…but also of interest to those who like visualizations: Songs represented as charts, a photoset on Flickr. (Via little. yellow. different.) As a long-time Pet Shop Boys fan, I was much amused by this one.
The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive site designed to be used
as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during
the second half of the fifteenth century. While printing in Asia
pre-dates European activity by several hundred years, the rapid
expansion of the trade following the discovery of printing in Mainz,
Germany around the middle of the fifteenth century is a topic of great
importance to the history of European civilization. This website uses
Flash to depict the spread of European printing in a manner that allows
a user to control dates and other variables.
I think I’ve mentioned my fondness for Librivox‘s audio books, both because they’re made in the open-source spirit and because they’re introducing me to a lot of unfamiliar books. Lately I’ve been branching out from their ghost story collections and P. G. Wodehouse novels into science fiction section.
My latest train-listening download was Omnilingual, a 1950s novella by H. Beam Piper about archaeologists investigating a long-dead civilization on Mars. Martha Dane, the heroine, wants to decode the completely alien Martian language; her efforts finally pay off when the team finds what proves to be a Martian university, with a huge library of books. Even more useful is a Martian version of the periodic table, which supplies the beginnings of a solution to the language puzzle.
There’s a nice post on the linguistics of it at Tenser, said the Tensor.* The language question is a key part of the book, but part of what intrigued me was the question of print culture. The first chapter has Martha poring over a Martian periodical (complete with volume and issue number, and table of contents). The Martians in this book are basically humanoid, and the archaeologists recognize what various buildings and artifacts are for with ease, because they’re so much like the earth equivalents. It turns out that the Martians not only had scholarly journals, they also had books in codex format, and libraries with stacks and reading rooms and reference desks and even dumbwaiters for transporting books between different floors.**
I can’t decide whether to be tickled by the idea of aliens developing a print culture in exactly the same ways western European culture did (with silicon-based paper the one exception), or consider it a too-easy solution to the characters’ chief problem, i.e. reconstructing the civilization with no live Martians to explain anything. For most of the first couple of chapters I was hoping there’d be a plot twist where all of the archaeologists’ assumptions turned out to be wrong.
But in the end, I rather enjoyed it. And I think it’s interesting in itself that the whole apparatus of both a print culture and a university system — both of which could, after all, have developed in many different ways, or not at all — was so transparent to Piper that when he thought about his Martians leaving behind a written record, libraries full of books and periodicals seemed like the most logical and likely outcome.
I’d still like to see a science fiction novel about aliens with a completely different way of preserving the written record, or without a written record at all. Those of you who read more SF than I do, do you have any recommendations?
* Who also has a great post about that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the aliens who communicate only in literary and mythological allusions.
** I found the detail of the dumbwaiter unaccountably charming. It seems so retro now, in the way so many technologies once considered cutting-edge tend to do. Although I have seen a book dumbwaiter in a very new special collections library, so they’re not completely obsolete. (Actually, if I ever design and build my own house, I think it would be fun to have a dumbwaiter of my very own.)
Jason Shiga’s Bookhunter is very (very!) loosely based on a real book theft,
but turned into an action movie. Special Agent Bay of the Library
Police tracks down missing library books. Small-time perps just steal
or deface books, but sometimes Bay faces more complicated cases, such
as when a valuable pre-1500 bible once owned by John Quincy Adams is
not just stolen from a library, but replaced with a high-quality
forgery.Fortunately, Bay has the resources of a major police organization
behind him, as well as sharp eyes, a good head for detail, and little
to no regard for the personal safety of himself or the people around
him.
Ooh, shiny! I knew there were action-movie possibilities (or, in this case, detective-comic possibilities) in the world of librarianship. [dashes off to read]
I hardly ever post about the day-to-day details of my work life, but I’ll make an exception to say: One of the underappreciated perks of working at Swarthmore is that you can be going about your regular business on an otherwise unremarkable Valentine’s day when suddenly, a student dressed as a ninja rushes into the room to deliver a ninja-gram. Complete with a ceremonial yell of "NIIIINJA GRAAAAAM!"
(The ninja-gram in question wasn’t for me; it was for a student in a class session I was teaching, and we were wrapping things up when the ninja appeared at the door. The video in this article should give you some idea.)
I mean, really, how often can one say that one’s class got visited by a ninja?
I ran across Lori Nix’s website the other day, and am fascinated. Nix is a photographer who creates miniature models and then photographs them. Her most recent work (as seen on BoingBoing) is The City, a series of tableaux of grand but abandoned buildings — museums, libraries, an aquarium, a theater, a clock tower — being slowly taken over by animals, weeds, and decay.
Her miniature buildings remind me a little bit of Mars Tokyo’s Theaters of the 13th Dimension, which I’m sure I’ve blogged at some point or other, but they’re on a different scale, and their surrealism is less whimsical and more ominous. I’m also quite taken with Some Other Place, a series of landscapes with a kind of Hitchcockian quality to them. (The "Elysium Fields" one made me think of North By Northwest, for some reason.)
Why are miniatures and models so intriguing, anyway? I’ve spent more than a few hours staring at the miniature rooms in both the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. The life-size model rooms one sees in museums don’t hold the attention nearly as much. I wish I had a theory about why, but for now I’m going to see if Lori Nix plans on exhibiting anywhere I can get to any time soon.
I’ve just had a paper proposal accepted at the Questioning Authority 2008 conference, upcoming in March at the University of Michigan. The conference is organized around the theme of the authority of digital information; I’m going to be talking about authority control and LibraryThing. Very exciting. Now I have to get cracking on actually writing up the talk and deciding which of the umpteen things I want to say can best fit into the time allotted. More, probably, as the conference weekend draws nearer.
In the vain hope that sharing a time-sink with the interwebs will somehow stop me wasting my own time, I present to you my most recently-discovered procrastination enablers:
- Flight of the Hamsters. I think I’m probably the last person in the blogosphere to link to this game, but it’s bizarrely addictive. The fact that the music is the Ride of the Valkyries makes it even funnier.
- The Television Tropes Wiki, a compendium of familiar devices, characters, dialogue conventions and the like, not limited to TV. It’s adding all kinds of useful phrases to my vocabulary, like MacGuffin Delivery Service, Applied Phlebotinum, and, of course, It Was His Sled. (Via Feminist SF – The Blog!)
In the ongoing series of Things I Learned in Library School, here are the latest, all courtesy of the course on Curatorship of Special Collections I’m taking this term*:
- Conservators use the term "inherent vice" for those physical characteristics of books that cause them to self-destruct. The standard example is the acid in wood-pulp paper that makes the paper turn yellow and brittle.
- Early attempts at mass book deacidification didn’t go so well, owing to the fact that diethyl zinc, the gas that the Library of Congress used to deacidify its books, explodes on contact with air. (Oops.)
- One of my classmates told me the story of the four college students who set out to rob the special collections library at Transylvania University. Disguised as old men, complete with wigs. You can read the full story, as recounted in the court opinion when the students were tried, here. The part that describes how they stunned and tied up the special collections librarian is kind of horrifying, but the rest reads like one for the Least Competent Criminals record books. (The misspelled e-mails to Christie’s offering a rare "first addition" for sale! The plan to carry off the big heavy Audobon books in a bedsheet! The attempt to flee the scene in the staff elevator!)
I knew that special collections librarians had to be wary of theft, but I’d never quite realized that the world of special collections was also one of "inherent vice" and occasional explosions. Throw in a few car chases, and you’ve got the makings of an action movie. Or, if the Transylvania U. case ever makes it to the big screen, a farce.
* Which meets on Wednesday afternoons and let out early today, hence this afternoon’s blogburst.
I’ve been thinking, in a work-related context, about close reading, and how librarians might help students learn to do it. The standard "bibliographic instruction" model — class meets in library, librarian shows students how to find what they need — tends to be geared toward paper research. Close reading is a skill that isn’t usually covered, because there’s no well-defined set of library tools for it. Close reading also takes time, which is a luxury if you only see the students for one 50-minute session.
And yet there are plenty of courses that make use of close reading, and I always want my library teaching sessions to seem like a real part of the class rather than a disconnected "field trip" with no relationship to anything else the students are doing. So the question came up recently: how can a library visit reinforce what the students are learning about how to engage closely with a text?
There are one or two nifty resources I can demonstrate (I’m showing one upcoming class the OED) to encourage that kind of engagement. But I think Dr. Crazy is right about teaching close reading*: you have to model it and get the students to practice it.
And where that fits into bibliographic instruction as we know it, I’m still figuring out. But I think it’s worth pursuing, because I always found that students responded much better to short exercises that get them actively reading than to extended lectures. Now the question is how to carry that over into the teaching I do as a librarian.
Perhaps one way might be to approach the question of evaluating sources (is this web site appropriate to cite in a term paper? is this encyclopedia worth the paper it’s printed on?) as a close-reading question. Or maybe what we need is a whole other kind of library instruction that’s more directly part of the class. If I come up with any answers, I’ll no doubt blog about them.
* Incidentally, I Googled "teaching close reading" and got an appreciable number of hits from academic blogs. One of my Drexel professors this term likes the idea of using blogs and wikis as a way for librarians and faculty to communicate; I think librarian/faculty group blogs could be a really neat way to hold a campus-wide conversation about, say, teaching writing. Or introducing undergraduates to science research. Or what have you.