Tuesday October 03, 2006

The assignment this week isn't due until the week after next, as neither the Tuesday class nor the Thursday class will meet next week due to Fall Break.

By midnight of the day before the next class, please do both of the following:

• Find a print reference work related to your topic by searching the NCSU Libraries catalog. Include a full citation, and annotate this as usual with a paragraph that both describes the source and evaluates its usefulness for you. Include in your description such key information as whether the work is issued serially (e.g., every five years), how it is arranged, and any special features.
• Find an electronic reference work (not the MLA Bibliography nor Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts) that contains information relevant to your topic by searching the NCSU Libraries website. In your paragraph of description and evaluation, please try to include such key information as its scope (e.g., what it includes), how many records/entries the work includes, how often it is updated, and how far back it goes (e.g., the online MLA Bibliography now dates back to the 1920s, farther back than the print version). Be sure to get this information from within the database itself, as the database descriptions on the Libraries' website may be out of date.

To find print reference books in the catalog, remember that you can click on the "Genre" facets on the left-hand side to limit to Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and so on. You can also go to the Advanced Search page and leave only the "Reference Works" box checked. To find electronic reference works, you can start with the Browse Subjects Reference Tools tab, but you may well find untold treasures just by searching the catalog or browsing the alphabetical list of databases. If you like, you may also look for a database available at UNC or Duke but not at NCSU.

Monday October 02, 2006

This week, reference librarian Ciindy Levine is going to speak to us about print and online reference works. Class will meet in the ITTC Lab in D. H. Hill library, located on the 2nd floor of the East Wing. Leave lots of extra time to get to class! It's easy to get lost on the way.

Mea culpa! So sorry I didn't post the assignment. Here it is, and you may post your responses when you can.

Please do one or both of the following:

• Find 1-2 "new model" digital scholarly projects online that are related (however loosely) to your topic. Describe and evaluate the usefulness of the scholarly project(s) as usual, but please also look for and mention evidence that the scholarly project is in fact scholarly. Who is the primary scholar responsible for it? Does it have an editorial board? Is it peer-reviewed in some fashion? Is it associated with a particular university, center, institute, foundation, or university press?
  
• Do a keyword search related to your topic on Google and then on 1-2 other search engines and describe the differences between the Google results and the other results (please say which keywords you used).

Other search engines you might try include Vivisimo and Dogpile. See also Wikipedia's list of search engines. If you can get it to work, there's also fascinating information to be had at Thumbshots Ranking.

Tuesday September 26, 2006

Many people mentioned they had trouble finding academic blogs and listservs related to their field / topic -- I didn't realize that so many of the Voice of the Shuttle links would be outdated! It's an emerging genre, of course, and so it will take time for the field to assimilate and index it. And many of these resources are rather inherently ephemeral.

I did find a few sites that are attempting to index academic blogs, though, so here are links to those. (Blogscholar.com had no useful information that I could see.) Unfortunately there's not usually much information about these blogs given; they're just lists of arcane, enigmatic, pseudonymous titles. The one at the Chronicle seems to be the best, but that one emphasizes blogs that are about the academic profession rather than about intellectual issues. You'll find that there's a lot of overlap between the professional and the personal and the intellectual on scholarly blogs, though! Which is why some of them are anonymously authored.

• Chronicle Careers: Academic Web logs
• Crooked Timber: Academic Blogs (arranged by subject)
• Rhetorica: Professors Who Blog

In Thursday's class, Susanna Branyon raised the important issue of conference legitimacy. It is certainly true that there are more and more academic conferences all the time, and while not all of them are money-making scams pure and simple, some are less than discriminating, less than reputable.

I don't personally know of any such conference in the discipline of English, and of course humanities scholars tend to have little in the way of discretionary funding for travel, which means that we are not very tempting targets. But as a practical tip, it's good to investigate any conference you're thinking of attending to see whether it's fully legitimate. As an impractical amusement, you might enjoy visiting the website of SciGen: An Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator. I recommend the video "Near Science," which memorably recounts the adventures of three MIT Computer Science students who presented three randomly-generated papers at a sketchy conference titled "The 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI 2005)."

By midnight of the day before your class, please post full citations for two of any of the following types of resources related to your topic:

• newsgroups, e-mail lists, listservs, online forums, e.g., the Women's Poetry listserv;
• personal, institutional, publication-based, or community-based blogs, e.g., the personal blog of Professor Michael Bérubé.

Please annotate each resource with a paragraph that summarizes/describes the source and also evaluates how useful the source might be for your research. Please make sure you indicate when you are quoting from another source by using quotation marks and introductory phrases!!

To find e-mail lists, try the Voice of the Shuttle; for blogs, try searching Technorati.

Other useful online scholarly communities include the Calls for Papers e-mail list at the University of Pennsylvania and the two major higher education trade journals: The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.

Many of these online resources (though unfortunately not all) can be sent in an easily scannable form to your personal computer via a web feed (aka RSS feed). See how it works in my e-mail (I use Thunderbird) below. You can also see some recent calls for papers in my regular e-mail inbox; I've filtered them into a subfolder. If you could see my regular inbox you'd also see e-mails from a few random scholarly lists, including Versification.

Tuesday September 12, 2006

By midnight of the day before your class, please post citations in correct MLA or APA citation style for two of any of the following types of resources related to your topic:

• Past, present, or forthcoming conferences, e.g., the 2007 North American James Joyce Conference;
• print or electronic conference proceedings, e.g., The Languages of Joyce: Selected Papers from the 11th International James Joyce Symposium, Venice, 12-18 June 1988 [TIP: Click on Subject: Genre - Congresses in the NCSU Libraries catalog]; or
• festschriften, e.g., Literary Theory and Criticism Festschrift Presented to René Wellek in Honor of his Eightieth Birthday [TIP: the festschrift is an obscure but intriguing genre of literary scholarship; try WorldCat].

Please annotate each resource with a paragraph that summarizes/describes the source and also evaluates how useful the source might be for your research.

Tuesday September 05, 2006

By midnight of the day before your class, please post the names of two living experts (preferably scholars) on your topic. Please also add a brief "annotation" listing any relevant biographical information you can find out about these experts (institutional affiliation, other works published, juicy scandals).

If you are braver, you may also email or call your expert, ask for help on your topic, and write about her/his response.

By midnight of the day before your class, please post a list of Library of Congress Classifications and Library of Congress Subject Headings related to your chosen topic as a comment to this post. Please also add a brief "annotation" on how you found these terms, whether you think they'll be useful, and any ideas they might suggest.

LC Classifications

LC Subject Headings

By midnight of the day before your class, please post a list of keywords related to your chosen topic as a comment to this post. Generate synonyms for topic keywords (e.g., "gender" and "sex"; "Victorian" and "19th century") and try alternate spellings (including misspellings) for proper names (e.g., "Heany" for "Heaney").

Try these keywords in at least a few of the following library catalogs and databases: NCSU, Duke, UNC-CH, NCCU, Open WorldCat, and WorldCat. Write a paragraph discussing how the same keywords produce different results in different catalogs and/or how different keywords and keyword combinations produce different results in the same catalog.

The following dropdown box in the NCSU Libraries catalog is helpful. Be sure to check out WorldCat (available from the Databases page of the library web site) as well as Open WorldCat.

ENG 669 will meet tonight (Tue 9/4) and Thursday 9/7 in Winston 133 rather than in Tompkins G123. I'll post a note to that effect on the door of G123.

Before class, please register for a (free) RefWorks account. To do this, navigate to http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/cgi-bin/proxy.pl?server=www.refworks.com/refworks/ and follow the instructions.

If you have trouble, you might also try http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/guides/refworks/refworksintro.html.

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