In 1812 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published Children’s and Household Tales in the German region of Westphalia and its influence slowly spread all over the world. The Grimms’ book, which they updated in their lifetime, is the second bestselling book in the German language after the Bible. While many in Britain will have first experienced…
I’m generalising wildly, of course, but journalists – particularly student journalists – often try to learn programming from books. That may sound like common sense, but it’s not in an art or a science – and programming is both. Programmers – if I’m to generalise wildly again – typically combine books (which they don’t read…
Multimedia journalism is a pretty nebulous term. As a result, in my experience, when students try to adopt the role two main problems recur: 1) having a narrow assumption of what multimedia means (i.e. video) and 2) not being able to see the multimedia possibilities of your work. Multimedia journalism is a very different beast…
I confess that I have never been all that physical. I do try to take the stairs instead of the elevator at work. I let my daughter talk me into auditioning for a community theater musical (and while my dancing was definitely in the bottom third, or maybe the bottom tenth, I didn’t humiliate myself).…
The first issue of the student paper is on campus. Similar:The lesson of Rolling Stone and UVA: protecting victims means checking their stories It is a depressing certainty that th…Current_EventsHarper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, dies aged 89Harper Lee, whose 1961 novel To Kill a M…BooksPerspective | How NPR’s Steve Inskeep cracked the…
The first issue of the Seton Hill student newspaper comes out tomorrow, but the articles are already online. I’m the faculty adviser, so naturally I’m proud. Way to go, new media journos! “The human brain multitasks just fine. If you’re paying attention to me at the same time you are also regulating your heart beat…
My 10yo has a complex relationship with books. She loves being read to, and she reads quite a lot, but she says she doesn’t enjoy reading. Of the various lessons she has to accomplish each day, she will often choose reading first, but only, she says, because she hates it least. Today when I finished…
The Idealist Similar:August Wilson Trifecta (Two Trains, Ma Rainey and Fences on the same day)Fences was performed in the backyard of …CultureYou're not going to read thisI ask my students to contextualize links…Business"Wolf!", cried the shepherd boy. (The whole thread is worth reading.) https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/statu…CultureAbout 30 years after I first saw John Speed’s 1676 map…
The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls Of mastodons, are billiard balls. The sword of Charlemagne the Just Is ferric oxide, known as rust. The grizzly bear whose potent hug Was feared by all, is now a rug. Great Caesar’s bust is on my shelf, And I don’t feel so well myself. Similar:TSA Agent ConfessionIt…
If you have written anything you think my readers will appreciate, feel free to suggest it. Dankeschön. Similar:That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent ItProfessional disinformation isn’t spread…CultureJust remember: what you’re seeing and what you're reading is not what’s happening.Words apparently spoken by the President…Current_EventsTeaching Shakespeare in a Maximum Security PrisonGood essay by…
That’s one small misspeak for a man… “The `a’ was intended,” Armstrong said. “I thought I said it. I can’t hear it when I listen on the radio reception here on Earth, so I’ll be happy if you just put it in parentheses.” Although no one in the world heard the “`a,” some research backs…
Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated. And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would…
I don’t get to teach technical writing much anymore, so when I touched on it in a new media class I took the opportunity to freshen up some older web resources. A business memo, a lab report, or a professional e-mail are all variations on the basic report structure described in this document. Feel free to modify these guidelines…
Are we moving toward an era where Americans will speak discernibly red versus blue accents? It’s hard to say. Social identities are complex, and can be defined along a number of different dimensions like class, race, or ethnicity. Not everyone feels that politics are a part of their core identity. But I suspect that political…
I’ve been meaning to create a screencast like this for a long time. Teaching an online lit course is great motivation for churning out these things. 1. What is Literary Close Reading? (0:30) Why a literary close reading doesn’t mean “anything goes” (1:00) 2. Why Do We Read Closely? (1:35) 3. Let’s Read a Text…
Newspapers and their fans make a lot of noise about the professionalism of journalism, that journalism needs to be paid for, that the Internet is no substitute for the hard core objectivity and insightful commentary newspapers offer. and so on. Whether these arguments are true or not does not interest me. I have found…
As gimmicky as “steampunk Huck and Tom” sounds, the characters actually may be quite well suited for steampunk. Twain’s novel Tom Sawyer Abroad was a play on Jules Verne-style adventure stories, and featured a mad professor and his absurd, futuristic airship. And Tom Sawyer had his own mystery story with Tom Sawyer, Detective. However, Twain…
Vote for Carolyn’s Headshot — Round 2. Similar:Rossum's Universal Robots (Act 2)https://youtu.be/XfOONrGsf2I For my b…CultureShe was a musical ingenue Sunday, filmed a slasher movie past midnight Monday, and was pre…DanceProfessoring. With an(other) apple pie cupcake.I touched up and board-ified a presentat…AcademiaSpring and Fall, by Gerard Manley HopkinsMárgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldeng…AestheticsA pleasant find: somebody…
Here’s a fantasy workspace, that I built in Blender 3D, using various Googled images of old books and this awesome steampunk keyboard. Here’s me in my real office. The books aren’t as neat and tidy. I just took some reference photos of the chair… I’ll add it to my fantasy office the next time I…
There’s often a moment in a lit class when a student says, “Since the professor says there’s no single ‘correct’ interpretation of a story, then pretty much anything goes, so I’m going to argue ‘Huck was a girl’ or ‘Hester was a witch.’ ” Of all the possible “correct” answers, the stronger ones are better…