VSAWC

The Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada conference, Victorian Humanity and its Others, has come to a close. It was held at Coast Hotel in Vancouver, a location that has, ladies and gents, left me feeling a little nostalgic. I attended my first VSAWC meeting at the Coast in 2009 — my first visit to Vancouver. Fellow Floating Academician Daniel Martin gave me a tour of Stanley Park over a lunch hour and was kind enough to introduce me to the Victorian Studies who’s who of Western Canada.

Since then Daniel has moved east and I’ve moved west. It was great to have mini FA reunion at the conference: Daniel, Jennifer Esmail, and I

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The Nineteenth-Century Novel, Anthropologie Style

Anthropologie rewraps the nineteenth-century novel.
http://www.anthropologie.com

As a follow up to Jennifer Esmail’s interesting posts on the marketing of Victorian novels with classic status through new covers, I wanted to share these books from Anthropologie, which are nineteenth-century classics being marketed for the holiday season solely through their covers.  In the last post, Jen talked about how Victorian novels like Dracula and Wuthering Heights were being repackaged with gothic covers to  appeal to the Twilight generation, and how this underscored that  more traditional covers are also a form of marketing.

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Canadian premiere of Linotype: The Film

[re-posted from www.ischool.utoronto.ca/events/2012/canadian-premiere-linotype-film]

Date: Wed, 2012/11/21 – 7:30pm – 9:00pm

Place: Room 205, Bissell Building, 140 St. George Street, University of Toronto

From cave sketch drawings, to fountain pens with ink wells, to writing with a pencil to a pen, to typewriters, to printing materials, to using computer typesetting, we’ve moved from an oral society, to a written one, to a digital one.

From the late 19th century to the 1970s, Linotype was the industry standard for typesetting and printing newspapers, magazines and posters. Now, the publishing industry uses offset lithography printing.

The Linotype type casting machine was called the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’ by light bulb inventor, Thomas Edison. The Linotype revolutionized printing and society. To celebrate what the machine allowed us to do, the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto is pleased to present the Canadian premiere of Linotype: The Film, a feature-length documentary centered around the charming and emotional story of the people connected to the Linotype and how it impacted the world. Already, premieres from around the world have been sold out.

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Young Adult Readers and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Part Two

About two years ago, we had a conversation on this blog about how some publishers were attempting to capitalize on the popularity of books like Twilight in order to market nineteenth-century fiction to young adult readers. Various publishers were re-packaging books by, for instance, the Brontës’, with covers they thought might be more appealing to young adult readers.

See, for example, the cover of Penguin’s Illustrated Jane Eyre by Goth artist Dame Darcy:

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Zotero!

I have made the resolution to use software to manage my citations more than once.  At the beginning of my MA I took a course on Endnote and dutifully used it to produce my master’s dissertation, which probably wasn’t necessary seeing as it was a twenty-five page dissertation with about thirty works cited.  At the beginning of my PhD, I took a course on Refworks and started gathering material there, but didn’t stick with it.  All in all this was okay; I actually found the recent week I had to spend sorting out my references for that project rather soothing on the whole.  I think it gave me the feeling of being productive without having to reflect on the quality of my arguments and analysis.

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Dickens’s 200th Birthday!

I woke up this morning, opened up my browser to Google, and asked myself if it was Walt Disney’s birthday.  Yes, the sketch on the Google letters that indicates that it’s somebody’s birthday looked like a Disneyfied version of A Christmas Carol, complete with ladies in bonnets with large ribbons and street urchins hanging around gas lamps.  Actually, come to think of it my first exposure to Dickens was probably through Mickey Mouse, so this may be quite fitting!

In celebration of Dickens’s 200th Birthday, here is a round up of links to some of the festivities!

Click here to read free articles on Dickens from Routledge until May.

Click here to see places in the novels in London.  (So sorry I haven’t got the map of where Dickens stayed in Toronto!  I think it was University Ave.)

Click here to sign up for an online conference on Dickens in March.

Click here to search for Dickens in the British Newspaper Archive on a seven day free trial.

Happy Celebrating!

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Links Round-up: Digital Platforms, Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Publishing

In the last few weeks, I have read some thought-provoking articles/essays/posts on scholarly publishing. My ideas are still percolating but I invite you to check out these links and contribute your thoughts in the comments about some of the questions raised by these writers:

If, as the MLA has repeatedly recommended, we should be moving away from the proto-book model of graduate dissertations, what should we be moving towards?

How do we, as scholars, ensure equitable and open access to our published research?

Has it been your experience, like Aimee Morrison’s (below), that “the more you write, the more you write”? (That is, that writing that doesn’t “count” because it isn’t peer reviewed, for instance, can facilitate increased writing output in the kinds of writing that do “count”? )

How have you successfully integrated blogging (and twitter?) into your research and teaching?

How have you been addressing these various issues of access and digital publishing  in your own publishing practices?

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Dracula in Twilight and Goth Janes: Nineteenth-century Young Adult Fiction Today

Dame Darcy's cover for The Illustrated Jane Eyre

Over the past few years, I have come to learn a lot about children’s literature and the reading preferences of young urban children and youth. I am involved with a wonderful organization that provides books free to children in low-income neighborhoods. Books are donated to the organization, which then displays them in a beautiful location in a century home – complete with window seats and fireplaces – and then children browse the shelves and take home one free book every time they come for a visit. The organization serves hundreds of children a day and is a wonderful oasis in the middle of Toronto.

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Victorian Studies e-books and the Future of Scholarly Publishing

Designer Kyle Bean's The Future of Books (c. Kyle Bean, 2009). http://www.kylebean.co.uk

The future of academic publishing is an important and complicated issue that concerns us all and I know that we’re all deeply interested in the ways that scholarly publishers are responding to the economic pressures they face. For most presses, digitality seems to be an attractive cost-saving measure.  The University of Michigan Press, for instance, announced last year that they would be switching their list primarily to digital formats (with a print on demand option) in future. Other presses seem to be experimenting with e-book text access in order to figure out business models that work: indeed, various presses, like the University of Chicago Press, are providing access to specific e-books on their list at no charge.

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