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Resources for the sporting male

At the Providence Public Library a few days ago, I ran across a copy of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. The book gives excerpts and essays from a cache of recently rediscovered newspapers for the “sporting male.”

Seeing the book reminded me of one of my favorite online resources, the digitized version of The National Police Gazette. Yale has the entire run (1845–1906) of this newspaper, keyword-searchable through ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Illustration from the National Police Gazette, October 5, 1901
Illustration from the National Police Gazette, October 5, 1901

The Police Gazette is really not a police gazette; it more often covers burlesque shows, boxing, violent crime, and other bawdiness. One particular specialty is engravings and photographs of burlesque performers.

I always find bawdy humor from bygone ages really entertaining. Plus, I actually did find the Police Gazette useful for a genuine academic purpose, a paper about boxing.

If your library doesn’t subscribe to the digital version of the National Police Gazette (outrageous!), you can still get a taste of it in a fun book, The Police Gazette, edited by Gene Smith and Jayne Barry Smith. Introduction by Tom Wolfe! And if your library doesn’t have that, well, what kind of library is it, anyway?

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Blogging the Beinecke

Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities is a blog featuring amazing finds from Yale’s phenomenal Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I like the lesbian pulp novels, the Revolutionary War-era lottery tickets, and the WPA textbooks from the 1940s. The blog is maintained by Tim Young (curator of the Modern Books and Manuscripts collection) and Nancy Kuhl (curator of poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature).

Riding a moon bat to Saturn (obviously), from Voyage dans la Lune, a 1900 book about lunar travel in the Beineckes collection.
Riding a moon bat to Saturn (obviously), from Voyage dans la Lune, a 1900 book about lunar travel in the Beinecke's collection.

I think a blog is a great way of showcasing a collection, since it portions out awesome finds in manageable chunks. I often feel overwhelmed by the number of digital collections out there, and a blog helps me to process things at a reasonable pace.

Also awesome: the Beinecke produces podcasts about its events and exhibitions. To be honest, I’m not likely to listen to a podcast of an event (although maybe others are?), because an event is an event — designed for the people who are there in person, and not necessarily suited for recording. I’d really like to see them spotlight individual items in the collection, the way they do in the blog, and explore them from a bunch of different angles.

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Getting meta in the classroom

HEY! WAKE UP! Photo by Sara!
HEY! WAKE UP! Photo by Sara!

I’ve been going through some old teaching evaluations and in between cringing (“I hate Miriam!”) and patting myself on the back (“I love Miriam!”) I was struck by one student’s comment.

This was for a film theory section. I think generally the class was successful, but it a) was a theory class and b) took place during late-afternoon dead-time (oh, and c) I’m not exactly Robin Williams), so occasionally the tenor of the classroom would get a little, shall we say, less than wildly enthusiastic. Anyway, this student said, to paraphrase, that when things got slow, “I wish Miriam would have said, ‘HEY! WAKE UP!’ to get our attention.”

Continue reading “Getting meta in the classroom”

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Libraries I like: Brown’s Friedman Study Center

Bright colors make a big difference. Photo by the Brown University Class of 60.
Bright colors make a big difference. Photo by the Brown University Class of '60.

I liked Yale’s Mudd Library for its endearing obsolescence, but for the Study Space of the Future, you can’t beat the Friedman Study Center in Brown University’s Science Library.

The Friedman Study Center, which opened in 2007, is a 24-hour study space designed by the Architecture Research Office. It’s in the basement of Brown’s Science Library, a Brutalist monster that’s about as inviting as a prison. The study center, though, plays against the cave-like, concrete walls of the library with exposed cables, bright colors, and an open atmosphere.

Continue reading “Libraries I like: Brown’s Friedman Study Center”

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My favorite tools: Record and edit audio with Audacity

audacity_logoAudacity is a great choice when you need to edit audio. It’s free, but it’s also pretty full-featured: it can record audio, import and export different file formats, and edit sounds. You can even use it to change the pitch of a recording without altering the tempo, remove static or hiss, or create sound effects.

Personally, I don’t need most of these features, since I’m not about to mix a masterpiece. So for me Audacity’s greatest feature is its user-friendly interface. I can download a Franklin Roosevelt speech from American Rhetoric’s Online Speech Bank, cut it up with Audacity, and drop it into a teaching presentation. Easy!

You can use Audacity with Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems. It’s free, no registration required.

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Wax cylinder recordings

Photograph by Scott Dierdorf.
Photograph by Scott Dierdorf.

(Via MetaFilter.) Syracuse University has started digitizing its Belfer collection of cylinder recordings. So far it has 293 online, but they’re hoping to get 6,000 recordings digitized by the end of the year. You can search the recordings by keyword or browse them by subject (e.g., “Elks (Fraternal Order)” and “Foot’s resolution, 1829”), and you can download the recordings as MP3s or WAV files.

My favorite, hands down, is the 1910 anti-daylight savings song “We Don’t Want More Daylight.” My one tiny criticism is that I wish there was a straightforward list of all the recordings.

Also see U.C. Santa Barbara’s Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project. (To their great credit, the two institutions are comparing notes to ensure they don’t duplicate their online offerings.)

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Dropbox: Sync and share files across multiple desktops

dropbox_logo2

If you work on multiple computers, you probably need a way to get ahold of your files and documents. You could email them to yourself, put them on a USB drive, or use a file server, but it might be easier to use a free service called Dropbox. This service allows you to stick a folder on each of your computers. Whenever you drop a file or document in your Dropbox folder, it’s synced onto every computer where Dropbox is installed.

The cool part is that Dropbox updates whenever you make a change to your documents, so you know you’re working on the latest version. It also allows you to access your files and documents through a Web interface, and it even allows you to recover documents you’ve deleted or changed.

You can also use Dropbox to share files with other users, so it might be a good solution for a collaborative project or to share photos. It works on both Windows and Mac. I learned about Dropbox through Pattern Recognition, whose owner uses the service to set his desktop wallpaper across multiple machines.