Tag Archives: Noteworthy

Turn the Page

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The British Library’s Turning the Pages online collection of 14 rare books has recently added Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. The collection is accessible to any internet user with a broadband connection and the Macromedia Shockwave browser plug-in. The 3D-like experience of actually “turning the pages,” zooming in on a specific area of the page, and listening to the accompanying audio commentary by British actress Miriam Margolyes is not to be missed. According to a BBC News report, “In the original Alice manuscript, Carroll included the first sketch of Alice Liddell who provided the inspiration for Alice in his books. It was drawn in pencil from a photo of Alice aged seven but he was not satisfied with the sketch so replaced it with a photo of Alice instead. In 1977, the pencil drawing was rediscovered hidden under the photo. The 90-page virtual manuscript contains all 37 original illustrations.” Other titles in the collection include the Diamond Sutra, at 868 C.E. the earliest, dated, printed book in the world, Jane Austen’s The History of England, and the Sforza Hours, a Renaissance masterpiece. Every one of the 14 works is a priceless window into another world and time. –David C. Murray

Citation Searching Article

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An interesting article in the online D-Lib Magazine (11.9 (2005)), “An Examination of Citation Counts in a New Scholarly Communication Environment” by Kathleen Bauer and Nisa Bakkalbasi of Yale, this preliminary study examines citation searching in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. I quote from their conclusion:

Based on our preliminary examination and discovery of higher citation counts, we recommend that researchers should consult Google Scholar in addition to Web of Science or Scopus, especially for a relatively recent article, author or subject area. A search of Google Scholar will likely reveal both traditional journal articles, some of which will also be covered in Web of Science and Scopus, and additional unique material, but the scholarly value of some of the unique material remains an open question. Consulting Google Scholar may prove most useful for disciplines such as physics, where nontraditional forms of publishing are widely accepted. However, it is important for all researchers to note that until Google Scholar gives a full account of what material it is indexing and how often that index is updated, it cannot be considered a true scholarly resource in the sense that Web of Science and Scopus are. An understanding of the material being covered is central to the validity of any search of scholarly material.

In light of the frequent requests for citation counts on publications (particularly on faculty’s own publications), it may behoove one to search Google Scholar as a supplement to Web of Science. -Derik A Badman

Five Updated Subject Guides

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I’ve just updated five of my subject guides, which provide a quick overview of available resources in the disciplines I’m responsible for. Take a look. Classics: The Basics Islamic Studies: The Basics Jewish Studies: The Basics Philosophy: The Basics Religion: The Basics. Here is the complete list of our subject guides. I added information on how to use WorldCat for interlibrary loans, both regular books as well as theses and dissertations. I also added the online encyclopedias we recently purchased (see Exciting New Online Encyclopedias!). –Fred Rowland

Grokker Brings Information Visualization to the Masses

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Information visualization is an effective means of communicating information on large quantities of data. It allows the user to quickly identify patterns and relationships that might otherwise remain buried in long stretches of sequential alphanumeric data. The financial services industry uses this method to make sense of reams of data on companies and markets. Information scientists also use this method to make sense of citation patterns among scholars. Take a look atthis document posted on Drexel University’s web site. It shows multiple visuals of “co-citation networks”.

Now a company named Groxis has brought its information visualization software,Grokker, to the free web through an agreement reached with Yahoo. There’s also a more advanced version for a fee. Grokker provides “A New Way to Look at Search”. The principle behind Grokker is that the sequential lists of web sites that search engines provide are ineffective for complicated, multi-faceted searches because relevant web sites are often buried on the 9th, 23rd, or 64th page of results and few have the time or patience to scroll away the day. Instead, Grokker provides a visual “lay of the land”, an overview in pictures that helps you to understand the different angles of your topic. Once you get an initial results screen, you can drill down on the areas that you’re most interested in. It functions a bit like a table of contents in a book.

So take a look and play around with Grokker. This product will probably be followed by many more like it because information visualization has the potential for making web searching more intelligible and efficient.

Foreign News Sources

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The Temple University Libraries provide online access to many different foreign news sources, both English and non-English publications. These sources are important because they offer news, events, and opinions that might otherwise be ignored or filtered by the US press.

First, take a look at the Non-English Language News available in Lexis/Nexis. You can search for articles in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. (Click on images below to see the enlarged images.)

Lexis Nexis screenshot

Second, if you don’t read any of the above languages, you can also read English language news from around the world in Lexis/Nexis. Many different countries publish newspapers in the world’s lingua franca, English.

Lexis Nexis Screenshot 2

Third, try World News Connection for foreign news in English translation. The translations comes from the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).

World News Connection screenshot

One thing to keep in mind with both Lexis/Nexis and World News Connection is that you cannot browse through the electronic editions of these newspapers. Instead, you have to search for articles. To search a specific newspaper in Lexis/Nexis, you can click “Sources” in the upper right corner and select your newspaper (“Sources” not shown in the Lexis/Nexis images above). In World News Connection I had no luck searching specific publications, though this search option is supposed to work (appears to be a glitch that needs to be fixed).

Lexis/Nexis and World News Connection are restricted to Temple students, faculty, and staff. Of course, the Internet offers a lot of free public content as well. Here’s a list of newspapers by geographic region from the Internet Public Library. The difference is that in Lexis/Nexis and World News Connection you can search across many publications for articles, thus saving a lot of time. For any one newspaper, you’re also likely to find more content in these two databases than in the free content on the newspaper’s site.

One final note: if you are trying to learn another language, be sure to take advantage of the many news sites that offer audio and video clips in addition to print news. Often governments sponsor the best news sites for language learning. Sometimes you can even hit the motherlode of language learning, audio and video clips along with a transcript, so that you can read and listen at the same time. Take a look at the following sites for audio and video clips:

Deutsche Welle, news in over thirty languages
Radio Netherlands, news in six languages
Voice of America, news in dozens of languages
Vatican Radio, news in dozens of languages, along with a whole lot more of religious programming.

–Fred Rowland

[Addendum: David Murray adds: Great article, Fred. A brand new database for obtaining foreign news articles is “Access World News”. It can be accessed from the A-Z list of databases under “NewsBank”. Access World News offers “full-text content of [700] local and regional papers” outside the United States. There’s a nice browse function that allows easy limiting to a specific publication and/or date. The content I found was all in English. Paid advertising is excluded.]

Hamletworks

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Since 1994, scholars at a number of universities have been working on an electronic variorum of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What is a variorum? It collects both the play itself (including textual variants) and its attendant criticism, interpretations, and annotations as written by various authors through history. Usually variorums are in the form of books and thus limited in scope; this project is in the form of a web accessible database and theoretically unlimited in scope.

After 11 years the project still isn’t complete (and how could it be with people still writing on Hamlet to this day), but what is there shows the promise of what will come. Already one can see extensive commentaries on the play, often at the level of the single word. These comments are not yet linked to full bibliographic citations, though that is the eventual outcome. The site also includes electronic images of editions of the play and four searchable concordances.

This project is an excellent example of how technology can be used to assist literary study. This kind of narrowly focused but highly detailed project (narrow in its focus on one work, not narrow in its potential size) is made more easily possible and widely available thanks to computerized databases and electronic communication.

See a longer article at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

–Derik A. Badman