Posts tagged books

The Big Map of North American English Dialects

The map and page might look like a mess, but the North American English Dialects Map is fascinating mess to go through.

With English dialects throughout North America, audio samples, linguistic explanations and more, it’s a great place for language fans to spend their time.

Have You Seen this Book?

Lexicographers, philologists and bibliophiles unite: there’s a book that needs to be found.

As the Oxford English Dictionary overhauls its dictionaries it’s reexamining the more than 300,000 entries in the OED. Sometimes though, the original sources are hard to find. Case in point, Meanderings of Memory by Nightlark, which is referenced 49 times from 1852. The OED can’t find the book in its catalog or databases. All it has to work with is the fragment seen above from a bookseller.

Via Sasha Weiss in the New Yorker:

I asked Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press, about how the search had come about. Her answer amounted to a mini-history of the O.E.D.’s longtime practice of calling on the general public to aid its lexicographers. “We like to say the O.E.D. has been crowdsourcing since before there was a word for crowdsourcing,” she said.

In 1879, James Murray, a leading member of the British Philological Society who edited the first edition of the O.E.D., put out “An Appeal to English Speaking Readers,” asking for volunteers to comb through periodicals, pamphlets, works of literature, and scientific and philosophical treatises, and note down unusual words and to quote the sentences in which they appeared. “Anyone can help,” Murray wrote, “especially with modern books.” Readers took down their findings on six-by-four index cards—called “slips”—and submitted them to the dictionary’s editors. Over a million quotations were collected before the publication of the dictionary’s first installment. (The practice has continued, with a few lapses, since then—now it exists in digital form.) According to the O.E.D.’s Web site, “The quotations are one of the most important aspects of the entries contained in the OED. They document the history of a term from its earliest to its most recent recorded usage.”

So, word nerds, the hunt is on. A global search for a single book.

Image: Catalog entry for Meanderings of Memory, via the OED.

Waiting on Perfection

See the Slate series, Daily Rituals: Life Hacking Tips from Novelists, Painters and Filmmakers.

For example:

[P]erhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.

This idea comes up over and over again in the book. William Faulkner: “I write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day.” George Balanchine: “My muse must come to me on union time.” Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” John Updike: “I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.” George Gershwin said that if he waited for inspiration, he would compose at most three songs a year.

All very true. All very hard to learn.

Hello, Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America launched today with “photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States.”

Its goal is to create “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in current and future ­generations.”

Exhibitions are here. And your inner hacker can access the DPLA’s API here. Yes, the library has an API, which is awesome. One app currently using it is the Library Observatory:

Library Observatory is an interactive tool for searching and visualizing the DPLA collections, accompanied by an interactive documentary that weaves together history, visualizations, and audio about the making, use, and enduring significance of library data and the collections they describe.

Another app searches both the DPLA and Europeana, a European project similar to it, simultaneously giving results from each.

Start exploring.

Ireland’s Central Bank Issues Commemorative Coin to Celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses, Misquotes the Text

The bank inserted an extra word (“that”) into a sentence taken from Ulysses. Not the biggest error, but still.

“While the error is regretted,” the bank said in a statement, “it should be noted that the coin is an artistic representation of the author and text and not intended as a literal representation.”

Meantime, some Joyce scholars think its fun. Via the Guardian:

Mark Traynor, manager of the James Joyce Centre, which is dedicated to promoting the author’s life and work, called the slip-up “unfortunate”, but said there was “certainly a humorous side to it too (no ‘flip side of the coin’ pun intended)”.

“For one thing, Joyce was an author who embraced errors. As Stephen remarks in Ulysses, ‘A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery’,” said Traynor. “So if there is any value in the little mistake by the minters it is that it has bred a new, unexpected narrative. What should have been a fairly mundane launch of a commemorative coin has suddenly reached a much wider audience than expected.”

It also just goes to show, Traynor added, “that – even after the cessation of copyright on Joyce’s major works – you still can’t reproduce a couple of sentences without causing a bit of scandal”.

Image: Front and back of the Ulysses commemorative coin.

Calvin and Hobbes Nursery Complete with Fort for Sleeping

Via Reddit