The strangely familiar browsing habits of 14th-century readers - MIT News Office

Today we constantly switch from one text to another: news, blogs, email, workplace documents and more. But a new book by an MIT professor reveals that this is not a new practice: In the 14th century, for instance, many people maintained eclectic reading habits, consuming diverse texts in daily life.

Consider Andrew Horn, the chamberlain for the city of London in the 1320s — meaning he was essentially the lawyer representing London’s interests in court against the king, who was Edward II for most of that time. The bound manuscripts in Horn’s possession, handed down to the city and preserved today, reveal a rich mixture of shorter texts: legal treatises, French-language poetry, descriptions of London and more. Read article....

BBC News - Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English

BBC News - Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English  

By Cordelia Hebblethwaite BBC News, Washington DC

There is little that irks British defenders of the English language more than Americanisms, which they see creeping insidiously into newspaper columns and everyday conversation. But bit by bit British English is invading America too.

"Spot on - it's just ludicrous!" snaps Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley.

"You are just impersonating an Englishman when you say spot on. Will do - I hear that from Americans. That should be put into quarantine," he adds.

And don't get him started on the chattering classes - its overtones of a distinctly British class system make him quiver.

But not everyone shares his revulsion at the drip, drip, drip of Britishisms - to use an American term - crossing the Atlantic. Read more...

Related articles

• The Britishisation of American English (3quarksdaily.com)
• BBC News - Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English (demiurgicdenken.wordpress.com)
• Britishisms used by Americans (mistybarriers.wordpress.com)
• The Britishisation of American English (bbc.co.uk)
• BBC: Geoff Nunberg snaps and quivers (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
• It seems Americans are starting to chat up gingers more and more... (quieterelephant.wordpress.com)
• BBC News - 30 of your Britishisms used by Americans (teacherlingo.com)
• English - UK or US? (dralimanonlife.wordpress.com)
• 30 of your Britishisms used by Americans (bbc.co.uk)
• Americanisms in Britain, Britishisms in America and a house divided at the BBC (economist.com)

Shakespeare: Staging the World: how the British Museum's superb exhibition catalogue brought the Bard to life - Telegraph

Shakespeare: Staging the World: how the British Museum's superb exhibition catalogue brought the Bard to life - Telegraph

Portrait of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, ambassador to England from the King of Barbary (Morocco), unknown artist, England, c. 1600. Photo: Oil on panel. © Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon (University of Birmingham) 

Shakespeare: Staging the World, a new exhibition that uses both artefacts and film to immerse you in the playwright's life and times, opened this week at the British Museum. Not only is the exhibition winning acclaim from the critics, but its catalogue has proved an impressive work of Shakespeare scholarship in itself. Writing in his five-star review earlier this week, Richard Dorment, the Telegraph's chief art critic, said that the exhibition was “one of the best I’ve ever seen” – and that the 304-page book, which features 275 colour illustrations, was “well worth reading for its own sake … once you start you won’t be able to stop.”

Here the book's co-author Dora Thornton, who curated the show along with Jonathan Bate and Becky Allen, writes about the year-long process of bringing it to life.

"What we are attempting in this book – which has been a richly rewarding collaboration between the Shakespearean scholar, Professor Jonathan Bate, and myself – is a series of case studies of some of Shakespeare’s places of imagination.

Although it is intended to underpin the British Museum exhibition, Shakespeare: Staging the World, the book is not an exhibition catalogue, but the product of a substantial body of research in its own right. Book and exhibition mirror one another; in both we feel our way between texts and objects. It was Jonathan’s brilliant idea to structure the book and the exhibition around Shakespeare’s imagined places as an inherently theatrical concept which also takes us neatly through the known chronology of Shakespeare’s plays. Once we had agreed our locations, my task as curator of the exhibition was to people those places and find their distinctive atmosphere. READ WHOLE ARTICLE...

Related articles

• Shakespeare: Staging the World - review
• All the world's a stage in British Museum's Shakespeare show
• London's Olympic summer has a Shakespearean flavor
• Did Shakespeare Hold the First London Olympics?
• British Museum to display Robben Island copy of Shakespeare's works
• Banged-up Bard
• British Museum - Shakespeare Staging the World July 19- November 25th

Walking to 'Middlemarch' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Walking to 'Middlemarch' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

By Sanford Pinsker

I first walked down the streets of Middlemarch and met its vivid inhabitants when I was an earnest 20-year-old English major. For me, George Eliot's classic novel was not an assigned reading in a "British Novel" class; instead, it was the sort of work I took on faith. Middlemarch, I had discovered, was the 19th-century British novel. No self-respecting English major could graduate without reading it, which was incentive enough for me. (Read more...)

Pat Kinsella for The Chronicle Review

Related articles

• The Sunday Salon: Middlemarch, Book IV (Three Love Problems)
• The Best Quotes from Middlemarch

Summer Study Programs for Info Pros & Library Students

Image via Wikipedia

I have learned over the years about the following programs by serendipity and have found that generally they are not particularly well known among special librarians. Despite the fact that times are challenging economically, I thought it might be helpful to compile information about these programs in one email, as they may be of interest to some of our SLA-NY members, both professionals and students. The two programs sponsored by UNC do offer library school credit for one course to students from all library schools .

The University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science (SILS) has sponsored for a number of years two summer study abroad programs, one in England and one in the Czech Republic. The London Seminar is in conjunction with the Department of Information Studies, University College London. The Prague Seminar is in cooperation with Charles University there. Each program is two weeks long and is open to both students and professionals. Students taking either of the Seminars pay an extra fee if they want credit and write a paper (ca 15-20 pages) about some aspect of the seminar. The course credit should be good at any library school.

· The London Seminar, entitled "British Libraries and Librarianship: Past, Present and Future," from May 16th - 29th, 2010, is already full for the summer of 2010, but is accepting applications for the waiting list. Anyone who is interested might want to keep an eye on the website early in 2011. This Seminar is new and replaces one that SILS held in conjunction with Oxford University for many years.
http://sils.unc.edu/programs/international/london.htm

· The Prague Seminar, entitled "Libraries and Librarianship in the Czech Republic," is from May 23 - June 5, 2010, and still has openings.
http://sils.unc.edu/programs/international/prague.html

Rare Book School (RBS), located at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, offers a wide variety of one-week summer courses in Charlottesville in June and July 2010. Continuing-education opportunities are available for professionals and students from many disciplines and levels to study the history and preservation of written, printed, and digital materials with leading scholars and professionals in the field. RBS was founded (in 1983) and directed for many years by Terry Belanger, a professor at the former Columbia University School of Library Service. RBS moved to its present home at the University of Virginia in 1992. Terry was honored in 2005 as a MacArthur fellow (AKA "MacArthur Genius Award") for his efforts to preserve one of the great inventions of humankind: the book. Recently retired, Terry still teaches at RBS.
http://www.rarebookschool.org/schedule/

The London Rare Book School, which is part of the Institute of English Studies in the University of London, offers one-week courses in two sessions: June 28 - July 2 or July 5 - 9.
http://ies.sas.ac.uk/cmps/events/courses/LRBS/index.htm

For more information, please check the websites. If you have any questions, I am happy to try to answer.

Thanks and best, Leigh Hallingby lhallingby@sorosny.org