Global Shortage of Colored Pencils?

26 March 2016 by particularkev

The link below is to an article that looks at a possible shortage of colored pencils.

For more visit:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/03/25/is-there-really-a-global-shortage-of-colored-pencils/

Inside the pages of the oldest comic in the world

20 March 2016 by particularkev

Laurence Grove, University of Glasgow

Here’s a good pub quiz question: what was the world’s first comic?

If you’ve no idea, don’t feel too foolish. It wasn’t even recognised by experts until a few years ago and is still debatable today. But long before Viz, The Beano, Eagle and even Punch, I can answer with reasonable confidence that the accolade goes to the Glasgow Looking Glass of 1825.

The fortnightly publication, which ran over 19 issues for a year starting in June 1825, offered a satirical view of politics and all aspects of life in the city – before broadening to become the Northern Looking Glass from issue six. The cover of the first issue includes a panoramic cartoon that pokes fun at the world powers of the day, including images of John Bull (personifying England) alongside the likes of the King of Prussia and Charles X of France. Next to this is a cartoon entitled “Fashions for June”, which mocks the excessive styles that people were wearing.

The comic was the brainchild of the English satirical cartoonist William Heath, who had reached Glasgow after fleeing from London to escape debts. Often published under the nom de plume Paul Pry, Heath teamed up with lithographic printer Thomas Hopkirk and his print manager John Watson to produce the publication after meeting Hopkirk in one of the city’s drinking dens.

The Looking Glass contained the world’s first comic strip, namely the History of a Coat, whose adventures from owner to owner ran over three episodes. There were many examples of speech bubbles, such as the heated one below between “Billy the Bully and Ranting Dan”.

Billy the Bully and Ranting Dan.
Looking Glass

Well before the environmental movement as we know it was a cartoon entitled: “The Consumption of Smoke”, which gives a futuristic before-and-after imagining of city life without factory smoke. Also eye-catching is the hard-hitting cartoon in the lead image that accompanied an essay on the problem of grave robbing; and the one below that depicts English banks crumbling around a fat John Bull next to thrifty Scotsmen – ironic after the banking crisis in our era.

Other contenders

The Looking Glass was a soaring success, sharply increasing the number of outlets in the first few issues both across the Scottish central belt as well as to Liverpool and London. Its undoing seems to have been its celebrity, with its biting satire making enemies for Heath, who fled back to London at the height of its popularity. He was said to have run up drinking debts. He started a London version of the title but it folded after a few months.

Despite being a trailblazer, the Looking Glass’s claim to be the world’s first comic was overlooked by virtually all historians of the graphic novel until the end of the 20th century. The main previous contender was the Histoire de M. Jabot, which was launched in 1835 by Geneva schoolmaster Rodolphe Töpffer. Jabot tells the story of its central character’s search for love. The tone is burlesque and caricatural, with humour often provoked by the discordance between the pseudo-lofty tone of the text and the slapstick nature of the accompanying images.

Although only intended for Töpffer’s pupils and close friends, the cartoons were popular enough to engender numerous pirate versions and spin-offs. This included North America’s first comic, The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck of 1842 – a year after Punch arrived in the UK.

When I said at the beginning that the Looking Glass’s status as the first comic was debatable, it means ignoring previous examples of narrative heroes like Rowlandson or Hogarth; the speech bubbles used by Isaac Cruikshank and Biblia pauparum; and before-and-afters like the manuscript of Petrarch’s Visions. Depending on how you define “comic”, any of these might be able to stake a claim.

But judging from our 21st-century viewpoint, where we see a comic as something to fold up and take home – something featuring picture stories and available to a mass market – it is hard to argue against the Looking Glass. Jabot is perhaps the world’s first modern graphic novel, though it was not available to the masses of course.

Whatever your point of view, we’re running a four-month exhibition in Glasgow that contains examples of everything I have mentioned – as well as the first copy of Punch and various other artefacts dating as far back as Ancient Egypt. Thanks to a loan from the Kunzle Collection of Los Angeles, we’ll also be able to show the first editions of Oldbuck and Jabot and the original Jabot manuscript side by side for the first time ever.

Töpffer felt that his comics were not worthy of serious attention, let alone academic analysis or gallery displays. This was the way that most people viewed comics until the end of the 20th century. Thankfully the world has now seen the light. Publications like these give us a unique view of society in the early 19th century, and are invaluable in helping us understand how the modern comic came about. Long after the laughing has stopped, they continue to be incredibly important.

Laurence Grove, Professor of French and Text/Image Studies, University of Glasgow

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How reading fiction can help students understand the real world

28 January 2016 by particularkev

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, University of California, Los Angeles

The real world is often overwhelmingly complicated. Literature can help. This is true at universities too: courses in comparative literature offer students new insights into their chosen disciplines by unlocking new, varied perspectives.

How can those studying political science truly grasp the terror of living under a dictator? Perhaps by reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, a magnificent historical novel about the tyrannical Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. Students who read it are unlikely to forget the dizzying Cold War political intrigues that led the US to first support Trujillo and then implement sanctions against him.

In area studies, students must learn about the politics of postcolonial government. Chinua Achebe’s 1966 novel, A Man of the People, explores how rapidly post-independence revolutionary zeal can turn venal as the corrupt, greedy postcolonial elite seizes the reins of power from the coloniser only to further strangle the majority.

I would suggest that teaching these and other subjects – history, economics, sociology, geography and many others – can only be enhanced by including novels, short stories and artistic feature films. Students will also benefit from learning the methods of critical reading that are inherent to literary study. In this article I will explore why this is the case, focusing largely on the important but contested field of international development studies.

Why development is about more than economics

International development studies cries out for a literary component precisely because it is such an ideological and normative subject. “Development” is itself a term that should demand ideological evaluation. It is more than economics. This is made clear by the UN’s Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals. These reiterate that “development” also focuses on cultural change, such as gender equity through empowering women and girls.

But the syllabus of almost any international development studies course contains a heavy dose of development economists: Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs. Or, if the professor is slightly more left-leaning, there will be works by anthropologists like James Ferguson and Arturo Escobar or brilliant political science professor Timothy Mitchell. Why only these? This is an area in which books in the humanities and arts are pertinent, yet one never sees a postcolonial novel on these syllabi.

It is frankly criminal. Development was constituted as a field of study and area of practice during the years of decolonisation after World War II. This was the very same time period which spawned the birth of what is today called postcolonial literature. But international development studies courses seldom broach the fundamental question of what is truly meant by development. Developing to what? For whose benefit? Under whose aegis? This question, however, is interrogated in a vast body of excellent fiction.

I have prescribed Nuruddin Farah’s 1993 novel, Gifts – inspired by Marcel Mauss’ classic ethnography The Gift – to my students. When development aid from powerful countries is donated to impoverished 1980s Somalia, a fine line is walked by both the West which “gives” and the Somalis who “receive.” The book is a long meditation on the tightrope act that teeters between donation and domination. Certainly my students learned more about how it really feels to be the recipient of donor aid from this novel than any of our social science readings, which were mostly written from the donors’ point of view.

Exploring different points of view

This isn’t to suggest that such novels are stand-ins for “native informants”, who are perceived to be experts about a culture, race or place simply because they belong to it. Quite the contrary. They should be read as literature, which literary critics like Mikhail Bakhtin describe as a jumble of competing viewpoints depending on language that always struggles to convey actual truth.

Point of view might be an easier concept for students to grasp at first than Bakhtin’s theory. It is a basic narrative technique that is explored in Literary Criticism 101 because it can change the way a story is told or perceived. In the rich 2006 film Bamako the people of Mali put the World Bank on trial to determine why their poisoned “gift” of development aid has left the country with such a debilitating debt burden.

From the World Bank’s perspective, development might mean one thing but for those “beneficiaries,” it means something quite different. Art has the power to convey that point of view with visceral impact. Isn’t this essential for international development students who aim to help the “other” to “develop”?

Room for myriad insights

The end state of “development,” which is implied but hardly ever explicitly theorised in international development studies, is “modernity” and becoming “modern”. This is a subject on which literature and literary theory can offer myriad insights.

Zakes Mda’s wonderful 2005 novel Heart of Redness depicts the tale of a contemporary village in post-apartheid South Africa. Here, two groups of villagers hold radically different positions on what development means to them. Does it mean street lamps and a casino resort that will bring tourists? Or maintaining a more “traditional,” environmentally-sustainable lifestyle albeit with some “modern” amenities? The villagers’ differing positions are also informed by their different views on their history of colonisation.

History is, of course, essential for understanding any subject. For this reason I’ve not restricted myself to postcolonial literature only in teaching my classes. Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, is an excellent novel for introducing the study of British imperialism which is a prerequisite for understanding our contemporary global cultural economy.

Pushing for positive change

In our globalising world, the stakes could not be higher. Many of our students will end up making policy, allocating aid, driving the global economy. They will change the world. Literature and humanistic thinking enable them to change it for the better.

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, Fublright-Nehru Scholar, Research Associate, Centre for Indian Studies, Wits University, University of California, Los Angeles

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

African libraries that adapt can take the continent’s knowledge to the world

26 August 2015 by particularkev

Lara Skelly, Cape Peninsula University of Technology

South African librarians were shocked in 2013 when one of the top researchers at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology claimed that he no longer needed the library to do his research.

Professor Johannes Cronje’s paper echoed an increasingly common way of thinking. Why, after all, do we need libraries when the Internet does such a good job of providing us with information?

But libraries are not just collection points for information. The best ones also help create it – and those which embrace this role will flourish in a completely changed world. This is particularly true for African libraries: there is more of an opportunity than ever before to bring the continent’s knowledge to the world.

A dual role

Libraries collect information and make it available to a particular community or communities. Some, like church libraries, specialise in collecting certain kinds of information.

The Internet can do exactly the same thing. Anyone can create a collection of information online and make it available to users. And who needs librarians when search engines like Google are on hand to help track down information?

Such technological advances mean that the traditional library is losing customers who just want to find information.

Libraries fulfil another crucial role, though. They help to create information. Modern libraries offer many services that help their users to put information online. Most academic libraries, for instance, have repository services that collate a university’s research output and make it publicly available.

They are extending this service to research data, which will save future researchers from collecting the same data and taxpayers from paying for it again.

These services are becoming common in public libraries as well, through an innovation called makerspaces. Here, users can make items of information. They can create music, produce items using 3D printers or engineer complex designs.

In makerspaces, librarians aren’t helping users to find information from the world. They are helping users to find information in themselves. Libraries should continue to develop services that help people create information.

Eli Neiburger from the Ann Arbor District Library talks about what libraries can do to survive.

In a way, these “new” developments really aren’t that different from what libraries have always done. Libraries curate and disseminate information. In the past, librarians curated information from foreign creators and disseminated it to a local community. Modern librarians curate local information and disseminate it to a foreign community. The flow of information has flipped.

Opportunities for African libraries

African libraries have been slow to embrace this evolution. There are twice as many repositories in Asia as there are in Africa, and ten times as many in Europe. But the continent is slowly gaining ground.

The University of Cape Town is the first in Africa to offer a Masters of Philosophy in Digital Curation. Early in 2015, the University of Pretoria opened up a makerspace, the first educational one on the continent.

The altered role of libraries is a great opportunity to showcase African knowledge. Getting information into the world is easier and cheaper than ever. African libraries need to take up the responsibility of being partners in information creation.

This means that policies must be altered – and, of course, that budgets must be increased. University leaders, decision makers, governments and library users need to understand and support the changes that are reshaping libraries.

Librarians, too, must embrace these changes. They will require new skills to support the creation of information. Many library schools are already responding to these new needs by offering advanced degrees in digital curation.

It will be also be important to reconsider the very physical space of a library. Paper-and-glue book collections are shrinking and, in some libraries, disappearing. These collections have long been the symbol of quiet thinking. Will libraries still be silent spaces of learning without them? How will libraries retain their users’ trust if they are turned into cool cybercafés?

These are some of the tough questions that librarians must answer if they expect their funding to continue and to rise – and if they want to remain relevant well into the future.

Lara Skelly is Librarian: Research Support at Cape Peninsula University of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.