COASTLINE JOURNAL

January 24, 2012

A letter–and an invitation–from the editor

By mid-2011 it was apparent the interest from students and alumni of liberal studies programs in publishing their papers on this site had dried up. As I was working on my MA thesis project, I didn’t have time to write (again) to all the program directors asking if they’d recommend Coastline to their students. Thus, it is currently an archived site, as is obvious from the date of the last two essays, both written by the editor.

I still think this is a worthwhile endeavour, not for myself, perhaps, but for the GLS community, and I would invite anyone interested in becoming the editor of the site–either as a co-editor with me, or by taking over the site–to contact me directly. I also once again extend the invitation to all GLS students, through their instructors, to look through this site, to use the material as inspiration, or to cite it (see example below), or to contribute their essay(s) to the journal.

Until then, I’m working on my thesis, a series of documentary videos on public art.

How to cite an essay found in Coastline Journal:

Author, “Essay Title,” Coastline Journal, an online resource for the Graduate Liberal Studies community, <http://coastlinejournal.org> (access date if your university requires it).

April 20, 2011

The Index of Banned Books

by Sue Ann Whitston

MALS program, University of Michigan Dearborn

download a copy of this paper: The Index of Banned Books

image courtesy the Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University

The Index of Banned Books [editor: Index librorum prohibitorum] saw conflicts and misunderstandings during its history. Though Galileo’s Dialogue did not appear on the list until 1664, the Index of Banned Books began as the Muratorian Canon in C. AD. 170. The Canon declared which New Testament books would be excluded from liturgical usage. Two sources provide conflicting origins. One source, the New Catholic Encyclopedia, placed the composition date during the pontificate of Pius I (AD 14-155) because of the poorly phrased Latin, suggesting a translation from Greek.1 In the second source, Roy Hoover stated Marcion believed the Jewish scriptures should be eliminated from the Christian institutions following the Bar Kochba Rebellion. This kindled the church to determine which secular writings should be placed in the Canon. Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, selected twenty books. The number fluctuated until 631 C.E. when the Roman Emperor Constantine sent a letter to Eusebius to print fifty Bibles. This action settled the debate of what would appear in the New Testament, culled from gospels, dialogues/revelations attributed to Jesus, Jesus’ birth, Acts of the Apostles, homilies and other secular material. The Council of Trent accepted the official Roman Catholic Canon April 8, 1546.2 Since the Protestant Canon differed from the Catholic Canon, a conflict in ideas continued into the present. Essentially, the Muratorian Canon was the first Index of Banned Books. The Inquisition under Pope Paul IV in 1557 wrote the first Index. In 1571, a committee of cardinals and a prelate, under Pope Pius V, established The Assembly on the List of Banned Books. Starting with 22 rules, the committee drafted sixteen, divided into four groups: books written against the Catholic faith, books on superstitions and false moral values, books by anonymous authors and printers whose content could damage the Christian faith, and books inflicting damage on ecclesiastical or civilian reputations.3 In other words, The Assembly scrutinized what people could read, avoiding anything detrimental to what the Catholic Church believed at the time. This was wrong. Unless there were changes, the Index of Banned Books could wield an injustice on people learning. Read the rest of this entry »

March 11, 2011

e-texts and academia

E-texts and e-books and e-readers are becoming ubiquitous. Those of us who grew up with books are probably going to be more resistant to the onslaught, and we needn’t fear that printed books are going to disappear, but already we’ve lost many hundreds of independent bookshops due to online booksellers and now, the e-text revolution.

Amazon recently added “real” page numbers to their Kindle reader, so that one can now have a correspondence between a printed text and its electronic equivalent. This is useful for students who want to use an e-reader but who need to cite the text, especially as the professor will probably have assigned printed, published books for the course.

Take the concept of a page, for example. A page is a block of content divided by what “fits” into a given physical space. If you’ve ever done an essay for a course, you’ve probably changed the amount of content on a page by changing the line spacing or changing the font size. But the page itself rarely represents a semantic break in the content. That is, a page is a page not because it makes sense for the content itself, but because that’s just what happened to fit. (Inkling website)

Exactly–and that’s going to be a problem in classrooms because not every student will be equipped with an e-reader, and those who are, will have different ones. How do you standardize a textbook so that page 245 (or line 3200) in one e-text file is in the same place in another format and reader? How do you cite e-text?

I haven’t even tried an e-reader yet. I just keep ordering books, weighty books which arrive days after I place the order (but an ebook would download in a minute). I like books, but the day when students will be bringing e-readers to class, or reading the text on their laptops, isn’t far off–if it hasn’t already begun…see this Newsweek article.

While Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Chapters/Indigo have reduced prices for most of their e-books, and there are, of course, tens of thousands of free (pre-1923) books, many university publishers, such as the University of California, are still charging printed-text prices on many of their e-titles. The University of Chicago Press offers better prices on downloadable books; each month they offer one title for free.

Of special note is the latest version of Kate L. Turabian’s Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers (fourth edition) which is available from the University of Chicago Press as an e-book: the hardcover version is 39.00, the paperback and ebook retail for 15.00, or only 7.00 if you want a time-limited version (30 day license).

Kobois wi-fi enabled, allowing uploads of library books, epub and pdf files (Chapters/Indigo and Borders). More details here. Barnes and Noble's Nook now offers a full-color screen as well as the greyscale version. Apple has its iPads, but there is an issue of eyestrain, with extended reading using an LCD screen, compared with the e-ink screens of the other readers. But that hasn't deterred a San Francisco developer/publisher, Inkling, which is making textbooks interactive--on the iPad (see update below).Comparisons of the leading eReaders.

For the collection of pdf files–especially scientific papers, but applicable to any kind, Papers (for Mac users) is a great application, letting you browse, download, organize, search, print, annotate and otherwise deal with the hundreds of articles you collect.

While e-reader compatibility, annotation and citation issues have yet to be worked out, this revolution, and the challenges it poses for academia, is going to be in the classroom, and on the faculty agenda, sooner rather than later.

Beyond e-text is the fusing of text and film/video both online and in ebooks. See Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate, and Learning from You Tube.

**UPDATE January 2012: The article above was written in March 2011 and 10 months later it’s already out of date: Apple introduced this month (in this video) free apps to create e-texts (iBooks in their lingo) for the iPad (and iPhone, iPod, and whatever else they come up with). The apps (iBook Author, iTunesU), are free, the iPad starts at $500, which puts another burden on already cash-strapped students and parents. However, it could be argued that one iPad costs about the same as three or four textbooks. You can’t fault them for their marketing genius (even with Steve Jobs gone): a resources page is full of helpful, Apple-oriented tips and programs.