Via several of my Twitter contacts: The Times Online has developed Book Scraper, a literary text analysis tool with 126 books in its database so far, from the 16th through the early 20th centuries. You can look at word clouds and lists of unique and particularly long words for each text (check out the long […]
This coming Monday will be my five-year blogging anniversary. (Five years?! Time flies, et cetera et cetera.) When I started my old blog, I intended it to be primarily about my transition out of academia. Around the time I started the blog, I had the “I don’t think I want to do this anymore” conversation […]
How on earth have I gone all this while without knowing about the existence of the LOL Manuscripts blog? Its motto: "Everything could use a little LOL. Especially the Renaissance." Technically they're LOL woodcuts, but, as the author of the blog, a graduate student who makes frequent use of EEBO, puts it, "LOL Early Modern […]
According to Steven Bell in Inside Higher Ed a few weeks ago, "academic librarians are the nice guys of higher education." We agree with each other too much. Instead of engaging in any kind of intellectually rigorous back-and-forth exchange on controversies in our profession, we avoid sounding like we disagree. I’m of multiple minds on […]
I’m still here, in case any of you were wondering. Life (specifically, where I’m going to be next year) is still uncertain, and I’d rather not post about it until things are a lot less up in the air. And plans for next year constitute a lot of what’s been on my mind; hence, fewer […]
Watching the "If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing blog entries about it…" meme spreading, I find myself with the thought: someone should devise a way of automatically tracking blog-memes and visualizing the results. Between Technorati, del.icio.us, and Bloglines, there ought to be a way to extract the information, no? I’m […]
(What I want to know is, why isn’t "Because I like to write" one of the choices for the section of the survey where you check off reasons why you blog? And like Lynn, I wish MIT knew about culture blogs. But if the current set of survey results are any indication, the infamous and […]
An accumulation of links from my library-related Bloglines folder… Via The Shifted Librarian, a fabulous use of podcasting: Who Said? A Literature Game, in which you listen to a snippet of a novel read out loud and then guess the novel, the author, and the character. (I’ve been listening to previous snippets, and was chuffed […]
The Wandering Moleskine Project weblog. What an absolutely brilliant idea. I may sign myself up to contribute. Via Space and Culture, which in turn is via Caterina. Also, vilaine fille has rapidly become one of my favorite new blogs. Look at what she has to say on the subject of why opera isn’t just for […]