Get Ready for a Night Full of Fun: WorldFest Trivia Night

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Who doesn’t like trivia? Trivia contests offer a wonderful way to learn interesting facts and show what you know. Even if you don’t feel confident enough to compete you can always watch seasoned participants, learn some new, possibly surprising facts, connect with people, and have fun.

A library seems a natural place for a trivia contest. We are looking forward to welcoming everyone to our 3rd annual Trivia Night co-hosted by the UC Quiz Team and UC Libraries as part of the Worldfest 2018 program.

Here are the prizes you can win:

Some attendees are getting into a competitive mood and asking to share questions from past years in order to be better prepared.We have posted a link to last years’ quizzes at our Facebook event page. Please visit the page for information and updates.

Last but not least, there will be plenty of snacks and pizza for everyone!

Data Cleaning with OpenRefine – Workshop on Feb 26

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UC Libraries is pleased to offer a data science workshop this spring on OpenRefine. Join us in 850D Baldwin Hall (CEAS Library classroom) on Monday, February 26 from 2:00pm – 4:00pm.  Register here (UC 6+2 Central Login required).

OpenRefine, http://openrefine.org, is a free, powerful, and easy-to-use tool for cleaning up and transforming datasets in order to prepare them for analysis and sharing. In this workshop, you will learn how to leverage OpenRefine’s interface and scripting language for basic data exploration and bulk transformations. No prior knowledge necessary.  Please bring your own laptop for the hands-on exercises.

Contact Ted Baldwin with questions, Ted.Baldwin@uc.edu .

Talking About “Style” and the UC Alum Behind It

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By:  Kevin Grace

Strunk Cover     If you took a composition course in America, chances are you were faced with the seminal book in writing well, William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style.  And if you were fortunate, you had a high school teacher or college professor whose teaching could match the plain elegance and helpful guideposts of this little book.  The Elements of Style is arguably the most referenced guide to writing in American education.

But how many of us know the story behind this famous text?  Chances are we’re all familiar with E.B. White, the decades-long columnist for the New Yorker and the author of modern classics like Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, One Man’s Meat, The Second Tree From the Corner and a host of other books.  Curmudgeonly almost to a fault and a writer with uncommon regard for the simple declarative sentence, White was one of the great literary stylists of the 20th century.  And William Strunk?  He happened to be an English professor at Cornell University during White’s undergraduate days, White graduating from Cornell in 1921.  Strunk developed a little handbook for writing that he used in his classes and decades later White wrote an essay for The New Yorker about Strunk’s lessons for usage and style.  At the urging of a publisher, White revised Strunk’s work, added an introduction and The Elements of Style was born.

William Strunk

William Strunk, Jr.

Now to the University of Cincinnati connection: William Strunk, Jr., the author of this famous guide, grew up in Cincinnati and was an 1890 graduate of UC.  For the Archives & Rare Books Library’s “50 Minutes” lunchtime series of talks, Greg Hand returns to campus on Thursday, February 22, to relate in his well-informed fashion the story of Mr. William Strunk, and an interesting one it is.  As always, Mr. Hand tells his tales with great aplomb and guaranteed satisfaction for all, earning the favor of everyone in attendance.  He will speak of facts and fictions, of parodies and paradoxes, and if he were to offer an elegant phrase or two of his own, we would not mind in the least.  The talk begins at 12:00 noon in Room 814 of Blegen Library and will last until everyone is ushered out around 1 pm.  Bring your lunch, a friend, and acceptable manners (note the Oxford comma).  There will also be a random drawing of select and relevant books.

Ohio Supercomputer Center to Provide Two Workshops on Resources

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Posted on behalf of Jane Combs

Associate Director, IT@UC Research & Development University of Cincinnati

The Ohio Supercomputer Center will offer two workshops on its resources and how to use them Tuesday March 13, on both East and West campuses.
IT@UC Research & Development will be hosting the Ohio Supercomputer Center for two workshops on Tuesday, March 13. The morning workshop will provide an introduction to the Ohio Supercomputer Center resources and how to use them. In the afternoon, the workshop will cover Big Data Analytics and Spark.

The Ohio Supercomputer Center, headquartered in Columbus, partners with Ohio researchers to develop proposals to funding organizations and is the state’s leading strategic research group.

The morning session will take place on West Campus, Langsam Library, room 475 from 10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m. The afternoon session will take place on East Campus in MSBRCV, E602 from 1:30 – 4 p.m. Laptops are needed if attendees want to participate in the hands-on portions of the sessions.

Workshops are open to anyone interested in learning about OSC services and those who want to use their accounts more efficiently; this is a great opportunity to ask any questions you have about performing your computational research on our systems. There are no prerequisites for attending.

 Morning topics include:

  • High performance computing concepts
  • Hardware and software available at OSC
  • Storage and file systems
  • How to start a new project and request resources
  • How to use our web portal OnDemand
  • Introduction to batch processing

Afternoon topics will include:

  • Introduction to Big Data
  • Data analytics at OSC
  • Running Hadoop and Spark at OSC

Register HERE

For additional information, contact Jane Combs at combsje@uc.edu.

2018_313 OSC Workshop Flier-UC

From the Desk of…Christian Boyles

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Christian Boyles, Collection Services Manager, UCBA Library.

Welcome to my desk, I hope you like it.  Up until a few months ago, my space was pretty barren.  That all changed when a co-worker told me that I “needed more $h!t in my area.”  I hope I rose to the occasion.

 

Save the Date: WorldFest Trivia Night on February 28th

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Please join us for the third annual WorldFest Trivia Night!

Tivia night flyer

UC WorldFest 2018 will be declared open with the Kick Off Ceremony on February 28, 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM. The theme of this event will be “A Trip across the World”.
See the complete schedule of UC WorldFest 2018 with program descriptions
at https://www.uc.edu/eps/Programs/Worldfest/worldfest-descriptive-calendar.html.

Happy Year of the Dog!

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This weekend, the Greater Cincinnati Chinese Chamber of Commerce hosted their annual Lunar New Year Gala. I was happy to attend, along with many of my UC colleagues.

Some of you may remember that the Walter C. Langsam Library hosted its own Lunar New Year celebration in 2015. I always welcome the opportunity to celebrity this important Chinese holiday. Happy Year of the Dog!

Me and my wife Wendy, along with some of my UC Libraries colleagues

UC Libraries’ Global Services Librarian Hong Cheng (center, in red dress) with a group of our JCI partners from College of Engineering and Applied Science

 

 

I Can’t Help Falling in Love with UC Libraries & the STRC

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Using the Production Room in the Student Technology Resources Center (STRC), Nick Skowron recorded his version of Elvis’s “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” as part of an assignment for his Music Video class offered by the Digital Media Collaborative.

The John Miller Burnam Classics Library Hosts “An Evening with Ovid”

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Ovid

Ovid

Join the John Miller Burnam Classics Library 5:30-7:30 p.m., Thursday, March 29 in 417 Blegen Library for “An Evening with Ovid,” an event celebrating the life and work of the Roman poet. We will raise a glass in his honor in connection with his birthday and the 2,000-year anniversary of his death.

The evening will begin with welcoming remarks by Rebecka Lindau, head of the Classics Library. Bridget Langley, visiting assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Classics, will give a brief presentation of Ovid’s life and work. Colin Shelton, adjunct professor in Classics, will follow with a reading of two of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin and in translation by modern English poet Ted Hughes. Jenny Doctor, head of the Albino Gorno Memorial Music Library, will introduce a musical performance by modern English composer Benjamin Britten, “Six Metamorphoses after Ovid,” featuring College-Conservatory of Music oboist Yo Shionoya.

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The evening will conclude with refreshments Ovid and his contemporaries would have enjoyed. The event will be presided over by Emperor Augustus himself in the form of a copy of the original marble head discovered at Troy during an excavation led by UC’s Classics Department. Additionally, the library will feature a book exhibition with works of Ovid, including rare editions of the Metamorphoses.

The event is free and open to all. RSVP to Cade Stevens at stevencd@ucmail.uc.edu or 513-556-1314 by Friday, March 23.

Feb. 28 Digital Humanities Speaker Series to Feature Two Speakers from the University of Iowa

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digital humanities speaker series

Sponsored by the Digital Scholarship Center, the next Digital Humanities Speaker Series event, scheduled for Wed., Feb. 28 in both the Walter C. Langsam Library and the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library, will feature David Eichmann, director and associate professor in the School of Library and Information Science, and Blaine Greteman, associate professor of English, both from the University of Iowa. Both sessions are free and open to all.

Blaine Greteman

Blaine Greteman

David Eichmann

David Eichmann

10:00 a.m.-noon: [Keynote]: “Networking Print: Small Worlds, Phase Transitions, and Hidden Histories in 500,000 Early English Books.” Led by: Blaine Greteman. Co-Presenter: David Eichmann.  Location: Walter C. Langsam Library 462

Noon-12:45 p.m.:  Lunch- all welcome, Langsam 462

1:30-3:30 p.m.:  “Identification of Collaborator Networks in Biomedicine (and How They Relate to the Printing/Publishing Community of Pre-1800 England).” Led By: David Eichmann. Co-Presenter: Blaine Greteman. Location: Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library, Dr. Stanley B. Troup Learning Space (MSB G005G)
David Eichmann has conducted research in relational database theory, software reuse and reengineering, web search engines and intelligent agents, biomedical informatics and ontology-based research profile harvesting and visualization.  His current projects include Shakeosphere (modeling the social network of the print community in England 1540-1800), CTSAsearch (aggregating research profiles from 70+ institutions), CD2H (an informatics coordinating center for the CTSA consortium) and Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) (where he is part of a consortium exploring the next generation of library catalogs).

Blaine Greteman writes regularly for popular publications including The New Republic, Slate, TIME and The Week. His first book was The Poetics and Politics of Youth in Milton’s England (Cambridge University Press, 2013); his forthcoming book, Networking Early English Print (Stanford University Press), is based on Shakeosphere, a digital project built in collaboration with David Eichmann. Greteman holds an M.Phil from Oxford, where he attended on a Rhodes Scholarship, and a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley.

Located in the Walter C. Langsam Library, the Digital Scholarship Center (DSC) is a joint venture of the University of Cincinnati Libraries and the College of Arts and Sciences. Launched in September 2016 as an academic center, the DSC provides faculty and students across the university with support for digital project conception, design and implementation. For more about the Digital Scholarship Center, visit  http://dsc.uc.edu.