General

Please join us for the opening of The Ramp Gallery’s spring exhibit: Topophilia: A Love of Place.

Opening remarks at 2pm on Friday, February 22.

The Ramp Gallery is located in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, basement level.

Curated by Blanche Froelich, ’19, the Ramp Gallery features student art work from all four class years.

Have research to do over break?  Most of the Library’s databases can be accessed anywhere in the world with your Bowdoin ID.   Just use our A-Z list of databases and you’ll be prompted with a login screen where you enter your Bowdoin credentials.

More information is found at https://library.bowdoin.edu/research/off-campus-access-to-databases.shtml

Questions?  Ask us!

Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, Nixon Lounge
Thursdays at 4:30 pm

September 27th
Meredith McCarroll, Director of Writing and Rhetoric
Unwhite:  Appalachia, Race, and Film (University of Georgia Press)

October 25th
Christopher Chong, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Coherent Structures in Granular Crystals: From Experiment and Modeling to Computation and Mathematical Analysis (Springer)

December 6th
Connie Chiang, Professor of History and Environmental Studies
Nature Behind Barbed Wire:  An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration (Oxford University Press)

January 31st
Emma Maggie Solberg, Assistant Professor of English
Virgin Whore (Cornell University Press)

March 7th
Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (University of California Press)

April 25th
Doris Santoro, Associate Professor of Education
Principled Resistance:  How Teachers Resolve Ethical Dilemmas (Harvard Education Press) and Demoralized:  Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay (Harvard Education Press)

The Library invites you to the Ramp Gallery’s opening reception for Creating with Light and Time: Explorations in Non-Narrative Video.

We’ll be showing non-narrative videos created in Erin Johnson’s digital media class, along with stills from the videos. The show’s opening will include the work of six students.

Curated by Blanche Froelich, ’19.

Open to the public. Refreshments will be served. You’ll find The Ramp Gallery in the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, basement level.

October 18, 2018
4:30 PM — 6:00 PM

Improvements are coming to Hawthorne-Longfellow and Hatch Science Library!

Hawthorne-Longfellow Library

Research Desk
The Research Desk will be relocated near the entrance to the Research Lab, on the south side of the 1st floor. The move, along with new and configured furniture, will facilitate interactions between liaisons and library users. Soft seating will be installed in the space currently occupied by the existing desk.

College Test Center
A new facility, the College Test Center, will be created on the south side of the 2nd floor. The Center will provide a controlled environment designed to support students who have approved accommodations for disabilities or require other special arrangements for test taking. When not scheduled for exams—during most evenings and weekends—the space will be available to the student community for quiet study. Overseen by Lesley Levy, Director of Student Accessibility, the Test Center will not only meet a long-standing need at the College but will be a welcome addition to H-L’s student-centered resources.

Faculty Study Commons
A Faculty Study Commons will be created adjacent to the current Faculty Research Room on the north side of the 2nd floor. This new space, which will replace existing faculty studies, will provide carrels, soft seating, and bookshelves to support individual study and research. The adjacent Research Room, which will be connected directly to the Study Commons, will be newly furnished as a collaborative space.

Exhibit Gallery
The 2nd floor exhibit gallery will be reconfigured with new, state-of-the-art exhibit cases installed in the floor’s central area. In place of the existing cases, soft seating will be provided around the two interior light wells.

Carpeting
New carpet will be installed throughout the 2nd and 3rd floors.

Hatch Science Library

Library Entrance
The former reference desk and adjacent shelving will be removed and replaced with soft seating.

Carpeting
New carpet will be installed in the circular stairwell that connects the ground through 2nd floors of the library.

Over the course of the academic year, our Research and Instruction Librarians provided direct support for 150 unique courses and hundreds of student research projects.  Of particular note this semester was the collaboration between Professor of History Patrick Rael and Marieke Van Der Steenhoven, Special Collections Education and Outreach Librarian. History in the Archives, a new capstone seminar in the History Department, developed and taught by Professor Rael in close collaboration with Van Der Steenhoven, allowed upper level students to experience the excitement and challenges of conducting original historical research through a deep dive into Bowdoin’s remarkable archives and manuscript collections.  Through group discussions, hands-on activities, practicums, guest lecturers, readings, and other pedagogical approaches, the seminar’s ten students were introduced to the fundamentals of archival research, and in the process, how to form solid research questions, recognize leads, and then follow them out across collections.  Each then chose an area of research well represented in Bowdoin’s vast holdings with the objective of writing a 25- to 30-page paper on topics including slavery, the Civil War, missionary encounters with Native American communities, the Cuban Revolution, the Medical School of Maine, and the 1970 student strike at Bowdoin.

History in the Archives was one of over 52 courses from 20 areas of study that engaged with Special Collections & Archives this year.  From one-off visits to weekly meetings, students interacted with a variety of primary sources, and many faculty developed specific research assignments around SC&A holdings.  In April, the SC&A reading room saw 143 student researchers working on projects that ranged from selecting historic photographic material for a pop-up exhibit to using the College records to explore issues in gender and sexuality to inspire zines.

Faculty interactions with staff in Special Collections & Archives represents but one category of faculty-librarian collaborations in support of student learning.   This year Research and Instruction Librarians shared their subject expertise in courses ranging from First Year Seminars and introductory classes to capstone seminars that represent virtually all of Bowdoin’s academic departments and programs. Instruction was conducted in the classroom, individually, and in small groups in our new Research Lab on a wide variety of subjects including historical game simulations, food and fashion in China, nuclear proliferation, border education, documentary films, genomes, and the American presidency. One area of particular interest—one that crosses disciplinary boundaries—is the increasing focus on integrating data into research assignments.  During this semester alone, faculty in Digital and Computational Studies, Computer Science, Mathematics, Environmental Studies, Economics, Government and Legal Studies, History, and Asian Studies, incorporated numeric or text data into their courses.  The broad support the Library provides for data-focused courses is exemplified by the collaboration between Research and Instruction Librarian Barbara Levergood and Eileen Johnson, Lecturer in Environmental Studies, for students enrolled in Johnson’s The Nature of Data: Introduction to Environmental Analysis. In this class, the students were asked to collect and analyze data using one or more methods including text analysis, spatial analysis, or social network analysis in order to address an environmental social science research question. As the students embarked on their research projects, Levergood provided in-class instruction and an online guide tailored to the assignment.  Students were asked to reflect on the importance of understanding the corpus of data available to them, crafting search queries with intention, the value of documentation, and the evaluation of methods employed by published studies.  Research projects focused on a wide range of topics including a sentiment analysis on immigration and perceptions regarding gun control.

For more information and to hear directly from faculty about the ways in which the library supports teaching and research, visit our Stories from Faculty page.

The Library just wrapped up a celebration of National Poetry Month, during which daily pop-up poetry readings were held under Alexander Calder’s Red Fossils mobile in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.  Every weekday at noon, a student, faculty, or staff member read a favorite—or sometimes, an original—poem to an appreciative audience.  Readers from across campus shared poems that resonated with them, a surprisingly intimate and often profoundly moving experience for the listeners.  Those of us who “took ten” to hear a reading can testify to the enduring power of poetry; see the list of the readers and their chosen poems below.  The series was dedicated to the memory of Professor of English Celeste Goodridge, who passed away in March.

Our thanks to all who participated!

Please join us for the last of this spring’s book launches, hosted by the Library. Professor Saiber will discuss her new book, “Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy” with Aaron Kitch, Associate Professor of English.

May 3, 2018 | 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM | Hawthorne Longfellow Library, Nixon Lounge

Refreshments will be served. Free and open to the public.

Students Quyen Ha and Sabina Hartnett text-mined German sources to reveal trends in discourse. Professor Birgit Tautz explains…

In summer 2017, Quyen Ha and I worked together as part of a Gibbons Fellowship that Quyen won. I’ve long been interested in popular discourse on China in 18^th century German language newspapers and journals — unlike established then-and now-famous literary texts — the popular often remains anonymous, is repeated, stolen, translated or republished without attribution of source. (There was no copyright law in the 18^th century!) So I had a hunch that the journals may help us explain how the image of China in German lands morphed from one that was largely positive and respectful, in part because of China being perceived as an ancient harbor of philosophy, to one that turned increasingly negative, irrational and into sinophobia. Quyen wrote a program that assisted with text recognition, making old German print legible, and “mined the data,” leading to sets and patterns waiting to be explored. She applied topic modeling and created data sets that I not only used in a seminar on 18^th century German literature but that we are now interpreting: and the patterns we find reveal a much more complicated image of China than we expected.

Sabina Hartnett brings her far-ranging expertise in digital and computational studies (DCS) to her honors project in German. Her topic is very timely and revolves around the public discourse on refugees in Germany today, but also in historical perspectives. Here, the historical data serve to illustrate how concepts and words became engrained in the German language, were eclipsed or promoted by massive dictionary projects of the 19^th century and resurrected, popularized, and emotionally invested in recent years. She shows in fascinating ways how data may help us understand how people think and talk and become politically enshrined and invested in closed-off ways of thinking.

In both projects, digital and computational studies methods help us to read in new ways and open up to debate long-standing truisms.  And in the future, we look forward to applying DCS methods to the new database, German Literature Collections, for which the Library purchased the text-minable file.

Please join us as Scott MacEachern, professor of anthropology, discusses his new book, Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa.

This is the second event this semester in the Library’s book launch series.

March 1, 2018 | 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM | Hawthorne Longfellow Library, Nixon Lounge

Refreshments will be served. Free and open to the public.