Anthony Grafton – Apocalypse in the stacks? The research library in the age of Google
What is the research library in the age of Google? Dr. Anthony Grafton provides the perspective of a humanist scholar on recent changes in research libraries that have been brought about by increased digitization. By examining changes that have occurred over the last forty years in the way that scholars conduct their research and where the library fits in, Grafton sees four crises that today’s academic libraries must face: financial, spatial, use, and accessibility. According to Professor Grafton, a research library should provide not only physical space where scholars can pursue research in books, but also virtual space where they can collect, store, and exploit electronic resources – an ingenious way to pull humanists, teachers, and students alike back into public workspace, in an environment that has the open, collective quality of a laboratory, but also meets the needs of researchers who work with texts, images, and sounds. This talk was hosted by Green College as part of its Cecil H. and Ida Green Visiting Professor lecture series on March 20, 2013 at the Victoria Learning Theatre (Room 182), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Reference:
Grafton, Anthony. “Apocalypse in the stacks? The research library in the age of Google.” Daedalus 138.1 (2009): 87-98. [Link]
Speaker Bio
Professor Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. His current project is a large-scale study of the science of chronology in 16th- and 17th-century Europe: how scholars attempted to assign dates to past events, reconstruct ancient calendars, and reconcile the Bible with competing accounts of the past. He hopes to reconstruct the complex and dramatic process by which the biblical regime of historical time collapsed, concentrating on the first half of the 17th century. He has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses on art, magic, and science in Renaissance Europe and on the history of books and readers; undergraduate seminars on historiography; and the history components of the intensive four-course introduction to Western civilization offered to undergraduates by the Program in Humanistic Studies.
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Andrew Kaufman, Camille Martin and Barry Webster
ANDREW KAUFMAN, CAMILLE MARTIN and BARRY WEBSTER
at the Robson Reading Series
Thursday, March 14, 2013, 7pm
UBC Bookstore at Robson Square
Robson Reading Series events are free and open to the public but registration is recommended. To register for this event, please click here.
Photo credit Lee Towndrow
Born Weird (Random House of Canada) tells the tale of the Weird family who have always been a little off, but not one of them ever suspected that they’d been cursed by their grandmother.
At the moment of the births of her five grandchildren Annie Weird gave each one a special power. Richard, the oldest, always keeps safe; Abba always has hope; Lucy is never lost and Kent can beat anyone in a fight. As for Angie, she always forgives, instantly. But over the years these so-called blessings ended up ruining their lives.
Now Annie is dying and she has one last task for Angie: gather her far-flung brothers and sisters and assemble them in her grandmother’s hospital room so that at the moment of her death, she can lift these blessings-turned-curses. And Angie has just two weeks to do it.
What follows is a quest like no other, tearing up highways and racing through airports, from a sketchy Winnipeg nursing home to the small island kingdom of Upliffta, from the family’s crumbling ancestral Toronto mansion to a motel called Love. And there is also the search for the answer to the greatest family mystery of all: what really happened to their father, whose maroon Maserati was fished out of a lake so many years ago?
The title of Looms signifies the weaving tool as well as the shadowing appearance of something, These “woven tales” were inspired by Barbara Guest’s statement that a tale “doesn’t tell the truth about itself; it tells us what it dreams about.” The strands of their surreal allegories converse, one idea giving rise to another, and the paths of their dialogue become the fabric of the narrative. In a second meaning, something that looms remains in a state of imminent arrival. Such are these tales, like parables with infinitely deferred lessons.
Camille Martin is the author four collections of poetry: Looms (Shearsman Books), Sonnets, Codes of Public Sleep, and Sesame Kiosk (out of print). A chapbook, If Leaf, Then Arpeggio, was recently released from Above/Ground Press.
She has presented and published her work internationally. One of her current poetry projects is “Blueshift Road.” She’s also working on “The Evangeline Papers,” a poetic sequence based on her Acadian/Cajun heritage and her participation in archaeological digs at an eighteenth-century village in Nova Scotia, where her finds included ancestral pipes and wine bottles. Martin earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of New Orleans and a PhD in English from Louisiana State University.
Photo credit Maxime Tremblay
In Barry Webster‘s latest novel, The Lava in My Bones (Arsenal Pulp Press), a frustrated Canadian geologist studying global warming becomes obsessed with eating rocks after embarking on his first same-sex relationship in Europe. Back home, his young sister is a high-school girl who suddenly starts to ooze honey through her pores, an affliction that attracts hordes of bees as well as her male classmates but ultimately turns her into a social pariah. Meanwhile, their obsessive Pentecostal mother repeatedly calls on the Holy Spirit to rid her family of demons. The siblings are reunited on a ship bound for Europe where they hope to start a new life, but are unaware that their disguised mother is also on board and plotting to win back their souls, with the help of the Virgin Mary.
Told in a lush baroque prose, this intense, extravagant magic-realist novel combines elements of fairy tales, horror movies, and romances to create a comic, hallucinatory celebration of excess and sensuality.
Barry Webster‘s first book, The Sound of All Flesh (Porcupine’s Quill), won the ReLit Award for best short-story collection in 2005. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the CBC-Quebec Prize, and the Hugh MacLennan Award. Originally from Toronto, he currently lives in East Montreal.
Al Hunter
AL HUNTER
at the First Nations Longhouse
Wednesday, March 6, 2013, 6:30pm
Robson Reading Series events are free and open to the public but registration is recommended. To register for this event, please click here.
This event will take place at the First Nations Longhouse at UBC and is located at 1985 West Mall, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z2.
Photo credit Stephan Hoglund
“In this fluid collection we enter a galactic expanse where absence, distance and fire repel and attract love-bodies in a winged-whirl of magnetic mad flight. Loss, emptiness, space, desire, blood, memory; all devour themselves in the combustions of love without self. The you/other may be interchangeable, never static or frozen or attainable. In these sharp-beaked bird-worlds there is “no going back” – at best, bodies meet only “flame to flame,” mutable and razor-like in feathery, impermanent forms. I find Hunter’s new work a rare melding of Blues, Kabbalah, and personal transcendence– a piercing, hard-won angelic love mantra. A blazing tour de force!”
– Juan Felipe Herrera, California Poet Laureate
“What lies here are the vagaries of a heart wounded, shattered, and redeemed by love. Such generosity of spirit deserves acclaim. A bravura work.”
– Richard Wagamese, author of Indian Horse
Al Hunter is an Anishinaabe writer who has published poetry in books and journals around the world, taught extensively, and performed internationally, including, at the International Poetry Festival of Medellin.
A member of Rainy River First Nations and former chief, Hunter has expertise in land claims negotiations, and is a longstanding activist on behalf of indigenous rights and wellness, and environmental responsibility. Hunter lives in Manitou Rapids, Rainy River First Nations in Ontario.
Al is also the founder and president of Good Life for Young Peoples (www.goodlifeforyoungpeoples.com).
Chung Collection
Photo courtesy of the Chung Collection
UBC Library is proud to unveil a documentary film and a book looking at the fascinating stories behind the Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection – a designated national treasure that was donated to the Library in 1999.
The book, Golden Inheritance: The Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection at UBC Library, provides an overview of UBC alumnus Dr. Chung and his family, profiles the dedication and dynamics behind the Chung Collection, and offers an in-depth examination of its three themes: early B.C. history, immigration and settlement, and the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. Passage of Dreams: The Chung Collection is a documentary that features the stories of Dr. Chung’s childhood love of collecting Canadian Pacific artifacts and memorabilia.
The Chung Collection is housed in the Rare Books and Special Collections on Level 1 of UBC Library’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and is open to the public.
Walid Bitar, Basma Kavanagh, and Missy Marston
WALID BITAR, BASMA KAVANAGH and MISSY MARSTON
at the Robson Reading Series
Thursday, February 21, 2013, 7pm
UBC Bookstore at Robson Square
Robson Reading Series events are free and open to the public but registration is recommended. To register for this event, please click here.
They have no maps. Ours, I’ll redraw.
Isn’t itself, their neck of the woods;
needs a rest – something more than a nap,
and less than death, though death wouldn’t hurt.
In Divide and Rule, Walid Bitar delivers a sequence of dramatic monologues, variations on the theme of power, each in rhymed quatrains. Though the pieces grow out of Bitar’s personal experiences over the last decade, both in North America and the Middle East, he is not primarily a confessional writer. His work might be called cubist, the perspectives constantly shifting, point followed by counterpoint, subtle phrase by savage outburst. Bitar’s enigmatic speakers are partially rational creatures, have some need to explain, and may succeed in partially explaining, but, in the end, communication and subterfuge are inseparable – must, so to speak, co-exist.
Walid Bitar was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1961. He immigrated to Canada in 1969. His previous poetry collections are Maps with Moving Parts (Brick Books, 1988), 2 Guys on Holy Land (Wesleyan University Press, 1993), Bastardi Puri (Porcupine’s Quill, 2005) and The Empire’s Missing Links (Véhicule Press, 2008). From 1990 to 1991, he held a Teaching-Writing Fellowship at the University of Iowa. His newest work, Divide and Rule (Coach House Books, June 2012), is a collection of dramatic monologues. He lives in Toronto.
Basma Kavanagh’s debut collection, Distillō, engages the natural world and seeks to explore our relationship to it. Hers is a poetics of description which subverts scientific observation and the authoritative language of nomenclature for mythopoetic ends. In the opening section (“Moisture”), precipitation is dissected and categorized, but ultimately the deluge of “rain making rain, /making rain” overwhelms controlled interrogation and undulating imagery saturates everything. Nomenclature reappears elsewhere in the book, attempting to anchor object poems about west-coast flora and fauna–salmon, elk, bear, bigleaf maple, bog myrtle–which otherwise drift toward the mythworld and gesture in the direction of the ethereal and the totemic. Understanding that language can be most precise when it harbours ambiguity and surprise, Kavanagh experiments with pattern poems and the layering of multiple voices in her attempt to express “a fullness /an absence /of self.” This is a book which turns over rocks and looks under them in search of truth in its soft, damp hiding places, poems which instruct us to “[d]escend. Blend /your knowing with the breath of earth”.
Basma Kavanagh is a painter, poet and letterpress printer living in Kentville, Nova Scotia. She produces artist’s books under the imprint Rabbit Square Books. Her poems have appeared in the chapbook A Rattle of Leaves, published by Red Dragonfly Press, and included in anthologies in the United States.
The Love Monster is the tall tale of one woman’s struggle with mid-life issues. The main character, Margaret H. Atwood, has psoriasis, a boring job and a bad attitude. Her cheating husband has left her. And none of her pants fit any more. Missy Marston takes the reader on a hilarious journey of recovery. Hope comes in the form of a dope-smoking senior citizen, a religious fanatic, a good lawyer and a talking turtle (not to mention Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Warren Zevon, Neil Armstrong and a yogi buried deep underground). And, of course, hope comes in the form of a love-sick alien speaking in the voice of Donald Sutherland. More than an irreverent joyride, The Love Monster is also a sweet and tender look at the pain and indignity of being an adult human and a sincere exploration of the very few available remedies: art, love, religion, relentless optimism, and alien intervention.
Missy Marston‘s writing has appeared in various publications, including Grain and Arc Poetry Magazine. She was the winner of the Lillian I. Found Award for her poem, “Jesus Christ came from my home town.” As explained in her National Post Afterword columns, Missy Marston loves Margaret Atwood, aliens and Donald Sutherland. Her first novel, The Love Monster, is an ode to all three. She has been called “an irreverent Canadian” by Commentary Magazine and “weird, funny and moving” by The Globe and Mail. She is fine with that. The Love Monster is her first novel. She lives in Ottawa, Ontario.
Anabel Quan-Haase – Serendipity Models: How We Encounter Information and People in Digital Environments
On February 27, 2012, 12.00PM-1.00PM, the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS) will be hosting Anabel Quan-Haase for her talk “Serendipity Models: How We Encounter Information and People in Digital Environments” at the Lillooet Room, Room 301 of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Much of the research on how we encounter information tends to focus on linear models of intentional information search. Recently a number of studies and frameworks have suggested that not all information individuals encounter is through goal-oriented search, but rather that individuals often find information and connect with people accidentally, without purposefully looking. A wide range of terms and models have been proposed to describe the phenomenon. The present presentation has three goals. First, it provides an overview of the current debate around the phenomenon of serendipity, presenting and contrasting various models of how serendipity occurs. Second, it discusses how technology could affect serendipity and opportunities for designing digital tools that support innovation, creativity, and resource discovery. Finally, it presents current research findings on how serendipity impacts the work of scholars.
Anabel Quan-Haase is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies and Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Quan-Haase received her Masters degree in Psychology from the Humboldt-University in Berlin in 1998 under the supervision of Dr. Herbert Hagendorf and her Ph.D. in Information Studies from theUniversity of Toronto in 2004 under the supervision of Drs. Lynne Howarth and Barry Wellman.
The primary interests lies in the areas of Internet and society and computer-mediated communication. Her Ph.D. thesis examined how information flows in high-tech organizations employing a social network analysis approach. She also compared employees’ face-to-face, email, and instant messaging networks. She was also involved in a large-scale survey investigating the effect of the Internet on people’s social relations, sense of community, and political involvement. This talk is sponsored by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS) as part of its SLAIS Colloquium lecture series.
When Experts Disagree: The Art of Medical Decision Making
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Vancouver Institute Lecture Series. Dr. Jerome Groopman is the Dina and Raphael Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and one of the world’s leading researchers in cancer and AIDS. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New Republic. He is author of The Measure of Our Days; Second Opinions; Anatomy of Hope; the New York Times best seller, How Doctors Think; and the recently released Your Medical Mind. Dr. Pamela Hartzband is a member of the faculty at the Harvard Medical School and the Division of Endocrinology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She is a noted endocrinologist and educator specializing in disorders of the thyroid, adrenal, and pituitary glands and women’s health. She is regularly featured among America’s Best Doctors. She has authored articles in the New England Journal of Medicine on the impact of electronic records, uniform practice guidelines, monetary incentives, and the Internet on the culture of clinical care.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Hartzband, P., & Groopman, J. (2012). There is more to life than death. New England Journal of Medicine, 367(11), 987-989. [Link]
Hartzband, P., Groopman, J., & Wallace, D. (2012). Understanding Your Medical Mind: Decision Making Through Patient-Doctor Dialogue. Reflections: The SoL Journal, 12(3), 1-11. [Link]
Hartzband, P., & Groopman, J. (2010). Untangling the Web—patients, doctors, and the Internet. New England Journal of Medicine, 362(12), 1063-1066. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Life at the Intersection: A Conversation with Dr. Carl James
Professor Carl James
On February 8, 2013 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM, the Department of Language and Literacy Education and the Faculty of Education presents Dr. Anne Henry, Head of the Department of Language and Literacy Education (Faculty of Education) to celebrate Black History Month. Dr. Annette Henry will host the conversation with Dr. Carl E. James about his latest book, “Life at the Intersection: Community, Class and Schooling“, and about his work regarding race, equity and education.
Carl James is widely recognized for his work in ethnically and racially diverse communities and for his role, nationally and internationally, in research around equity and identity as related to race, class, gender, racialization, immigration and citizenship. He has conducted research that examines the schooling, educational, social and athletic experiences of marginalized youth and racialized youth. He was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada as a fellow in 2012. Life at the Intersection: Community, Class and Schooling is his most recent book.
As Director of the York Centre for Education and Community, James has been a member of the Faculty of Education at York University since 1993 and is cross-appointed with the graduate programs in the Department of Sociology and the School of Social Work. He was formerly the Affirmative Action Officer at York University.
A former youth leader and community worker, he has extensive experience with critical ethnography, phenomenology, action research and government and institutional policy analysis. Dr. James is widely recognized for his work in ethnically and racially diverse communities and for his role, nationally and internationally, in research around equity and identity as related to race, class, gender, racialization, immigration and citizenship.
Carl James is known for his mentorship and is engaged in professional development with social service workers, community agencies and educators. On an international level, he has been working with teacher educators, teachers and teacher-candidates since 1997 at Uppsala University and Sodertorn University College in Stockholm. In January 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in Sweden for his contribution to social equity and anti-racism education
CONTACT: Laurie Reynolds (Assistant to Dr. Annette Henry)
laurie.reynolds@ubc.ca
VENUE:
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
1961 East Mall V6T 1Z1
DODSON Room in the Chapman Learning Commons (Third Floor)