To assist our students as they prepare for finals, the library is adding the third floor as another Quiet Floor, beginning April 16 and running through May 2. The fourth floor remains as the Quiet Floor throughout the academic year.
The Thorpe Center, location of the ITS Help Desk and our graphic design software and Macs, will not be designated as Quiet space. In addition, the Library will open at 10:00 a.m. on April 23 and April 30.
On this Theme Thursday we look into one of the most classic works in children’s literature, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. “Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), which was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Alcott wrote the books rapidly over several months at the request of her publisher. The novel follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood, and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters. Little Women was an immediate commercial and critical success, and readers demanded to know more about the characters. Alcott quickly completed a second volume, entitled Good Wives. It was also successful.
“The two volumes were issued in 1880 in a single work entitled Little Women. Alcott also wrote two sequels to her popular work, both of which also featured the March sisters: Little 
Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Although Little Women was a novel for girls, it differed notably from the current writings for children, especially girls. The novel addressed three major themes: “domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interdependent and each necessary to the achievement of its heroine’s individual identity.” Little Women “has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth”, but also “as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well”.
“According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from Romantic children’s fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new format. Elbert argued that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the “All-American girl” and that her multiple aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters…” from Amazon.
A couple days ago, a visually compelling thread on Twitter exploded with thousands of shares and likes and dozens of users submitting their own contributions. The thread (a series of connected tweets for the Twitter uninitiated) has become an evolving photo essay of women activists standing up to walls of militarized riot police and mobs of angry bigots. The photos feature subjects like Tess Asplund, Leshia Evans, and Saffiyah Khan, and historical inspirations like Gloria Richardson and Bernadette Devlin. Many of the subjects are unknown or unnamed, but no less iconic. These images, from all over the world, of women standing defiantly and often alone, against heavily armed and armored, mostly male power structures inspire and, in the case of children like Ruby Bridges, can break your heart.
Read more here.
Everyone uses it but maybe you don’t want to admit it. Wikipedia is a great resource for familiarizing yourself with a new topic, and for non-academic purposes it’s great for understanding a new thing. You probably know you can start with Wikipedia, but when working on academic assignments, your research should go beyond and incorporate scholarly sources.
But maybe you just want to learn about something not related to course work. How do you start to evaluate what you’re reading? Lucky for you, Wikipedia has a great resource on evaluating their articles. Check it out!
On this Theme Thursday, we focus on Pioneer Work in Opening Medicine Women, which focuses on women in medicine and shines the spotlight on their accomplishments, specifically Elizabeth Blackwell, first woman doctor.
“Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman ever educated in an American medical school. This is a story of success by perseverance and personal sacrifice. She has no funding: she goes on. She has no mentors: she goes alone. She has no money for a cab: she walks. She
wears out her shoes and avoids places where she can’t look shabby. She loses an eye, and gives up her dream of being a surgeon, embracing general medicine instead. She endures insults, humiliation, and profound loneliness. But she believes she is making a future possible for American women doctors, so nothing, nothing stands in her way for long. And I thought medical school was hard! The old farts who harassed us women med students in the 1980’s could only dream of tormenting us like 19th century gentlemen tormented her. I would love to be able to thank her, both for making life better for women, and for her beautifully written and amazingly upbeat book about breaking the bonds. ” from Amazon.
We’ve talked about ways to identify bias in individual sources like books and articles in magazines and journals. But what if we take it to a meta level and talk about the bias that may or may not come about when some manuscripts are published and others are not.
Peer review is the process through which experts in a field ensure the quality of a publication and it is largely successful. That doesn’t mean it isn’t flawed, however. Getting published isn’t easy and some manuscripts have been denied publication because the theories or ideas presented don’t match with editors’ or reviewers’ perspectives.
This kind of bias is called publication bias, and some argue it can affect how facts come to be in science. Here’s an excerpt from a recently published piece:
“Arguing in a Boston courtroom in 1770, John Adams famously pronounced, “Facts are stubborn things,” which cannot be altered by “our wishes, our inclinations or the dictates of our passion.”
But facts, however stubborn, must pass through the trials of human perception before being acknowledged—or “canonized”—as facts. Given this, some may be forgiven for looking at passionate debates over the color of a dress and wondering if facts are up to the challenge.
Carl Bergstrom believes facts stand a fighting chance, especially if science has their back. A professor of biology at the University of Washington, he has used mathematical modeling to investigate the practice of science, and how science could be shaped by the biases and incentives inherent to human institutions.”
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2016-12-scientific-facts-false.html#jCp
Virginia Woolf was a revolutionary English writer, her name withstanding the test of time.
“In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—a sister 
equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling.
“In this classic essay, she takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a fixed income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.”
