Summer will be a good time to relax a little bit and focus on other projects that don't have a rapidly-approaching deadline.
Either way, I'm still plugging away at those ol' books. I just finished The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer, and it was an interesting book. Told mostly through flashbacks, the story covers a sort of alternate 20th Century where things are pretty different from our own world. Most of the changes seem to stem from a single person, Prospero Taligent, a mechanical genius who builds robots, flying cars, and other such wonders without going anywhere near an electronic circuit. Because of this, the world of the novel is more technologically advanced than ours, but ours is more scientifically advanced. They haven't discovered the atom, how to manipulate electrons, or progressed much further than basic electrical generation.
It's an interestingly different universe that bears some eerie similarities -- the art world there is an almost exact copy of our own, for instance, with artists being lauded as geniuses for creating large canvases that have only single words painted on each. The effect is a weird sense of bleed-through between our 20th Century and theirs, which is exacerbated when the author himself appears in the novel. There are also a few little jokes, like when one character muses on the possibility of developing a mechanical system that relies on switching between "open" and "closed" in order to think or accomplish tasks -- which is the basis of binary code itself.
Oh, right. I forgot. The plot. The main character is a writer of greeting cards who has a long association with Prospero Taligent and his daughter, Miranda. Prospero is the wealthiest man in the world, but is incapable of relating to an actual human being until he adopts Miranda. Unfortunately, he has an engineer's need for a sense of control and predictability, and as Miranda grows up and begins to rebel, Prospero descends into madness, drives Miranda insane, and drags the main character down with him into a surprising and tragic conclusion. Or maybe it's not tragic; it's so bizarre, really, that I'm not sure what to make of it.
And, of course, all of this takes place in Xeroville, an alternate New York that continually haunts the novel with its decaying gloom. Usually when reading one of those other-dimension novels, it's pretty clear that the premise stems from the basic question: "What if that happened instead of this?" What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, what if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, what if Franz Ferdinand had survived? None of this is clear with Dream of Perpetual Motion; I thought maybe it was the emergence of the Taligent empire, but there are indications that the differences go back further than that, including frequent references to an "age of miracles," where angels and demons shared the world with humans until industrialization came and killed them all. So who knows?
Either way, it's an absorbing novel. It reminds me a lot of Gears of the City in some ways (which I'll get around to reviewing in here someday -- I read faster than I blog).
So last week, I promised you some words about the nature of research in general.
This is mostly because I've encountered some students in the last couple of weeks who are surprised to find out that there is no magic bullet that will bring up everything they need in a single try. When I explain that research takes time, effort, and a little mental footwork, they look at me as though I'm an alien.
Questions regarding my status as an Earthling aside, the students' reaction is both unsurprising and regrettable. Unsurprising because they're used to Google, which has become incredibly good at finding you what you want based on your initial search query. Regrettable because it predisposes those students to give up quickly, turn in substandard work, and contend with either a low or failing grade. Sometimes, if they don't learn how to handle the research process soon enough, they wash out altogether, even though some actually have enough smarts to go pretty far once they have that diploma in hand.
Here's the thing: Academic databases are not Google. Google uses an algorithm that's so secret no other search engine can use it without going through Google, even for academic purposes, and so advanced it nearly qualifies as an artificial general intelligence, relying on contextual clues that most ordinary machines can't understand in order to figure out what you mean.
Okay, so why can't an academic database use Google to run its search, as Gallaudet does when you want to search through its website?
Because to do so, Google's algorithm and ancillary programs -- like the spiders that comb the Web and index everything they come across so it can be searched -- would need to be copied into the (copyrighted and subscription-only) database itself, something Google never permits. Even when you see a Google-based search on a Web site that's not Google, it's using the same resources as google.com; you can see this by clicking on the search I sent you to in the last paragraph and looking in the address bar of your browser. The first thing you see: http://www.google.com.
This is a lot of technical stuff. The upshot: Academic databases just aren't as easy to search as Google, so that's the first reason why it can be a little more difficult to find what you're looking for and why it takes time.
The second reason can be chalked up to vocabulary. There are two different ways your vocabulary can make research take some time:
- Academic jargon. Some fields are very specialized and use words you've never heard to describe a common thing. For instance, in a medical journal, don't go searching for "nose job." Doctors don't use that term in scholarly work.
- Synonyms. This is sort of the opposite of the first reason; often, especially in so-called "soft" sciences like psychology and sociology, different terms can be used to refer to the same thing, like "domestic violence" or "spousal abuse."
The nose job example also illustrates the third, and probably most significant, reason why research takes some effort: It requires some detective work. You have to figure out your starting point, and use whatever clues you find to proceed from there, step by step. Sometimes it's easy, especially if you pick a well-studied topic like the Maginot Line in World War II, but when you're working on more esoteric topics -- like the effect of rhinoplasties on a specific psychological model of self-perception -- this strategy is invaluable. However, it's also time-consuming and can take a few hours.
That's why you learn about time management in your First Year Seminar course when you arrive at Gallaudet as a freshman. School takes time, and it always will, especially if you decide you want to do the best work possible.
One final note, and this is something I say to a lot of the courses I present to: There will be times at which you hit a wall. You can't figure out how to proceed any further with your research. Maybe you've run out of terms to try, or there simply isn't anything in the databases you've been looking in. At this point, ask a librarian. It's what we're here for.
Question of the Week
Are you open during the summer?
We're open year-round! Our hours are usually reduced during the summer -- we generally close at 8 p.m., for example -- so things will be a little bit different, but we're open nonetheless. We'll be releasing our summer hours pretty soon; keep an eye on this blog, and I'll let you know when you can find out!
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