While the purpose of this blog is primarily to focus on librarianship, the joys of being an LIS student, and my own research, I feel like there is so much of an overlap between my own work and other fields that sometimes I want to be a little more interdisciplinary! Lately, I've been shown a lot of really exciting online resources that might technically fall under 'history resources,' but that creative minds could apply to an LIS classroom (and of course, to history classes as well.) So, for both students and instructors, I present a brief list to you:
BBC Dimensions
I really like this site, and I've spent more time on it than I care to admit after being informed of its existence via Twitter. Basically, the site takes the dimensions of any number of things (natural disasters, historic cities, industrial areas, etc) and allows you to superimpose an outline of the event/place over your own postal code. It's a great way to help conceptualize the actual size, and is a great jumping off point for talking about how everyone thought about the size of the event/place in question prior to seeing the map.
Getting back to library history more specifically, I humbly present the Library History Buff Blog. I'm sure I've talked about this blog before, but it's worth mentioning here because of the scope of Larry Nix's work. I love this blog because he talks about such a wide range of library history-related topics, from pieces of ephemera (see the World War I ALA bookmark) to people, events, and organizations that have shaped library history in one way or another. This blog will be of particular interest to those who study postal history as well, as Nix finds inspiration from letters and other postal artifacts.
Larry Nix also created a helpful website that showcases artifacts related to the ALA in World War I. I love the postcards he's found, and they help put imagery to the different ALA War Service activities I've looked at!
This is a link to a class website for a course taught by Dr. Karen Roggenkamp. There are plenty of links that discuss late 19th/early 20th century history, and these can help to introduce students to a topic without overwhelming them.
Harvard's Reading page is a very helpful resource I've used a number of times, because it provides a good deal of information on the history of readers and reading. There are so many interesting studies done on reading (those by Janice Radway and Christine Pawley, for example), and this site is a great place for students to gain an introduction to the study of reading history and use it as a jumping off point for discussing why the study of reading habits is important (i.e. is how we read a text a vital component to how we understand it?)
There are so many more history resources out there, but I've tried to stick with ones that are both recent and, to my mind at least, have something unique to offer. I've also tried to focus on resources that are more interdisciplinary, rather than those that would only be applicable in, say, an ancient history survey course. If you know of any more great resources, put them in the comments! The longer the list, the better!
Showing posts with label interdisciplinary studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interdisciplinary studies. Show all posts
Friday, October 29, 2010
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Moving Between Genres: The Challenges and Rewards of Interdisciplinary Blogging
In my last post, I talked a bit about my other blog, and the final project of which it is a part. Since I am building steam on writing for that blog, I wanted to write this post about what I have learned so far blogging both as a historian and as a LIS student. I would love to hear what experience other writers have in working between disciplines, so please add your thoughts to the comments!
The first difference I've noticed is my tone when writing. On this blog, I have developed my own 'voice' as it were, and feel like I can write somewhat more casually. The other blog doesn't use a very formal tone for the actual blog posts, but I feel like I need to write more in the way I would write for a peer-reviewed journal when writing the sections on historical background.I also use many more citations in the other blog, because it is based primarily on historical research.
On this blog, I do draw from other sources, but I don't find myself using parenthetical citations and a bibliography, because I am doing as much sharing of my own thoughts as I am pulling from other sources. That difference in approach is also reflected in the content: on this blog I feel much more comfortable sitting down and writing a post about some aspect of my professional life that I find interesting or particularly relevant, whereas when I post on the other blog I feel like I need to sit down and plan out what I will post about and how that fits into the scope of a larger project. Basically its the difference between creating a space for more formal research versus a place to share new ideas and offer my opinion on a subject.
The biggest challenges for me with this type of writing come from trying to switch not only between voices, but between ways of approaching a post. The Markham blog requires that at least some of my posts be approached as tightly-formed arguments on an aspect of a historical document (his cookery manual, in this instance). This blog requires me to write clearly for an audience across multiple disciplines, and discuss the world as it exists now. The greatest reward is that these two styles complement each other very well: by forcing myself to write academically on one blog, I can ensure that I am forming coherent arguments on this one. By writing in a way that (I hope) is interesting and accessible on this blog, I prevent my other writing from becoming too dry.
Because the blogs are updated frequently and are a more dynamic entity than an article, I feel this difference much more acutely than when I am writing papers on several different subjects. It probably helps that peer reviewed journals tend to adhere to some similar expectations in terms of building and defending an argument, and even in the scholarly language used in the paper.
I'm sure I will notice many more differences between the way I write for different projects as I go on, but one advantage I feel like I am giving myself here is exposure to a wider variety of writing styles--by both blogging and writing for more traditional publications across a number of disciplines, I am (slowly) familiarizing myself with the tenets of 'good writing' for these fields, a skill which I hope will be useful as I continue to work in a field as interdisciplinary as LIS.
The first difference I've noticed is my tone when writing. On this blog, I have developed my own 'voice' as it were, and feel like I can write somewhat more casually. The other blog doesn't use a very formal tone for the actual blog posts, but I feel like I need to write more in the way I would write for a peer-reviewed journal when writing the sections on historical background.I also use many more citations in the other blog, because it is based primarily on historical research.
On this blog, I do draw from other sources, but I don't find myself using parenthetical citations and a bibliography, because I am doing as much sharing of my own thoughts as I am pulling from other sources. That difference in approach is also reflected in the content: on this blog I feel much more comfortable sitting down and writing a post about some aspect of my professional life that I find interesting or particularly relevant, whereas when I post on the other blog I feel like I need to sit down and plan out what I will post about and how that fits into the scope of a larger project. Basically its the difference between creating a space for more formal research versus a place to share new ideas and offer my opinion on a subject.
The biggest challenges for me with this type of writing come from trying to switch not only between voices, but between ways of approaching a post. The Markham blog requires that at least some of my posts be approached as tightly-formed arguments on an aspect of a historical document (his cookery manual, in this instance). This blog requires me to write clearly for an audience across multiple disciplines, and discuss the world as it exists now. The greatest reward is that these two styles complement each other very well: by forcing myself to write academically on one blog, I can ensure that I am forming coherent arguments on this one. By writing in a way that (I hope) is interesting and accessible on this blog, I prevent my other writing from becoming too dry.
Because the blogs are updated frequently and are a more dynamic entity than an article, I feel this difference much more acutely than when I am writing papers on several different subjects. It probably helps that peer reviewed journals tend to adhere to some similar expectations in terms of building and defending an argument, and even in the scholarly language used in the paper.
I'm sure I will notice many more differences between the way I write for different projects as I go on, but one advantage I feel like I am giving myself here is exposure to a wider variety of writing styles--by both blogging and writing for more traditional publications across a number of disciplines, I am (slowly) familiarizing myself with the tenets of 'good writing' for these fields, a skill which I hope will be useful as I continue to work in a field as interdisciplinary as LIS.
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