Hide and Seek: Blacklight’s Smart Search Functionality
Bethany wrote recently in praise of Bess Sadler’s work on Blacklight, and its recent release (as “VIRGObeta”). I’d like to offer my own (admittedly anecdotal, perhaps insignificant) praise.
A Kindle for Every Student?
The blogosphere has been abuzz with diverse opinions on the release of Amazon’s new Kindle 2. So far, most of the news has surrounded the controversial text-to-speech function and whether or not it violates copyright law (more on this here and here). Regardless of its legality, the speech sounds mechanical, and I don’t see this posing a threat to genuine audio books read with intonation by real people. But my interest is not in this primarily, but in reading via ebook itself.Read more…
Rome Reborn
My wife and I frequently engage in a strange kind of “culture war.” She thinks ancient Rome is the more interesting civilization, and I’m partial to ancient Greece. In these debates, I always tell her that I prefer philosophers to politicians. Still, I was excited when I first encountered Rome Reborn, a joint project between UVA’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, a few other schools, and Google (who allows access to the project through Google Earth). Read more…
Teaching with ARTStor
I am a teaching assistant for a course on the early history of Christianity. When the professor for the course asked me to lecture for him on early church art and architecture, I was excited. I had recently come upon the new ARTStor online database, and couldn’t wait to find digital images of the churches I wanted to cover in my lecture. But then he said, “I’ll go over to the slide library with you sometime next week and introduce you to the folks there, and they’ll help you pull slides.” Now I had a conflict: Do I do it the old-fashioned way, my professor’s way? Or do I take advantage of what the latest technology has to offer?
