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Image of the Week: Dinner Menu printed on silk

By Dana Wheeles on January 24, 2012

Dinner Menu

This menu for the August 1858 Convention Supper for the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity in Brunswick, Maine, is a wonderful piece of ephemera saved by the New York Public Library. Not only does it gives us a glimpse of the epicurean sensibilities of nineteenth-century diners — Entrées, Vegetables, Relishes (?!) — but it is also printed on silk, making it quite the luxury souvenir.

Want to see more like this? Check out this saved search of items from the Buttolph Collection of Menus at the NYPL.

**UPDATE** The NYPL also offers, ‘What’s on the Menu?’ for those interested in transcribing this amazing collection.

 

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Image of the Week: Stop SOPA

By Dana Wheeles on January 18, 2012

Stop SOPA and PIPA

We at NINES stand with the Association for Computers in the Humanities and many, many others to speak out again the Stop Online Piracy Act. Click here to learn more.

 

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Image of the Week: The Winter Camp (Apsaroke)

By Dana Wheeles on January 9, 2012

The Winter Camp

This week’s wintry photo depicts the camp of people from the Apsaroke (or Crow) nation, and comes from the Edward S. Curtis collection at the Library of Congress.

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Image of the Week: Happy New Year!

By Dana Wheeles on January 5, 2012

Phoebe Apperson Hearst

Phoebe Apperson Hearst and all of us here at NINES wish you a happy new year!

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Image of the Week: Advertisement for Scribner’s, December 1896

By Dana Wheeles on December 21, 2011

Scribner's Christmas 1896

The New York Public Library Digital Gallery has a fun selection of advertisements for the holiday issues of several popular nineteenth-century magazines. Click here to browse them in NINES, or head over to NYPL to see the whole collection.

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Image of the Week: Central Park in Savannah, Georgia

By Dana Wheeles on December 12, 2011

Savannah

So often, images of the American South from the nineteenth-century show a landscape littered with wounded and scarred by battle. This photograph, from the Library of Congress Prints and Photography Division, shows the more neutral scene of women and children by a fountain in Central Park, Savannah, Georgia in 1865. It’s fun to compare the image, if you like, to this modern promotional photo of the same park.

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Image of the Week: Odd Thanksgiving Traditions

By annieswafford on November 28, 2011

In honor of Thanksgiving last week, today’s image of the week is of a Thanksgiving masking event from the early 1900s.  For Thanksgiving masking, children would be dressed as beggars and would go door to door asking for pennies or apples.  

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The Teachers Who Mattered Most

By pcfleming on November 16, 2011

Following last week’s symposium here at UVA, I found myself recalling Roger Lundin’s essay in Pedagogy from a few years ago: “the teachers who mattered most to me did so because of what they loved,” writes Lundin. “As I taught, in other words, I learned I had come to love what my most effective teachers had loved, and they had taught me how” (137). Lundin, riffing on Wordsworth’s Prelude – “what we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how” – offers a viewpoint that I think was implicit in many of the discussions. The symposium marks in the inauguration of Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, and Steve Ramsay began his talk by praising institutes like this one for providing an opportunity for scholars to live an intellectual life in community with others. Community – which means, people – is as important to academic fields as the theories and methodologies that were the symposium’s explicit focus.

Lundin again: “For the past several decades in the humanities, our discourse has been theory-rich, perhaps theory-saturated, and we have developed explanations for everything from the nuances of différance to the needs of the subaltern. But when have we thought about love?” (134). Love of our work, Lundin means, and in a real, non-theoretical sense. A flurry of recent posts (like Natalie Cecire’s and Jean Bauer’s) has considered the place of theory in digital humanities. And perhaps the most important argument to arise from symposium (besides the institute itself, of course) will be Bethany Nowviskie’s call for reform of graduate training, to match the methods and questions that will form the future. But in the words of the Black Eyed Peas, where is the love?

For digital humanities, the response to the Black Eyed Peas comes from the Troggs: love is all around. At THATCamps, at MLA sessions, on Twitter – digital humanists seem to have a fondness for their work, an emotional connection to their theoretical arguments. Panels play to packed houses, in a way that other fields seem not to. This isn’t to say that everyone always agrees with each other, or that theoretical conversations don’t happen. The teachers who matter to us, Lundin is careful to state, are not necessarily the ones with whom we always agree: “my most influential teachers had religious commitments, political views, or theoretical understanding that differed sharply from my own” (137). Disagreement of course fosters insights. Responding to Bethany, Ryan Cordell hopes to reform undergraduate teaching as well. Ted Underwood, though, is “not yet sure about the implications at the undergraduate level. Maybe ten years from now I’ll be teaching text mining to undergrads … but then again, maybe the things undergraduates need most from an English course will still be historical perspective, close reading, a willingness to revise, and a habit of considering objections to their own thesis.” In considering how our pedagogical goals might change, Ted gives what I think is the best and most concise list of what those goals are now (at least the best I’ve heard).

Academics are teachers, and I’m excited to see that teaching has become a center of the conversation in digital humanities, with both graduate students and undergraduates involved in digital scholarship. We can say to the leaders in the field, what you love we will love: teach us how.

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CFP: Beyond Accessibility (INKE)

By Dana Wheeles on November 15, 2011

Beyond Accessibility: Textual Studies in the 21st Century

Call for Papers

The Textual Studies team of INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) wish to invite presentation proposals for Beyond  Accessibility: Textual Studies in the 21st Century .
June 8, 9, and 10, 2012, University of Victoria, Victoria BC, Canada.
Keynote speakers: Adriaan van der Weel (Leiden University) and Sydney Shep, (Victoria University of Wellington)

At the end of the 20th century, textual studies witnessed a revolution in accessibility to texts with the explosion of the internet.  Now we simply take it for granted that digital processes infuse every step of our study, editing, production, and dissemination of texts. The Textual Studies team of INKE invites presentations that address the questions “What is the state of textual studies in the 21st century? What is the important work of textual studies in the 21st century? What are the outstanding issues, challenges, concerns, emerging trends, methods, attitudes, and exciting developments in textual scholarship?  Papers may address such questions as

  •    What is the state of the scholarly edition after the transition from print to print and digital?
  •    What is the impact on the material book and on book history of the different kinds of access enabled by the digital medium?
  •    How have authorship attribution studies been transformed by access to so many more searchable texts?
  •    How has the new age of access to materials affected the state of textual studies in various regions of the globe?
  •    How well are scholars being served by traditional and emerging infrastructures for the study, creation, production, and dissemination of texts?
  •   What is the future of, for example, the study of readership and letter writing, genetic editing, and reception history?

INKE is a multi-national, multi-disciplinary research initiative, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and partnering organizations, to study, develop, and implement digital environments for reading and research (www.inke.ca).   The Textual Studies Team of INKE is researching ways in which the age of manuscript and print production can inform our development and implementation of electronic reading technologies.

We invite proposals for papers, posters/demonstrations, and roundtable discussions that address these and other issues pertinent to research in textual studies. Proposals should contain a title, a detailed and focussed abstract (of approximately 300 words) plus list of works cited, and the names, affiliations, and Website URLs of presenters. Please send proposals before 15 December 2011 to richard.cunningham@acadiau.ca.

Potential participants in the conference, particularly those coming from abroad, might be interested to take advantage of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, which will just before our conference, from 4-8 June, also at the University of Victoria (http://www.dhsi.org/).   A limited number of scholarships for workshop tuition will be available for graduate students participating in the Beyond Accessibility conference.  Also of potential interest is the annual conference of the Society for Digital Humanities (SDH/SEMI) at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, 28-30 May, 2012 (http://www.sdh-semi.org/).

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Image of the Week: The Perils of Early Aviation

By heatherbowlby on November 14, 2011

[View of journalist Joseph Crocé-Spinelli, naval officer Henri Sivel, and Gaston Tissandier in the basket of the balloon, "Zénith," after losing consciousness due to lack of oxygen after reaching an altitude of nearly 28,000 ft., near Paris, France, April, 1875]

 

Gaston Tissandier (1843-1899) was a French chemist, meteorologist, aviation pioneer, and adventurer. Along with his brother, Albert, he edited the French scientific journal La Nature, which aimed to popularize science. Gaston was particularly interested in ballooning, and during the Franco-Prussian War in September 1870, he made a spectacular escape from besieged Paris by balloon.

This illustration from La Nature depicts the aftermath of Gaston’s most daring ballooning feat, in which he was able to reach the unheard-of altitude of 28,000 feet in April 1875. Both of Gaston’s companions, journalist Joseph Crocé-Spinelli and naval officer Henri Sivel, later died from the effects of breathing the thin air. Gaston survived, but became deaf.

Undeterred, the Tissandier brothers continued to conduct aviation experiments, and in 1883 they developed the first electric-powered flight by fitting a Siemens motor to an airship.

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