Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript ? the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity ? is of supreme importance for the history of the book.
Turns out that the earliest voice recording may just be some dude with a mic-type device of some sort. Not the trembling young girlish falsetto we'd heard before. Perhaps we've been misled. Happy summer!
Frank Rich's NY Times column takes up the issues we've been discussing in the seminar--and cites Clay Shirky. Rich, if you're not a regular reader of his stuff, is generally terrific.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/opinion/10rich.html
Amazon (and class favorite Jeff Bezos) unveiled the new, large-form version of the Kindle this morning. It's more than twice the size of the Kindle 2, and Amazon hopes the larger reading surface will make the Kindle DX more appealing to those who read digital versions of magazines, newspapers, and textbooks.
Here's the latest issue of RaVon, the e-journal that we mentioned in seminar last week:
Begin forwarded message:
From: Michael Eberle-Sinatra Date: April 29, 2009 8:37:30 AM EDT
To: NASSR-L@listserv.wvu.edu
Subject: [NASSR-L] New issue *Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net*
Reply-To: North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
============================================================== For unsubscription and other account requests, please begin by consulting the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list. Point your browser to http://publish.uwo.ca/~nassr/ then click on "NASSR-L" in the left-hand frame. ==============================================================
[apologies for cross-posting]
Dear all,
The latest issue of *Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net* is now available at: http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca. Regards,
Michael Eberle-Sinatra and Dino Felluga, Editors
*Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net* 52 (November 2008)
Special issue on "Science, Technology and the Senses" - Guest-edited by Sibylle Erle and Laurie Garrison
ARTICLES:
- Sibylle Erle (Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln): 'Blake, Colour and the Truchsessian Gallery: Modelling the Mind and Liberating the Observer'
- Kelly Grovier (The University of Wales, Aberystwyth): '"Paradoxes of the Panoscope": "Walking" Stewart and the Making of Keats's Ambivalent Imagination'
- Laurie Garrison (University of Lincoln): 'Imperial Vision in the Arctic: Fleeting Looks and Pleasurable Distractions in Barker?s Panorama and Shelley?s Frankenstein'
- Gavin Budge (University of Hertfordshire): 'The Hero as Seer: Character, Perception and Cultural Health in Carlyle'?
- Verity Hunt (University of Reading): 'Raising a Modern Ghost: The Magic Lantern and the Persistence of Wonder in the Victorian Education of the Senses'
REVIEWS:
- Gillen D?Arcy Wood (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign): 'James Heffernan. Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions'?
- Marie Mulvey-Roberts (University of the West of England, Bristol): 'Wil Verhoeven. Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World'?
- Nicholas Halmi (University of Washington): 'Thomas Pfau. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790?1840'?
- Daniel Cook (University of Cambridge): 'Tilar J. Mazzeo. Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period'?
- Ihsen Hachaichi (Université de Montréal): 'Florence Gaillet-de Chezelles. Wordsworth et la Marche: Parcours poétique et esthétique'?
- Jason R. Rudy (University of Maryland): 'Stephanie Kuduk Weiner. Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874'
- Tamara Ketabgian (Beloit College): 'Richard Menke. Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems'?
- Judith Stoddart (Michigan State University): 'Sharon Aronofsky Weltman. Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education'?
- Julia Kent (American University of Beirut): 'David Payne. The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot'
- Katherine Newey (University of Birmingham): 'John Stokes. The French Actress and her English Audience'
- Helen Rogers (Liverpool John Moores University): 'Carolyn Steedman. Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age'
- Julia F. Saville (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): 'Ana Parejo Vadillo. Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity'
- Eitan Bar-Yosef (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel): 'Aamir R. Mufti. Enlightenment in the Colony. The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture'
-----------------------------------
Dr. Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Associate Professor
http://web.mac.com/meberlesinatra -----------------------------------
- President *Synergies* http://www.synergiescanada.org - Vice-President (Outreach) *Society of Digital Humanities* http://www.sdh-semi.org - Founding Editor *Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net* (RaVoN) http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca - Secretary-Treasurer *Canadian Association of Learned Journals* http://www.calj-acrs.ca/ -----------------------------------
Departement d'etudes anglaises
Universite de Montreal
CP 6128, Station Centre-ville
Montreal, Quebec H3C3J7 - Canada
Tel: (514) 343-6149 - Fax: (514) 343-6443
-----------------------------------
Remember Kurzweil's speculation about lenses that would provide you with map overlays and the names of people at parties? Check out this brief article by Anne Eisenberg from Sunday's NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/business/26novel.html?_r=1
This essays posted on this site are the product of a computer algorithm, entirely fabricated and meaningless. This guy wrote a program to compile ideas, vocab, and grammar to replicate that quintessential postmodern essay feel. Get to the bottom of the page and there's the disclaimer: "The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator. To generate another essay, follow this link."
Every time you load the page it's a different "essay." Thought you'd get a kick out of it, 'cause every now and then we all wonder if the material our professors have us read could actually be random compilations of the most obscure "words" passed off as deep thought.
Some blog posts that have come to my attention today...
Two posts by Paul Kei Matsuda, both of which relate to the problem faced by graduate students in particular: having to "read everything." In these posts, he outlines some of his personal reading/note-taking strategies, and the development of mental intertextual maps.
Two other posts by Brian J. McNely focus on "ambient research," which he describes as "a framework and approach to research that is enveloping, atmospheric, ubiquitous, and unflinchingly mutable."
The first post, is a brief "sketch the parameters of ambient research as I currently understand them, discussing the infrastructures that enable legitimate and productive research activity that is streaming, aggregable, searchable, and conversational."
http://5000.blogspot.com/2009/03/infrastructures-of-ambient-research.html
The second draws on work in cognitive science and considers "the potential of ambient research for generative productivity and cognitive recursion in my own field and beyond." (McNely also discusses Steven Johnson's use of the program Devonthink to write his books, which just sounds like a really cool toy/tool.)
http://5000.blogspot.com/2009/03/ambient-research-recursion-and-rws.html
Charlie Rose interviews Malcolm Gladwell in 1996 about an article in the New Yorker about the trouble's we'll face if we succeed in extending life expectancy.
At first, he comes off as a nay-sayer, but he makes raises some significant (if grim) issues.
Gladwell recently published Outliers about what separates successful people from everyone else,
another good interview with Charlie Rose. He touches on the Beatles, Tiger Woods, and Bill Gates. I can't get over how his hair has grown in 12 years. He obviously stopped cutting it around 1996.
From SlashDot.org: "The BBC is reporting that the United Nations' World Digital Library has gone online with an initial offering of 1,200 ancient manuscripts, parchments and documents. ... Astonishingly, the collection is covered by numerous copyright laws, according to the legal page. Use of material from a given country is subject to whatever restrictions that country places, in addition to any local and international copyright laws. With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered. There is nothing on whether the original artists get royalties, however."
"There are millions of computers sitting idle at home consuming fantom electricity. Let's see where all that power is going. This is dedicated to all fans of Queen and hey let's not forget about Mike Myers and Dana Carvey of Wayne's World.
Please note no effects or sampling was used. What you see is what you hear (does that even make sense?)
Atari 800XL was used for the lead piano/organ sound
Texas Instruments TI-99/4a as lead guitar
8 Inch Floppy Disk as Bass
3.5 inch Harddrive as the gong
HP ScanJet 3C was used for all vocals. Please note I had to record the HP scanner 4 seperate times for each voice. I tried to buy 4 HP scanners but for some reason sellers on E-Bay expect you to pay $80-$100, I got mine for $30.
Keep in mind these are scanners and floppy dirves and not musical instruments."
The other week in class Chad Post mentioned the Plastic Logic e-reader, which is being released in a year or so. It's more open than the Kindle in that it can display a variety of content and file types (pdf, Word, Excel), and it has a flexible display that's quite different from the Kindle's. It's being marketed to students and business executives as well as casual readers.
Just in case you sometimes feel that we are surely the only people in the world who could possibly care about transcriptions from handwriting, there's this bit from today's scholarly editing list-serv--about Stephen Crane, the American writer, author of Red Badge of Courage among other things:
Subject: question about handwriting
In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Stephen Crane occasionally used an apostrophe in the middle of words, as in
F'our
F'riend
F'eb [as in the abbreviation for "February"]
Has anyone seen this use before, and do you know what it means?
Just in case you sometimes feel that we are surely the only people in the world who could possibly care about transcriptions from handwriting, there's this bit from today's scholarly editing list-serv--about Stephen Crane, the American writer, author of Red Badge of Courage among other things:
Subject: question about handwriting
In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Stephen Crane occasionally used an apostrophe in the middle of words, as in
F'our
F'riend
F'eb [as in the abbreviation for "February"]
Has anyone seen this use before, and do you know what it means?
