Category Archives: Events

Edible Book Festival, April 1st

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EdibleBookFestival The 9th Annual Edible Book Festival will take place on Tuesday, April 1, 2014 at the University YMCA in Champaign (1001 South Wright Street). According to the Library News & Events website,

“Edible art entries have a connection to books as shapes or content. Prizes will be awarded for the best culinary creations—which will be displayed, judged, and consumed. As I Lay Frying, The Bundt for Red October, The Pie Who Loved Me, and The Lord of the Fries were among the entries last year.”

Each year the festival features a special category; this year the special category is Banned Books. This year’s Edible Book Festival is sponsored by the University Library. For more information, please visit the Edible Book Festival website.

 

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February 7: Worlding Realisms

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Worlding Realisms is a one-day symposium hosted by the Unit of Criticism and Interpretative Theory on realist fiction, photography, film, and television. The event will be held on Friday, February 7th at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center on the UIUC campus.

The keynote will be given by Jed Esty (Penn), and many prominent scholars will participate as panelists including Ulka Anjaria (Brandeis), Ayelet Ben Yishai (Haifa), Colleen Lye (Berkeley), Sean O’Sullivan (Ohio State), Miriam  Thaggert (Iowa) and Terri Weisman (Art History).  The event will culminate with a roundtable moderated by Eleanor Courtemanche with responses from Harriet Murav (Slavic), Safiya Noble (GSLIS), François Proulx (French), and Rob Rushing (Italian/Media & Cinema Studies).

In preparation for this event, the Unit for Criticism is hosting a 2-meeting seminar on January 27 and February 3.  Readings and more information about the seminar can be found at http://criticism.english.illinois.edu/2014%20Spring%20pages/Seminar_Spring2014.html.

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Introduction to Text Encoding with TEI workshop

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Spend a weekend learning about the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup language, an important tool for digital humanities research! Take the “Introduction to Text Encoding with TEI” workshop at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) and learn the fundamentals of using XML for research, teaching, electronic publishing, and management of digital text collections. This hands-on workshop will be taught by Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman, experts known for their work on the Women Writers Project. During the two-and-a-half day course, participants will learn how to work with XML technologies to develop digital representations of texts using the TEI standard. The workshop will take place in the GSLIS building, beginning Friday, February 21 and ending Sunday, February 23, 2014.

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Schedule, Cost, and Registration
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Participants will meet in the GSLIS Learning Resource Lab for an introductory session on Friday evening and two full-day sessions on Saturday and Sunday. Participation is currently limited to 30 people seated at desktop workstations. Those bringing laptops will need to install a free trial version of the Oxygen XML editor – available from http://www.oxygenxml.com – on their computer prior to attending the workshop. Participants without prior markup experience will be asked to introduce themselves to TEI and XML by reading through a short suggested reading list, provided after registration.

Per person, the cost of the workshop is

  • $30 for current UIUC students;
  • $125 for UIUC faculty, staff, and alumni;
  • $300 for non-UIUC affiliates.

You must sign up and pay in advance to attend. To reserve your spot and begin the registration process, please email tei-workshop@illinois.edu with the following information:

  • your address,
  • phone number,
  • University of Illinois ID number
    • (if you are an alumni, your year of graduation)
    • (if you aren’t affiliated with the U of I, the name of the institution with which you are affiliated); and
  • whether you will bring your own laptop, and, if so,
    • which operating system you will use.

Those interested in attending the workshop are encouraged to register early as space is limited and the course fills up quickly. A registration waitlist will be kept after capacity is exceeded. Participants cancelling their reservation on or before February 14, 2014 will receive a 50% refund of their registration fee. Following this date, no refunds will be given.

This year’s workshop is co-organized by Ashley M. Clark and Megan Senseney. If you have any questions, please contact us at: tei-workshop@illinois.edu or (217) 244-5574.

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About the Text Encoding Initiative
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A seminal effort in the digital humanities community, the TEI is “an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent.” Allen Renear, GSLIS professor and interim dean, and John Unsworth, former GSLIS dean, have long been involved with the TEI community, and use of TEI markup is growing steadily. More information on the TEI can be found at the TEI Consortium website: http://www.tei-c.org/.

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About the Instructors
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Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman are active participants within the TEI and the Association for Computers and the Humanities. They have led numerous workshops, teaching the TEI standard to diverse groups at all levels of technical accomplishment. Julia and Syd work on the Women Writers Project (http://www.wwp.brown.edu/), a major text encoding effort of Northeastern University’s Digital Scholarship Group. Julia is Director of the Women Writers Project, as well as Professor of the Practice of English at Northeastern University. Syd is Senior Analyst for the Women Writers Project and former North American Editor of the TEI Guidelines.

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“Mad Men, Mad World Talk” at Chicago Humanities Festival in March Now Online

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In March of this year, Duke University Press published the first collection of scholarly essays on the critically-acclaimed television series Mad Men, entitled Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s. On March 26th, the Chicago Humanities Festival, in association with Time Out Chicago, The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University, and the U of I’s Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, hosted an hour-long talk about the book project with its three editors, the U of I English Department’s Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert Rushing. The talk was moderated by WBEZ host Alison Cuddy. It has now been posted to the Chicago Humanities Festival’s YouTube page and can be accessed here.

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The Great Gatsby Now in Movie Theaters

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The second-highest grossing film at the box office this weekend–trailing only Iron Man 3–was The Great Gatsby, which earned an estimated $50.1 million. Not bad at all for a film with no explosions, car chases, or vampires. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, this 3D adaptation stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the title character (Jay Gatsby), Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway. The film is, of course, a star-studded adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s most popular novel, which was first published in 1925. A copy of the first English edition of the novel from 1926 is currently housed at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Fitzgerald is generally regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the Modernist period, and is the face of the so-called “Jazz Age,” a term he coined. Along with The Great Gatsby, he also penned such notable works as “May Day” (1920), This Side of Paradise (1920), “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922), “Babylon Revisited” (1931), and Tender is the Night (1934). The Literatures and Languages Library has nearly 100 primary and secondary resources by or about Fitzgerald.

Fewer people are familiar Fitzgerald‘s flirtations with Hollywood. He wrote, revised, and consulted on numerous scripts in the 1920s and 1930s. Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation is the fourth full-length rendering of the novel for the big screen. The first version, released in 1926, has been lost. A 1949 version, starring Alan Ladd as Jay Gatsby, was made, as well as a more popular version in 1974, starring Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan.

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April Exhibits Up at the LitLang Library

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For April, the Literatures and Languages Library has installed two new exhibits on display in the Periodicals area on the South end of the Main Library Reading Room.

Cyberpunk is the focus of the first exhibit. Cyberpunk, a postmodern brand of science fiction that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, often focuses on detritus-strewn dystopian landscapes where corporate interests dominate, leaving rogue hackers and outsiders to find ways of infiltrating and upending these new, technologically oppressive establishments. The grungy underworld in which these fictions often take place are contrasted with the use of incredible technology in ways unanticipated by its creators, blurring the line between actual and virtual reality. These tropes are especially intriguing to think about today as the Internet increasingly influences the lives of humans. Elements of Cyberpunk continue to influence literature and media in the genre of science fiction and beyond.

Since April is when the Major League Baseball season begins each year, we focus on The Literature of Baseball for our second exhibit. Known as “America’s pastime” for over a century, the exhibit focuses on fictional and non-fictional renderings of the sport and how it has played an important part in the myth of America. Widely known texts such as Bernard Malamud’s 1953 novel The Natural and Roger Kahn’s non-fictional account of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, The Boys of Summer (1972), sit alongside a book about Toni Stone, the first female to play baseball in the Negro Leagues when she debuted with the San Francisco Sea Lions in 1949, and a lesser known Philip Roth book, with the tongue-in-cheek title The Great American Novel (1973), about a home-less team that must play all their games on the road.

Both exhibits will be on display until the end of the month.

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MEMORY/MEMOIR: Readings and Discussion

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Come to the Humanities Lecture Hall at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Building (located at 805 W. Pennsylvania Ave.) at 7:30 p.m. on February 27th for MEMORY/MEMOIR: Readings and Discussion. Members of U of I’s Creative Writing faculty will read from their work. Readers include LeAnne Howe and Audrey Petty. Afterward, Robert Ramirez will lead a discussion on the role of memory and memoir in the humanities. For more information about the event, visit this link.

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February Exhibits at the LitLang Library

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The Literatures and Languages Library has two exciting new exhibits up in the Literatures and Languages Periodicals area, on the south end of Main Library Reading Room, for the month of February.

The first exhibit, Black Science Fiction Writers, celebrates Black History Month by examining the contributions of African American authors to the science fiction genre. Works by writers throughout the 20th and 21st century–including Octavia Butler, George Schuyler, Walter Mosley, and Nisi Shawl–are on display.

To celebrate Presidents Day, The Presidency and American Literature is the focus of our other exhibit. It focuses on texts by notable literary figures–such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Adams, and Carl Sandburg–who wrote about the American presidency in one form or another.

These exhibits will be on display until the end of the month.

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Digital Humanities Symposium, October 4th

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Digital Humanities Symposium

Library Scholarly Commons, 306 Library

October 4, 2012, 8:30 a.m. – noon

Please join us on October 4th for the Digital Humanities Symposium at the Scholarly Commons to learn more about digital humanities concepts, tools, and current research projects at UIUC!

This half-day morning symposium on October 4th will feature talks and break-out sessions by UIUC faculty pursuing digital humanities research, including Professors Ted Underwood, Dianne Harris, Donna Cox, and Mara Wade.  The symposium will cover topics such as:

– BiblioTech: digital humanities at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library

– Visualization tools in digital humanities

– Graduate education and digital humanities

– Emblematica Online: a NEH-funded collaborative project in digital humanities

– Text mining tools and research

– Omeka in research and teaching

– Library services and tools for data research and data curation

– Working with I-CHASS and finding funding for your research projects

– Images and digital scholarship

Participants may be limited due to space constraints. Coffee and breakfast refreshments will be provided. If you have questions, please contact Harriett Green at green19@illinois.edu or Sarah Christensen at schrstn@illinois.edu. We look forward to seeing you on October 4th!

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The Work of Jorge Luis Borges Comes to Life

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One particular display from the London 2012 Festival that caught our attention here at the Literature and Languages Library is aMAZEme, an awe-inspiring installation dreamed up by Brazilian artists Marcos Saboya and Gualter Pupo. Click here to see some great images of the piece. The architectural sculpture is made out of a whopping 250,000 books and is inspired by the fiction of the Argentinian writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Borges’ work regularly deploys library and labyrinthine motifs. In fact, one of his most popular collections translated for English is titled Labyrinths (1962, tr. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby). Reportedly, Saboya and Pupo designed their massive book labyrinth to the design of Borges’ fingerprint.

UIUC Libraries have over 250 books authored by Borges, including Ficciones (1944), his most popular book.

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