Nicholas and I presented this afternoon at Online NW. Presentation materials are available here, on Nicholas’ blog. Good times!
We used Prezi to create the presentation. This is what it looked like, all together, when it was done. I know that some people I know have found it difficult to get used to, but I kind of really liked it. Plus, I’ve used it so far on three very different computers in three very different contexts and it’s worked smoothly every time.
Remember all of those fashion-centric shows on networks like MTV in the 1990’s? This is a bit of one, covering a famous runway show by John Galliano — scratched together with almost no support, held in a socialite’s house, with models who worked for free. I’ve been looking for coverage of this show for forever — because see the model who falls down on the stage in the beginning bit, falls down on purpose to evoke the desperation of the fleeing princess? (starts at 0:25 in)
That’s my little sister, Debbie. Not being in Paris at the time, I have only heard tell of this performance. I would love to see it unabridged, but for now, this will do.
It amazes me how quickly my expectations have changed from what I should be able to find – when I first started looking for information about this show, I was happy to find a review in an article somewhere. When I first started looking at YouTube for videos of Debbie on the runway, about two years ago, I was surprised not to find anything – surprised that there wasn’t a lot of content posted from this pre-ubiquitous digital video, pre-Internet era?
That seems a little unreasonable of me, but there it was. And now there’s lots and lots of video from that era up, and instead of feeling like I am living in the future, I expect it — and I’m really enjoying the trip back to the past.
“Every university or public library centers in its reference room. This is the room for the first task of research, the bringing of books together. Among the thousands of books on the shelves, perhaps a score are needed for the particular topic. Which are these? Perhaps half of them require but a few minutes and the others demand extensive reading. Which is which? The object of the reference room is to answer these questions so far as possible in advance. (emphasis added)….
Its function then is two-fold: first to facilitate that preliminary survey which gives general notions and boundaries and shows how a particular investigation might be limited; secondly to facilitate comparison on particular points.”
-Charles Sears Baldwin, College Composition, (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1922).
A blog I have thought about in the last month, but on which I have had no time to post. I have a little backlog of things to write about, and I think it’s going to be sooner rather than later before this space starts seeing some new content.
I almost wrote new ideas there instead of content, but let’s not over-reach.
I kept waiting for a way to explain the silence more organically than the standalone announcement, but none has presented itself, so I’m giving up. My husband and I became parents last month, after several months of navigating through the domestic adoption process in these parts. Our daughter is 11, and she is awesome.
Thus far, what I have learned about parenting is not very much. I think it might be a lot like teaching, except I’m really missing my prep periods.
This is like speaking to my high school self, so loud.
Someday soon I’ll have time to talk about everything that’s going on. It’s tutorials, and videos, and student collaborations, and peer review. But for now – I just liked this. I spent two years of my life diagramming sentences in middle school which I’m pretty sure no one else my age had to do, but at this point the whole experience has faded to a warm and fuzzy childhood memory. Plus! women’s suffrage!
Knowing about my constant and abiding interest in all things peer-review, a colleague handed me this pamphlet the other day. Published by a project I like, Sense about Science (and funded by, among others, Elsevier, Blackwell, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, the Institute of Biology and the Medical Research Council), this pamphlet provides a good summary of a lot of reasons why people should value peer-reviewed research.
I really like its focus on the reproducability of research, the role that peer review plays in getting science out there to be acted upon by other scientists. And this statement here gets at a lot of what I have been thinking about information evaluation lately – about how important it is that we evaluate sources within contexts, not in a vacuum:
If it is peer-reviewed, you can look for more information on what other scientists say about it, the size and approach of the study and whether it is a part of a body of evidence pointing towards the same conclusions.
But this has me mystified. A callout box titled How can you tell whether reported results have been peer reviewed? A question any academic reference librarian has struggled to answer at some point, right?
Their answer totally mystifies me. I keep reading it and reading it and I can’t make it make any sense. Seriously – they say the full reference to peer-reviewed papers is likely to look like this, and then they present – two formatted article citations, one from the New England Journal of Medicine and one from Science. The Science one is APA, but I’m not even sure exactly what style the second one follows.
just formatted citations, right?
So under the citations, there’s a word balloon that says that unscrupulous people might “use this style on websites and articles to cite work that is not peer reviewed. But fortunately, this is rare.”
!
Wait, what? So yeah, it turns out that I’m totally unscrupulous! And so are you if you use APA to cite an article from the New Republic, or Time or The Journal of Really Lousy Non-Peer Reviewed Science!
So, in the infamous checklists we tell students “make sure you can tell who the author is, check their credentials, are they expert, are they scholarly?” as a necessary part of scholarly information evaluation, right? Well, wouldn’t you say that an assistant professor of history at Southern Baptist University would be well-qualified to talk about the historical implications of the current President?
Wood also tells the story of what he did, and what others might do, to prevent and contain similar situations. This line really jumped out at me -
Moreover, this incident has led me to reconsider my somewhat adversarial relationship with technology. (I’m the guy who still refuses to buy a cell phone.) But one of the greatest difficulties I encountered in all of this was finding a platform from which to launch a rebuttal.
Using that space, Wood directly links this back to the information literacy skills we do talk about a lot as well -
To navigate those potential pitfalls, historians check facts and look for other documents that conform (or contradict) the information found in our source. We seek to identify the author and understand his or her motives for writing. We try to understand the larger historical and cultural context surrounding a document. By doing our homework, we’re better able to judge when something or someone deserves to be “taken at their word.”
This episode has taught me that these skills have an important place even outside this history classroom.
(Full disclosure, I haven’t read the essay in question, so I’m not sure how aligned the content is with the scholarly research of the professor in question, but I do think that for most students brand-new to thinking about what academic expertise means “professor of history” would probably be enough to establish credibility)
And in this case, when you figure out who the author is, you’re not done evaluating either. Does the work match other work by the author – does it fit within their normal research agenda – is it part of a scholarly/expert consensus, or is the interpretation more on the whacked-out side? That’s what this story has me thinking about – how to get students from “professor of history” to “there’s something seriously wrong here.”
And as for Prada & Prejudice up there, well, wacky time travel hijinks seem to send people back to Regency England more than any other time period, don’t they?
Seriously, if you just want to read the same story one million times, it’s out there for you.
Note: I haven’t read most of these – link DOES NOT EQUAL endorsement!
Looking just a bit ahead on Amazon or similar and it’s pretty clear the steady stream of Austen-inspired stuff isn’t drying up any time soon. Which is sometimes taken to mean that Austen is awesome, which she is. There’s lots of mentions of the Austen brand and what it means for an eighteenth-century author to be so currently popular and relevant.
But that brand language is odd because it’s not like you can point to the group of Austen family descendents or the current version of her publisher who own the brand and who are systematically and strategically leveraging it for all it’s worth. A lot of the stuff above is professionally, commercially produced, but a lot of it isn’t. There are so many self-published components to the Austen pastiche available on Amazon, and off Amazon. The Barbie thing? totally not commercial. It got me thinking the other day about how much all of this has to do with copyright and how it should work and how it doesn’t.
P&P is in the public domain, so anyone can do what they want with the story. Colin Firth’s particular Darcy may be limited, but that leaves a lot of room for a lot of creativity, some more creative, some more good, some more horribly, horribly wrong. But a lot of creativity – people building on the creativity and stories of our past.
How much of this creative energy is focusing on Austen because it can? How awesome would it be if other stories, other artifacts were fair game as well?
P&P is in the public domain, so anyone can do what they want with the story. Colin Firth’s particular Darcy may be limited, but that leaves a lot of room for a lot of creativity, some more creative, some more good, some more horribly, horribly wrong. But a lot of creativity – people building on the creativity and stories of our past.