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…
Ada Lovelace Day
Today has been declared — quite spontaneously, and to the cheers of a great many people — Ada Lovelace Day, a day on which to honor women working in technology by writing blog posts about their often-unsung achievements, and about ways in which they inspire and challenge us.
About the Author
Bethany Nowviskie
Bethany is Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library.
Read more about Bethany and access her other posts here.
Library Innovation Grant Yields Dividends for Numismatists
A recent post by Ethan Gruber, a UVA Library staff member who has lately joined the Scholars’ Lab team, detailed his experiments with 3-dimensional modeling to re-contextualize Roman mosaics — right down to the interplay of light and shadow in ancient villas. Now Ethan’s work on creating a scholarly interface for the study of Greek and Roman coins has been profiled in UVA Today. This project came about through an internal UVA Library Innovation Grant and was undertaken in consultation with Art History professor John Dobbins, a 1994 IATH Fellow, whose Pompeii Forum project provided an early example for the utility of digital tools for archaeological inquiry. The rare coins were scanned by Andrew Curley of the Library’s Scholarly Resources Digitization Services.
Photo credit: Dan Addison. Read the full UVA Today press release here, or jump straight to the coins collection.
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?
Google Scholar: Neglected Corridors of the Interwebs
Welcome to my first post here on the Scholars’ Lab blog. My name is Jason Kirby and I’m a third-year Ph.D. student in the Music department at UVa. I’m in the “Critical and Comparative Studies” track of my program, which means I look at musical sound and musicians through a cultural studies lens. I’m planning a dissertation on intersections between country and rock music over the past thirty years, and when considering the wide spectrum of academic musicology, I’m squarely a pop music studies guy. I’ve written about artists ranging from Lucinda Williams to Throbbing Gristle—artists about whom there’s a fair amount of popular-press ink spilled, but not necessarily much scholarly writing (yet). This brings me to the subject of today’s post.
Google Scholar: I enjoy it, and not for reasons which are necessarily immediately apparent. Read more…
