Friends,
If you haven't been reading the Lincoln Studies website (link on the right hand side, a little lower than what it had been before), then you are doing yourself a disservice, especially if you like history.
My friend Sam "Jam" Wheeler recently completed his doctoral dissertation on the poetry of Abraham Lincoln, so I want to say congratulations to the hardest working scholar in Carbondale. He runs Lincoln Studies, and there are really interesting things going on there about Civil War stuff, anniversaries, auctions for Lincolnalia, this fascinating post about Jefferson Davis' 200th birthday (like Alabama turned it into a state holiday and the federal government, the government Davis lead the revolution against, ponied up to help restore one of his houses after it was damaged by Hurricane Katrina), and how Lincoln's name and reputation are being dragged into the current political debate. He has a great post in the May 2008 archives of his site about current politician's need to "Get right with Lincoln" and how modern politicians always try to secure his endorsement in a manner of speaking.
Plus, on Sam's site, he posted this great Fox News blunder:
And some fun parodies of their screw up (in case you didn't know, that's not the right Douglas, and I hope it was the intern who the host that he was outsmarting that put up the wrong picture)
Sam also did a commercial for Google Books and how much he liked it (see video below). Now, I spent some time fussing and a fighting over the Kindle, but Google Books is another feathered horse all together. If you don't know what it is, it's an online resource for people to get whole books for free and previews of other books (with author & publisher consent). It mostly appears to be public record stuff like over at Project Gutenberg, but it brings into question this idea of publishing going completely digital. It's not the free part I'm worried about because it doesn't look like Google books is giving away anything the authors wouldn't want them too. It's just this is another way where physical books, and libraries, are being marginalized. Yes, yes, you'll never kill the book. And man will never fly, right Orville & Wilbur?
viva el mustache
June 11, 2008
My Man Sam Lincoln & Google Books
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
I don't think books or libraries are being marginalized by these new technologies. Google Books has helped me quite a bit in my research. Because Sheehan's career spanned from 1913-78, it's just one more resource for searching a ton of baseball literature in which he might be mentioned. I've found dozens of passages on him via Google Books. Of course, brick and mortar libraries and flesh and blood librarians have also been extremely helpful in my research. Viva technology! Books and Kindles and Google can, should, and will coexist.
And we flesh and blood librarians are happy to help. I'm not a fan of the Kindle, still, but digitization of information will be my future and I embrace it wholeheartedly. Here's to hoping Google Books stocks the four $35 books I need for my first Archives class at UW.
Post a Comment