Last month, the Library of Congress made available, free of charge, its catalog of historic recordings of early music, dating from 1901 to 1925. The new "National Jukebox" contains some 10,000 recordings which have been digitized for the first time and were made available to the LOC by Sony Music Entertainment. Sony owns the rights…
Category: Research
Well, Good Luck With That: No Jobs in Humanities
Last week, the Modern Language Association (MLA) held their annual convention in Los Angeles, California. Some 8,000 professors, graduate students, and others in the humanities field were in attendance. They shared papers, listened to lectures, and awaited word from the organization's executive director, Rosemary Feal, about the state of the job market for those involved…
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We Must Obarmate Against the Loss of Words…To Let Them Go Would be Venalia
Adopt a word. Save our language. Why save a word? Well, as the website savethewords.org argues, "90% of everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words," yet there are "old words, wise words, [and] hard-working words...that once led meaningful lives [but] now lie, unused, unloved, and unwanted." The site draws you in with a…
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Asking Utnapishtim for Directions to the Bathroom
It's been since about 500 B.C. that Babylonian and Assyrian were widely spoken. Those languages, closely related to Arabic and Hebrew, were assimilated into Akkadian, the primary speech of what is now Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Later, Aramaic, the language of Jesus, eventually became the preferred way of speaking in those regions. It wasn't until…
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Just How Many Books Are There? Google’s Massive Project to Count Them ALL
Books to the ceiling, books to the sky, / My piles of books are a mile high. / How I love them! / How I need them! / I'll have a long beard by the time I read them. ~Arnold Lobel Have you ever wondered just how many books are actually out there? Well, thanks…
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Franz Kafka’s Lost Writings Resurface
“In the fight between you and the world, back the world.” ~ Franz Kafka Elderly sisters, Ruth Wisler and Eva Hoffe, might want to take Kafka's warning to heart. For years, the siblings have had a secret. Their mother had been a secretary for Max Brod. Brod had been Kafka's publisher as well as a…
Why Are College Students Studying Less?
A new study, The Falling Time Cost of College: Evidence from Half a Century of Time Use Data by Philip S. Babcock and Mindy Marks has revealed the college students spend much less time studying today than they did in 1960-- a drop of 13 hours per week. From the study: Using multiple datasets from…
Light in February: Plantation Diary Find Sheds New Light on Faulkner Novels
For scholars, there is no bigger coup than finding new information that offers insight to a writer's processes, character construction, or plot development. Even if one is working with a lesser known writer, there is joy in discovery. To find previously unknown information for an author as popular and extensively researched as William Faulkner is akin to finding a gem…
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