Schoogle link

Here is a librarian’s blog devoted just to Google Scholar, an interesting read.
http://schoogle.blogspot.com/

Schoogle

All things Google are news. And so also, was the release of Google Scholar in late 2004. The goal, according to Anurag Acharya- the engineer behind the idea, “is to allow and enable users to search over scholarly content." Google scholar made visible a lot of the “invisible” content hidden behind the “veiled curtains of subscription”. You would still require a subscription to read the whole article, but the article’s existence would be visible. To show up on Google Scholar, Google maintains all you have to do is contact their office and then their spider’s crawl through your website. But sites must provide access for non-subscribers to bibliographic citations and abstracts even for non-subscribers. This way a search using last name can also be done in the format :
author:lastname + (title terms) .

And how does Google rank its results?
According to the official About Google Scholar page, Google Scholars ranks its articles based on the content of the article, the journal it appears in and the number of times the article is cited in scholarly literature. And the main grouse the critics have against Google Scholar is regarding their definition of “scholarly literature”. The list of providers and how exactly the ranking is done is not very clear. Serious research still depends more on sites like WebOfScience. As Google becomes BIG and expands its areas of service, Google bashing is emerging as a new fad to replace chants of “Google is God”. There are discussions on how Google might be spreading itself too thin. The literature analyzing Google Scholar too has been more on the critical side. This includes critiques by university libraries like this one http://web.library.emory.edu/services/ressvcs/howguides/googlescholar.html.

For me, Google Scholar remains the easiest way of searching and procuring (since it got connected with the University’s library holdings) scholarly articles on the Internet. I guess I am still addicted to the ways of Google (aren't we all :) )

If you still can not decide whether to use Google Scholar or a specialized electronic journal like Communication and Mass Media Complete, here’s a comparison of Google Scholar with Psych Info found on the UCLA website à
http://www2.library.ucla.edu/googlescholar/results.cfm

Scholarly links

A nifty collection of journal databases (taken from the UCLA website):

http://www2.library.ucla.edu/googlescholar/searchengines.cfm

Scholarly communication revamped

Every assignment that I have done this semester has left me with a slight jaw dropping awe at the convenience with which I can access the work of hundreds of thousands of researchers without having to shift so much as an inch of my posture.

A quick flashback to the day the first assignments were given out in class. While instructions were being given on how to look for relevant material online, my brain started conjuring romantic little trips on lonely nights to the library, to be spent working amidst lots and lots of thick BOOKS and yellowed JOURNALS…….ONLINE?? Did I just hear online?? The word shook me out of my reverie and electronic reality began to dawn on me. Doing that first assignment using a single computer in the library, and the subsequent ones done at home on my laptop rubbed away the remaining romance for good-old fashioned time consuming research. The good-old fashioned charm notwithstanding, all of us owe the existence of a LIFE outside the libraries to these journals available online.

According to Professor Garvey, a psychologist at The John Hopkins University, communication is the essence of Science. In other words, communication is the key to research and learning. To be effective this communication has to be timely and accessible. While eliminating manual processes improves upon the time factor, electronic handling also mean better accessibility because of the lower production costs. It makes sense to have research paper cost as less as possible since, the general public does sponsor research in a way having already paid taxes to the Government.
What was made easy by electronic journals has been made easier with newer tools, not the least important of which is Google Scholar. But that again is another topic for another time …..

Fictitious links

A comprehensive scholarly work on the subject of fanfics:
http://tinyurl.com/yedkow

A dated yet, interesting view on fandom, fanfic and its repercussions on popular culture. (the NYtimes archive)
http://tinyurl.com/yfq78f

And to read fanfictions try,
http://www.fanfiction.net

Fictitious??

One fine day, a few years ago, I went to the movies to see X2. Movie magic happened and brawny Wolverine found himself a drooling new fan. The Pow!Wowy! action movie and Mr. Jackman’s muscle flex had me hooked, the night was spent researching the two. It was then that I stumbled upon the myriad world of internet fan fiction. It was a world where fans made sure Wolverine bagged Jean, where Magneto turned over a new leaf, and a world where Jack returns an old man just as Rose is wrapping up her story about the Titanic. And by Jove! it is an amazing world.

We are all born actors and story-tellers. Fanfics are one way of not agreeing with how your favorite work of entertainment (movies/television series/books/game) developed, while at the same time exercising our humanness by telling a story. Although the credit of “decultifying” the concept and bringing it to the mainstream (not necessarily a good thing, some would argue) lies with the Internet, fanfics have been around longer than has the Internet. There are some works of scholarly research on the subject as well. No mean achievement for what was considered an outlet for nerdy fantasies.

There are issues of copyrights associated since fanfictions build on existing work, lots of information floating on the Internet and battles being fought on that front. What is more interesting is how fanfics have come a full circle. This art form (yes! I dare call it art!) is increasingly being used to bolster interest in the original work that they take off from. A very neat example was the crazy creativity and interest that Peter Jackson (that nerdy fellow J) generated before the release of his trilogy by indulging Tolkein fans to unleash their creativity and add to the already complex story with a few hundred more side-characters resulting in a few thousand more sub-plots.
And these fan are not your run-of-the-mill fans, the fanfic writing world is populated by a devoted fan base. It would be interesting to see if fanfics can actually work the other way round and create hardcore fans out of the regular fan populace.

All said and done, the next few years, fanfic, along with mobile games (based on the fictional work’s characters) is going to become an integral part of pre and post movie/TV show/game/ book release hype.

Here is a list of the top 5 movies by way of the amount of fan work put into their characters, in no particular order:
LOTR (No prizes for guessing this one)
Star Wars
Star Trek
X-men (all the three from the franchise)
Pirates of the Caribbean

Source: My very unscientific observations.

And the same for TV shows:
Star Trek
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Smallville
X-Files
*Why do none of the above surprise me*
Gilmore Girls (Boo! Here’s the surprise!)

Source: The same unscientific observations.

Non E-vil links

Now that I have taken up the cause of e-lit, here are what might be a few interesting links:

The very famous Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

An example of what you might find at Blish.com
http://www.blish.com/Search/SearchResults.aspx?category=16%7cEBook&cm_mmc_o=TBBTkwCjC_kblt%20w_BBLlCjCmq%20C%20PBBLl%20fB%20KBcEkBzpCjCFAkfb

A publishing time line for the book enthusiast
http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0154485.html

E not Evil: how to rid yourself of E-lit paranoia

As a child, reading comprised Lady Bug books of children’s fairy tales and AmarChitra Katha versions of the Ramayana. A natural progression to Enid Blyton and then Judy Blume and teen romances happened. Roald Dahl enthralled and Tolkein as well. Books held cosy comfort. Cable television had not hit India in a major way then and books were one of the few ways of escaping the drudgery of boredom and home work. All the books from that time, I still preserve, trying to preserve with them their feel and their smell and the comfort that they bring. Over the years, a bond with these books and the others that I read was cemented.

A few months back however, a friend sent me an E-snips link with e-versions of books by every conceivable author, from Salman Rushdie to Douglas Adams, and from Kaheel Gibran to Arthur Hailey. Greed gave way to worry, and I started wondering about the fate of my future reading.
Was the paperback era coming to an end? “I snuggled cozily in my arm chair with a book in my hand and a blanket on my lap”, would that phrase be relegated to colloquialism soon, and give way to the very uncomfortable sounding: “I sat rigid on my desk reading from my laptop computer”?

I searched around some more for digital libraries and came across http://www.blish.com/ and then of course there was Project Gutenberg, striking irony commemorating the father of what they were killing – the paper book. And Stephen King, of course had already written a book just for the Internet.

A few days of such worrying and then sanity struck back, as I remembered other doomsday prophecies for all things paper and how none of them really came true. Did the office become “paperless” at the end of the millennium? Did online versions of newspaper decimate their paper presence? Did tabloids sleaze …..ummm….seize to exist because of the plethora of equally trashy websites? (Well, you can’t have everything now can you!)

I searched around some more for “electronic literature”. Words like Fan fiction, e-poetry, wikis, interactive fiction, hypertext sprung up. And the sun of optimism began to shine again. This was not to be the death of literature as we have known it but an extension of its scope, I consoled myself. Techno and trance or R&B and hip-hop, these did not kill music, nor did Rock cease to exist. And so the paper back would live, even if electronic literature was here to stay.

Having made my peace with electronic literature, I decided to investigate some more…. And the results of these investigations, I shall present week after week after week.

My First

And here it is: my first blog and the first blog entry. And on a subject close to my heart too: literature. Only, in keeping with the flavor of discussions for Media Studies course, this blog shall be devoted to Electronic Literature. Cheers to the new blog, may it be the first in a line of many!