By Brian Mathews. I’m providing space this week to voices from the past and highlighting bold speculations about the future of libraries. Today I want to showcase Angus Snead Macdonald. He was the CEO of a library stacks company that developed standardized shelving. This innovation greatly improved planning since librarians could more easily quantify the physical size of their collections. The stacks were also designed to be lightweight and flexible in order to be moved around and adjusted accordingly. In 1933 he provided The Library Journal with a vision for the future. More...
Voices From The Past Reflecting On The Future (Number 1): Charles Beldon & The Unification of Knowledge
By Brian Mathews. Are we preoccupied with the future? There appears to be a steady stream of articles, books, blog posts, webinars, conference presentations, and other media centered on this theme. It seems we are all fairly focused on what’s next.
I’m guilty myself; the future can be intoxicating. This week I want to offer perspective from a different set of voices. A recent project took me deep into the archives of library lit and along the way I discovered some interesting speculation about the future from librarians in the past. Each day this week I’ll highlight a different visionary who helped shape the profession. More...
The Rise of ‘Educational Sovereignty’
In Search of a Principled Stance on Toleration and Acceptance
By Mazen Guirguis and Pavlina Vagnerova. Opinions are not hard to come by, but merely having a position is not enough. The great achievement is in having a point of view that is defensible, that does not buckle under the pressure of scrutiny. The same is true of belief systems. Most people are interested not only in believing things, but in believing things that are true. The distinction between opinions and correct opinions, beliefs and true beliefs, has important implications, one of which is denying that all beliefs are on an equal footing. Likewise we should reject, without hesitancy or shame, the idea that all beliefs are equally deserving of respect. More...
Mind the Gap (Between Graduate Training and Professional Requirements)
By Ryan Cordell. This post will come out on February 20, one day after digital humanities scholars across the U.S. will have submitted grant proposals to the NEH’s Implementation Grant program. Unlike much humanities work, the digital humanities often require, like the sciences and social sciences, grant funding. This is perhaps a necessary evil. Large-scale digital projects require a range of people with particular technical expertise, and so require funding at a different scale than the individual archival project. So it goes. More...
Android Apps for the Classroom
By George Williams. Two weeks ago I asked readers to share their favorite iPad apps for the classroom, and the comments thread now features several good suggestions. However, here at ProfHacker we’re not interested solely in the iPad as a teaching and learning tool; we’ve also written about Android devices. See, for example, Amy post on “Android for Academics,” Natalie’s “From the Archives: All About Android,” and Ryan’s 3-part series on switching from iOS to Android. More...
175 Years OK
By Allan Metcalf. OK. Mark your calendar now for March 23, OK Day. It’s the day we pause to celebrate the birthday of OK in Boston, Hub of the Universe, on March 23, 1839.
OK?
Yes, OK! How can we sufficiently sing the praises of America’s and the world’s greatest word?
Let’s try. OK is the expression we use countless times every day to make arrangements, give approvals, and get by, often with a cascade of OKs. More...
The Predictive Fallacy
By Ben Yagoda. A cool data-visualization website called Information Is Beautiful has a page titled “Rhetological Fallacies: Errors and manipulations of rhetoric and logical thinking.” Here’s a taste. More...
Coming and Going
By Geoffrey Pullum. I heard a Brazilian iron-ore magnate speaking on a BBC news program about how he had become so rich, and he said that at one point “the price of iron ore came from $10 a ton to $180 a ton.” I realized that there was a subtle mistake in English usage here: Even if the price is still $180 now, we do not say that the price came from $10 to $180; we say the price went from $10 to $180. But why? More...
Do Chicanos Have an Inferiority Complex?
By Ilan Stavans. The etymology of Chicano is surrounded in mystery. I’ve seen its roots traced to Nahuatl, specifically to the term Mexica, as the people encountered by Hernán Cortéz and his soldiers conquering Tenochtitlán in the early quarter of the 16th century where known. In Spanish, the word is pronounced Meshika: the x functions as sh. Mexico, as a nation, opts to look at the Mexicas as their defining ancestors. Curiously, when first registering the name, the missionaries spelled it Méjico, with a j. It transitioned to an x when the country ceded from Spain, becoming independent in 1810. More...