Tag Archives: Top News

Kathleen Fitzpatrick on scholarly communication & the digital humanities

Posted on by
Reply

KathleenFitzpatrick

 

 

 

 

[ensemblevideo contentid=moLRyH9EgEqQ6XpNOLS1Iw audio=true showcaptions=true displayAnnotations=true displayattachments=true audioPreviewImage=true]

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is the Director of Scholarly Communications at the Modern Language Association and a visiting faculty member in the English Department at New York University. She has published two books, The Anxiety of Influence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), which analyzed the anxiety and vested interests surrounding the purported demise of literature, and Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York University Press, 2011), a fascinating and incisive look at the future of publishing and scholarship in the academy. She has a blog, also titled Planned Obsolescence, and she is a co-founder of MediaCommons, “a community network for scholars, students, and practitioners in media studies, promoting exploration of new forms of publishing…”

Kathleen Fitzpatrick gave a lecture at the Center for the Humanities at Temple (CHAT) on March 7, 2013, entitled “The Humanities in and for the Digital Age.” Before her talk, she kindly stopped by my office to discuss her work in scholarly communication and the digital humanities.

Audio Download Link

Audio Embed code

—Fred Rowland

Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life

Posted on by
Reply

Andrew Isenberg

 

 

 

 

 

[ensemblevideo contentid=gtGmb8hlcE6Qsg5LE1ViqQ audio=true showcaptions=true displayAnnotations=true displayattachments=true audioPreviewImage=true]

Temple University history professor Andrew Isenberg came by my office in February to discuss his new book, Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (Hill & Wang: 2013), due out in June. His book and this interview are a fascinating look at the life of a man who lived on both sides of the law and reinvented himself time and time again as he moved from one place to another throughout the West. Having seen several different Hollywood versions of Wyatt Earp, I was interested in learning about the real man and how his legend was born. Untangling myth and legend from historical fact, Western historian Andrew Isenberg traces the journey of Wyatt Earp, from his beginnings in the small-town Midwest, to the saloons, jails, and brothels in cow towns and mining towns of Kansas, Texas, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Alaska, and California, to his final years in Los Angeles.

Audio Download Link

Audio Embed Code

—Fred Rowland

What’s new in the Special Collections Research Center?

Posted on by
Reply

image of Margery Sly

 

 

 

 

[ensemblevideo contentid=dqj_B3v8UUSsgNKwzwQ11g audio=true showcaptions=true displayAnnotations=true displayattachments=true audioPreviewImage=true]

Academic libraries are changing rapidly under the influence of digital technology, an expanded outreach and service philosophy, and increasing competition from nontraditional sources and venues.

These changes are particularly evident in special collections, an area which until recently was little known outside hardcore researchers. Often hidden away from the regular traffic of the academic library, the special collections function has been carried out for many years by dedicated professionals and equally dedicated students, interns, and volunteers, who have carefully collected and curated rare books and manuscripts, university records, community history, broadcast media, and ephemera. This is changing as special collections departments become increasingly visible on the web and in and around the academic library.

Margery Sly is the Director of the Temple University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC), located on the ground floor of Paley Library. On January 24, 2013, I sat down with her to discuss the SCRC. I was curious to find out how these trends were playing out here at Temple University and what the future holds for the SCRC.

Audio Download Link

Audio Embed Code

—Fred Rowland

Library Prize for Undergraduate Research and Library Prize for Undergraduate Research on Sustainability and the Environment Winners are Announced

Posted on by

Congratulations to the winners and honorable mentions for this year’s Library Prize for Undergraduate Research and Library Prize for Undergraduate Research on Sustainability and the Environment. Join us to celebrate in the Lecture Hall on May 2 at 4PM.

2012-2013 Library Prize Winners

Eamonn Connor

“Miasma and the Formation of Greek Cities”
GRC 4182: Independent Study (Fall 2012)
Faculty Sponsor: Sydnor Roy

Emily Simpson

“”Represion!” Punk Resistance and the Culture of Silence in the Southern Cone, 1978-1990”
History 4997: Honors Thesis Seminar (Spring 2013)
Faculty Sponsor: Beth Bailey

Nicole Wolverton

“The Murder at Cherry Hill”
English 3020: Detective Novel and the City (Fall 2012)
Faculty Sponsor: Priya Joshi

2012-2013 Library Prize Honorable Mentions

Jordyn Kimelheim

“The Persistence of Chattel Slavery in Contemporary Mauritania”
Political Science 4896: Theories and Practices of Slavery, Then and Now (Fall 2012)
Faculty Sponsor: Jane Gordon

Kyle Repella

“False Pretenders and Friends of Truth: Pennsylvania, the Keithian Controversy, and the Reorientation of the Quaker Empire in the late Seventeenth Century”
History 4997: Honors Thesis Seminar (Spring 2013)
Faculty Sponsor: Travis Glasson

2012-2013 Library Prize for Research on Sustainability and the Environment Winner

Andrea Gudiel

“Deforestation and the spread of non-native species”

BIOL 4391: Accelerated Research in Biology (Spring 2013) 

Faculty Sponsor: Brent Sewall

2012-2013 Library Prize for Research on Sustainability and the Environment Honorable Mention

Veronica Anderson

“Urban climate catalyst: Lima, Peru”

ARCH 4699: Thesis Studio (Spring 2013)

Faculty Sponsor: Sneha Patel

 

The Scientists: A Family Romance

Posted on by
Reply

Book cover depicting a city scene overlaid with multiple chemical formulas

 

[ensemblevideo contentid=RHdd7JWQoU-hQZrXFR0BMA audio=true showcaptions=true displayAnnotations=true displayattachments=true audioPreviewImage=true]

On November 15, 2012, I interviewed Marco Roth about his 2012 memoir The Scientists: A Family Romance, described by Lorin Stein of the Paris Review as

“…the first intellectual autobiography by someone our age in the searching nineteenth-century tradition of Edmund Gosse or Henry Adams: the autobiography equally of a reader and of a son, grappling with an inheritance that is both intellectual and emotional–and education for our times.”

I first met Marco Roth in October 2010 when I interviewed him and Keith Gessen about the founding of their literary magazine n+1, where both of them are currently editors.  Since Marco lives in Philadelphia, I run into him from time to time, and, hearing about his book, I asked him if he would talk to me about it. He kindly agreed. The Scientists: A Family Romance is a beautifully written book that I highly recommend.

Audio Download Link

Audio Embed Code

—Fred Rowland

 

Isaiah’s Suffering Servant

Posted on by
1

image of Jeremy Schipper

 

[ensemblevideo contentid=wQNno1VpwEagpwD_UsNI3w audio=true showcaptions=true displayAnnotations=true displayattachments=true audioPreviewImage=true]

53:3 He was despised and withdrew from humanity; a man of sufferings and acquainted with diseases; and like someone who hides their faces from us, he was despised and we held him of no account.
53:4 Surely he has borne our diseases and carried our suffering; yet we accounted him plagued, struck down by God, and afflicted.
Isaiah (Disability and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, p.3)

On October 31, 2012, I interviewed Professor Jeremy Schipper of Temple’s Religion Department on his 2011 Oxford University Press book, Disability and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant. His work is part of the Oxford series Biblical Reconfigurations, an “innovative series” which “offers new perspectives on the textual, cultural, and interpretative contexts of particular biblical characters.” Professor Schipper brings the insights of disability studies to bear on the Suffering Servant, a very well known and well studied figure in the Hebrew Scriptures. This close reading of third Isaiah not only provides fresh biblical insights, but also shines a lot on some very contemporary social issues.

Audio Download Link

Audio Embed Code

—Fred Rowland

Open Access Journals and Textbooks

Posted on by
1

Nick ShockeyNicole Allen

 

[ensemblevideo contentid=s0nUR-f2FUihkQ7b6_PezQ audio=true showcaptions=true displayAnnotations=true displayattachments=true audioPreviewImage=true]

 

Colleges and universities face major financial challenges as state and federal funding levels fall and few new revenue sources can adequately fill the gap.  Tuition has already been raised to unsustainable levels, as aggregate student debt recently reached $1 trillion. Higher educational institutions are seeking to be more “entrepreneurial” in order to generate new revenues, but this is a rather slow process in most cases. These issues were pressing even before the housing meltdown in 2008. Now they are urgent.

With this context in mind, the Temple University Libraries are interested in exploring ways that the Internet can be used to reconceptualize and reconfigure how research and educational materials are delivered. If successful, this might both improve research and educational performance at the same time that costs are lowered. As part of the sixth annual Open Access Week (Oct. 22 – Oct. 28, 2012), the Temple University Libraries invited Nick Shockey, director of student advocacy for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and manager of the Right to Research Coalition, and Nicole Allen, director of Student PIRG’s Make Textbooks Affordable campaign, to discuss “The Connection between Open Access and Open Educational Resources: Exploring New Publishing Models.”

Before they’re presentation, they sat down to speak with me about open access journals and open educational resources.

Audio Download Link

Audio Embed Code

 —Fred Rowland

 

 

Whither the soul?

Posted on by
Reply

Julien Musolino

 

[ensemblevideo contentid=TKukSY-vSEaTdeKPJCFZug audio=true showcaptions=true displayAnnotations=true displayattachments=true audioPreviewImage=true]

The growth of the cognitive and brain sciences has raised interesting questions about the brain and the mind.  No less, it raises interesting questions about traditional notions of the  soul.  Julien Musolino, professor of Psychology at Rutgers University and the director of its Psycholinguistics Laboratory, is interested in science in the public interest and in communicating scientific ideas to the general public.  He is writing a book on the soul for a general, popular audience which looks at the current scientific evidence for the soul’s existence.  Since I’m the classics, philosophy, and religion librarian – all disciplines that have had a long interest in the soul – I thought it was incumbent upon me to find out the latest on the soul.  Julien Musolino was kind enough to share a copy of his introduction with me and agree to an interview.

Audio Download Link

Audio Embed Code

—Fred Rowland

 

Philly’s New Urban Dining Room

Posted on by
Reply

 

[ensemblevideo contentid=GzFCnEUFAk2-QNMxPRsuvw audio=true showcaptions=true displayAnnotations=true displayattachments=true audioPreviewImage=true]

Can restaurants serve as a means of urban economic development? Sure seems like Philadelphia is trying, as restaurants proliferate in Center City and environs.  If you’re interested in studying this question, I recommend you look at Stephen Nepa’s 2012 dissertation, There Used to be Nowhere to Eat in this Town: restaurant-led development in postindustrial Philadelphia, available through the Temple University Libraries’ digital collections.

You can also read Stephen Nepa’s article in Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (Fall 2011),  “The New Urban Dining Room: Sidewalk Cafes in Postindustrial Philadelphia” (Temple-only).  With over 300 sidewalk cafes opening up since the late 1990s, this is an important urban phenomenon that deserves study.  Why such an explosion?  Why did it take so long?  What does it mean for the future of our city?

I interviewed Stephen Nepa on July 19, 2012 to talk about “The New Urban Dining Room.”

Audio Download Link

Audio Embed Code

—Fred Rowland

 

 

Pennsylvania in Public Memory

Posted on by
Reply

[ensemblevideo contentid=W3XMrXooj0S3aeACF7sSIw audio=true showcaptions=true]

Journalism Professor Carolyn Kitch

Earlier this year, Carolyn Kitch’s book Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (print) (online-TU only) was published by the Penn State University Press. She investigated industrial heritage sites across the state in an attempt to understand how Pennsylvanians understood their state’s rich history of business and industry.  As one learns from her introduction, she visited 224 sites and events, including museums, heritage sites and festivals, worker memorials, and factory tours. She explains that,

What I did do, I hope, was to visit enough sites, talk to enough people, and read or view enough media to gain some sense of patterns in tourism, museum interpretation, memorials, and other forms of public memory of past industry. This book recounts the stories and imagery that I heard and saw repeatedly across the state and across industries.

On a personal note, I was drawn to Pennsylvania in Public Memory because I’m fascinated in general by the ways communities understand, interpret, and sometimes fantasize and mythologize their collective pasts.  I was also interested in learning whether an understanding of the last century of Pennsylvania industrial history — through sites, museums, and antique trains and trollies — might provide some insights on the way forward out of our current rather dark economic times.  Could the struggle of workers in the past give courage to the present? Could our industrial history provide inspiration and hope to Pennsylvanians?

There are many very good scholarly works coming out on Pennsylvania history and related topics these days, among which journalism professor Carolyn Kitch’s is a good example. I was very pleased that Professor Kitch agreed to speak with me from Harrisburg, via Skype, on Monday, July 9, 2012.

Below are some incidents and sites mentioned in our interview.
Lattimer Massacre
Homestead Strike
Anthrocite Museum
Drake Oil Museum
Grey Towers
Eckley Miners’ Village
Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania
Rivers of Steel National Heritage Center
Historic Bethlehem

Audio Download Link

—Fred Rowland