scholarly journals The Archives of Babel A Wikipedia - Workshop

Author(s):  
Thomas Basbøll

In September of 2012, the American novelist Philip Roth published an open letter to Wikipedia in The New Yorker. “I am Philip Roth,” it began, and proceeded to explain how the editors of Wikipedia had gotten  the inspiration for his novel The Human Stain wrong. Though the article had in fact only mentioned a theory about his sources, Roth was adamant that it did not belong anywhere in a discussion of his novel. He wanted the idea removed entirely. This, it turns out, was a profound misunderstanding of the editorial practices of Wikipedia, and the theory that Roth would prefer we forget remains in the article to this  day. His letter in The New Yorker, of course, is duly cited. How well should librarians understand the editorial process behind Wikipedia’s articles? In this workshop, we will take a practical approach to the problem and have a look at what goes on behind the scenes, even edit some pages if we feel so inclined. The workshop will be led by Thomas Basbøll, a philosopher and writing consultant who has spent a few years working as a volunteer editor at Wikipedia and even has even been banned from editing certain pages for a time. The overall goal of the  workshop is to demystify one of the most accessed sources of knowledge in the world and help librarians  decide how to best help people like Philip Roth, and his readers, make sense of its “authority”.  Thomas Basbøll is the resident writing consultant at the Copenhagen Business School Library. He holds an MA in philosophy from the University of Copenhagen, and a PhD from the Copenhagen Business School. He works closely with students, teachers and researchers in their attempts to master “the craft of research” and is an avid blogger (blog.cbs.dk/inframethodology/). 

2014 ◽  
Vol 116 (7) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Bruce A. Kimball

Background Comprehensive, multi-year mass fundraising campaigns in American higher education began with the Harvard Endowment Fund (HEF) drive, which extended from 1915 to 1925. Notwithstanding this prominence, the archival records of the campaign have never been studied closely, and in the absence of archival research, scholars have misunderstood the HEF campaign. According to the received and presentist view, the university president initiated the HEF campaign, which professional consultants then directed to a swift and successful conclusion, drawing on their expertise. Focus of study The fundamental purpose was to learn from the archives what actually happened in this pathbreaking campaign. The research soon revealed that the unpaid organizers had to negotiate virtually all aspects of this novel venture among competing and conflicting groups of alumni, units of the university, and university administrators, including the president. The purpose then became to understand the divergent values and interests of the participants and how those perspectives contributed to the new goals, strategies, tactics, and practices introduced by the campaign. Setting The research was conducted primarily in the Harvard University Archives and the Special Collections of Harvard Business School library. Research Design The archival records comprise some fifty three boxes containing about forty thousand unindexed sheets of letters, memos, drafts, minutes, accounts, pamphlets, and other materials reposited in the Harvard University Archives. A chronological and topical examination of these materials over the past five years provides the research for this essay, which also draws upon a review of related collections in the Harvard University Archives and the Special Collections of Harvard Business School library. Conclusions The research led to several surprising conclusions: that the landmark campaign failed to meet its goal, that professional consultants did not organize or run the campaign but emerged from it, that now long-standing features of university fundraising resulted less from deliberate planning than from contentious negotiations among conflicting groups, that the campaign prompted the university administration to centralize and control alumni affairs and development efforts for the first time, and, above all, that a central ideological tension arose between mass fundraising and the traditional approach of discretely soliciting wealthy donors. The unintended and unofficial outcome was to establish today's ubiquitous episodic pattern of continuous fundraising, in which mass comprehensive campaigns alternate with discrete solicitations of wealthy donors, whose dominant roles have never changed.


Author(s):  
Steve Zeitlin

The author reflects here on the important role that laughter has played in his life. His brother Murray laughs harder than anyone else he knows—and he caps it off by clapping in wild applause. The author's daughter, Eliza, once quipped: “We had laughter for dessert.” He even imagined a mystery story in which the murderer kills by devising a perfect joke that convulses people with laughter till they die. He also can remember a girl whose infectious laugh inspired a poem entitled Lily. His friend and Ping-Pong partner Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, is a student of humor; he also teaches a class in humor theory at the University of Michigan. And like many long-married couples, he and his wife have developed routines for their own personal comedy team of sorts. The author adds that banter is a key ingredient of folk culture and family folklore.


Author(s):  
Michael V. Metz

Stoddard, president of the university from 1946 to 1953, was a controversial man, an East Coaster, a liberal, and an internationalist. Through much of his tenure he had difficult relations with both the university’s board of trustees and the state legislature, and he also faced opposition from conservative faculty at UI. A scandal over a phony cancer cure brought undesired publicity to the school and was the last in a series of controversies that led to his dismissal by the board in a late-night Illini Union meeting.


2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-132
Author(s):  
Elisabet Engdahl ◽  
Robin Cooper

This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics is devoted to Comparative Nordic Semantics. Whereas much research has been carried out on comparative syntax, morphology and phonology in the Nordic languages, much less work has been done on the comparative semantics of these languages. But the fact that some of the Nordic languages, namely the Scandinavian ones, Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, are historically, lexically and structurally very similar means that they provide an interesting target for semantic research. Are there systematic semantic differences between these languages? If so, are the formal semantic analytic tools that have been developed mainly for English and German sufficiently fine-grained to account for the differences among the Scandinavian languages? These were some of the questions asked in the research project Comparative Semantics for Nordic Languages (NORDSEM), which was funded by the Joint Committee of the Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities in 1998–2001 and which involved researchers at the Copenhagen Business School, Göteborg University and the University of Oslo. Two of the papers in this issue (by Carl Vikner and Kjell Johan Sæbø) derive directly from the NORDSEM project whereas the third paper, by Erich Round, pursues some issues investigated during the project by Joakim Nivre and published in Nordic Journal of Linguistics 25:1 (2002).


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
Sheila Liberal Ormaechea ◽  
Isidoro Arroyo Almaraz ◽  
Paula Hernández de Miguel

Presentamos un trabajo de investigación empírico donde analizamos el uso de la ilustración en un medio concreto (The New Yorker) para contrastar el poder de transmisión del mensaje en un contexto muy concreto como es el de la pandemia mundial debido a la propagación de la covid-19. Metodología: Se ha llevado a acabo una triangulación metodológica combinando diversas técnicas y herramientas como la investigación documental, análisis descriptivo, focus group y análisis de contenido . Resultados: El análisis de 347 portadas revela que el elemento que varía de una publicación a otra es la ilustración.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (1) ◽  
pp. 13651
Author(s):  
Charles Thomas Tackney ◽  
Mette Zoelner ◽  
Vibeke Ankersborg ◽  
Magali Gravier ◽  
Dorte Madsen ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-125
Author(s):  
Lidia Bielinis ◽  
Cezary Kurkowski ◽  
Monika Maciejewska

In the study we present results of two research projects conducted simultaneously at the Faculty of Social Sciences, UWM in Olsztyn referring to the place digital technologies have in the learning processes in the opinions of Early Education students. The results show that the group of surveyed students might be situated on the borderline of digital natives and digital immigrants’ worlds. The conducted survey demonstrated limited trust to digital sources of knowledge amongst students and discrepancy between their personal experiences with using new technology, on a daily basis, and traditional ways of learning proposed by the University. The analysis of the case study indicated that for preparing future teachers to work with children (digital natives), it is important to organize a learning environment in which both worlds – digital and analogue – are connected.


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