If you read Merrill Stein’s recent blog, “Next Best Thing to Being There! Great Links to the Games of the XXXI Olympiad, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” or have been watching or reading the news about the summer Olympics and have questions, Falvey’s collection can provide answers. This “Dig Deeper” features only part of our collection of books about the Olympics. And don’t forget, our very knowledgeable reference librarians (Ask a Librarian) are here to help you find materials. Or you may visit their offices on the second floor of Falvey.

Dig Deeper:

History of the Ancient Games:

“The Ancient Olympic Games” (1984)

“The Ancient Olympic Games” (1966)

“The Ancient Olympics” (2004)

“The Story of the Olympic Games, 776 B.C.” (1973)

Women and the Olympic Games:

“Grace and Glory:  A Century of Women in the Olympics” (1996)

“Their Day in the Sun:  Women of the 1932 Olympics” (1996)

“When the Girls Came Out to Play:  The Birth of American Sportswear” (2006)

“Women’s Sport and Spectacle:  Gendered Television Coverage and the Olympic Games” (1998)

Other aspects of the Games:

“The First Modern Olympics” (1976)

“Global Olympics: Historical and Sociological Studies of the Modern Games ” (2005)

“100 Greatest Moments in Olympic History” (1995)

“All That Glitters Is Not Gold:  The Olympic Game” (1972)

“Historical Dictionary of the Modern Olympic Movement” (1996)

Alvin Toffler, a futurist and author of ten books, but most famous for Future Shock, died on June 27 at age 87. The son of Polish immigrants living in Brooklyn, N.Y., he knew that he wanted to be a writer when he was only seven years old. He graduated from New York University as an English major and held various jobs including several years with Fortune magazine before becoming a freelance writer.

Toffler wrote his first book, Future Shock (1970), after five years of research. Future Shock sold millions of copies, was translated into numerous languages, made its author famous, and is still in print.

Farhad Manoo says, “It is fitting that his death occurred in a period of weeks characterized by one example of madness after another … It would be facile to attribute any one of these events to future shock. Yet … it seems clear that his diagnosis [in Future Shock] has largely panned out, with local and global crises arising daily from our collective inability to deal with ever-faster change.”

Dig Deeper:

Farhad Manjoo. “Why We Need to Pick Up Alvin Toffler’s Torch.” New York Times, July 7, 2016.

Obituary

Toffler Biography

Books by Alvin Toffler:

The Adaptive Corporation (1985)

Creating a New Civilization:  The Politics of the Third Wave (1995)

The Culture Consumers:  A Study of Art and Affluence in America (1964)

Future Shock (1970)

Learning for Tomorrow:  The Role of the Future in Education (1974)

Powershift:  Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (1990)

The Third Wave (1980)

Call for abstracts: The science of evolution and the evolution of the sciences

We invite submissions for papers to be presented at a two-day conference on The science of evolution and the evolution of the sciences, which will be held in Leuven, Belgium on the 12th and 13th October 2016.

Submissions should take the form of a 500-word abstract. Submissions on any aspect of the evolution of scientific theories are welcome, but contributions with a clear link to digital humanities are especially encouraged.

Aims and scope of the conference:

One of the longstanding debates in history and philosophy of science concerns how the sciences develop. Thomas Kuhn famously emphasized the role of scientific revolutions and so-called paradigm shifts. Other philosophers, including Karl Popper and David Hull, have offered a Darwinian account of the process of science. In their view, scientists create conjectures about the way the world works, and these conjectures undergo a process of selection as they are tested against the world. This is analogized with biological evolution: mutation and recombination creates novelty in the biological world, which then undergoes natural selection, driving adaptive evolution. In this conference, we will reexamine these ideas using new tools from cultural evolutionary theory and the digital humanities.

This conference explores recent attempts to move beyond mere qualitative theorizing about scientific cultures and their evolution and centers on the the question of the extent to which we can make quantitative predictions, extract quantitative data, or build quantitative models of and about scientific evolution over time. In addition to numerical models of cultural evolution drawn from the evolutionary sciences, quantitative data are also being extracted in the digital humanities. Cultural products like academic journal articles can be algorithmically mined in order to understand this body of work in a new light, offering data to help test hypothesis about scientific changes. By bringing together researchers with a common interest but with different disciplinary backgrounds and toolboxes, we hope to inspire cross-fertilization and new collaborations.

Questions addressed at this conference include:

*  What novel predictions do Darwinian accounts of science offer?

*  How can we test these predictions?

*  Can new work in the digital humanities, such as the automated mining and analysis of the scientific literature, shed light on Darwinian accounts of science?

*  Do formal evolutionary models or (quantitative) textual analyses permit a systematic approach to empirical issues in the realism-instrumentalism debate?

Keynote speakers:

Charles Pence (Louisiana State University)

Kimmo Eriksson (Mälardalen University and Stockholm University)

Mia Ridge (British Library)

Simon DeDeo (Indiana University & the Santa Fe Institute)

Abstracts must be received no later than June 7. Inquiries and abstracts should be directed to the conference organizers, Andreas De Block and Grant Ramsey, at the following addresses:

Andreas.deblock@hiw.kuleuven.be and grant@theramseylab.org

The conference receives financial support from the Institute of Philosophy (KU Leuven) and the FWO (Flemish Research Council).

_______________________

Grant Ramsey

www.theramseylab.org

grant@theramseylab.org

+1 574.344.0284

Sarah Wingo and Kallie Stahl

Sarah Wingo, Humanities II team leader and subject librarian for English, literature and theatre, taught an eight week honors course last semester. Her course, “Superheroes as Modern Mythology,” looked at comic books and their heroes as modern mythology. Wingo focused on the DC and Marvel comic books and movie franchises and also explored fan culture, history and other topics related to comic books.

When asked how a librarian with her background in Shakespeare and other early modern English playwrights became interested in pop culture comic book superheroes, Wingo answered, “[O]ne of the things that always fascinated me about Shakespeare … is that during his time Shakespeare wasn’t seen as the highbrow cultural icon that he is today. Shakespeare’s plays were a form of popular entertainment. … I’m interested in popular culture and popular entertainment, whether it be in Elizabethan England or 2015. I’m interested in what it says about us as a society and how we engage with it as a society.

Wingo went on to explain that she had watched the Batman, Spiderman and X-Men series in the 1980s and ‘90s and more recently her partner, who is interested in comic books and related media, has stimulated her interest in comic books and superheroes. She said, “It is easy to dismiss comic books and superheroes as childish, but just like Shakespeare they are responding to their times and dealing with cultural and societal themes that are important to the society in which they are created.”

As a finale to the course, Wingo invited Kallie Stahl, a graduate assistant to Falvey’s Scholarly Outreach team, to give a presentation on her current research on fandom. Fandom, according to Stahl and the “Urban Dictionary,” consists of a “community that surrounds a TV show/movie/book, etc.” The community may include message boards, online groups and other forms of communication.

Stahl is a second year graduate student, working on a master’s degree in communication. Her interests are popular culture, new media and cultural studies. Her research on fandom focuses on “Castle,” a popular television program.

Bridget Black, student moderator; Brighid Dwyer, PhD, director, Program on Intergroup Relations, Multicultural Affairs; Katrina Sawyer, assistant professor, Dept. of Psychology; and Camille Burge, PhD, assistant professor, Dept. of Political Science

Camille Burge, PhD

Katrina Sawyer, PhD

Photographs by Alice Bampton

Careers in International Development Day at the Connelly Center is not your usual job fair – it’s a symposium designed for career exploration and a perfect event for students interested in pursuing careers that address global poverty and related issues. Lindsay Coates, Executive Vice President of InterAction, an alliance of 190 International Non-governmental agencies will open the day at 1:30 p.m. in the Cinema with an overview of the changes, challenges, and opportunities in the field. From 2:30-4:30 p.m. in the Villanova Room, professionals representing a variety of career paths, including the UN, USAID, Social Entrepreneurship, Impact Investing, Global Health and others will meet students in roundtable breakouts (repeating every 30 minutes) to share their professional experience and offer advice on what students need to get a foot in the door. In the Villanova Room Market Stall area, students can meet one-on-one with representatives from graduate programs, post-graduate overseas internship and volunteer opportunities and relevant VU curricular and extra-curricular programs from 2:30-4:30 p.m.

Catholic Relief Services organized and will host the event in partnership with Villanova University, the College of Nursing Center for Global and Public Health, the Villanova School of Business, the VSB Center for Global Leadership, the Career Center, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering, the Office of Mission and Ministry and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Consortium for Higher Education.

Dig Deeper

The library’s collection includes many books, article databases and statistical sources about international development. For the policy wonk, Columbia International Affairs Online includes full-text  case studies, policy briefs, scholarly articles and books. Public Affairs International  Service (PAIS) is an article database covering similar territory. Because international development is truly interdisciplinary, academic research on international development can be found in many specialized databases, such as  PubMed for health, EconLit for economics, and  Compendex or Inspec for engineering.

Since 1990 the United Nations has published the Human Development Report, which identifies trends in development, and the Index, which is a tool used to assess country level development in terms of life expectancy, education and income. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development publishes numerous books and statistical series on development in many dimensions all available in the OECDiLibrary. AidData.org takes a data driven approach to improving outcomes by publishing datasets, visualizations and reports.

Villanovans across the disciplines are engaged in research on various aspects of development aid. Suzanne Toton, EdD, writes about Catholic relief, world hunger and social justice. The writing of Kishor Thanawala, PhD, explores economic development and justice. Latin American Development is the area of expertise of Satya Pattnayak, PhD. Jonathan Doh, PhD, is a prolific researcher on nongovernmental organizations and global corporate responsibility. Christopher Kilby, PhD, is a thought leader on the economics of foreign aid. Ruth McDermott-Levy, PhD, is a practicing nurse, educator and researcher on international community health.

Careers in International Development Day speakers represent a variety of organizations, all with interesting web sites well worth exploring with links below:

Alliance to End Hunger
InterAction
United States Agency for International Development USAID
Doctors Without Borders
Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Center
Catholic Relief Services
Uhl & Associates
TriLinc Global
Oiko Credit
Village Capital

Acumen
Amigos de Jesus
Augustinian Volunteers
Catholic Volunteer Network
Catholic Relief Services
Jesuit Volunteers
Maryknoll Lay Missioners
Mennonite Central Committee
Mercy Volunteer Corps
Peace Corps
Profugo
Unite for Sight

Article by Linda Hauck, MS, MBA, business librarian and team coordinator for the Business Research team.

We’re pleased to announce that more than 35,000 e-books are now available through Falvey on the JSTOR platform. The Library is participating in a “demand driven acquisition” program with JSTOR, which means that all of their e-books are accessible to us and we purchase only the ones that get repeated use.

The collection includes books in all disciplines, but humanities and social science fields are particularly well represented. You’ll find a wealth of high quality scholarly sources in history, philosophy, religion, languages and literatures, sociology and political science.

Since the content is on JSTOR, you can search for book chapters at the same time as you search for journal articles and primary sources. To see only book results, click on the Books tab after entering your search:

Unlike other e-book platforms, there are no restrictions on downloading and printing JSTOR e-books. Read chapters online, or download PDFs to print or read later.

Currently these books can only be found by searching the JSTOR interface, but soon we’ll have records for each of them in the catalog, and chapters will appear individually in the library’s “Articles & more” search.

Titles are available from a large number of highly respected publishers, including:

· American Schools of Oriental Research
· Berghahn Books
· Boydell & Brewer
· Columbia University Press
· Cornell University Press
· Edinburgh University Press
· Fordham University Press
· Harvard University Press
· Liverpool University Press
· Manchester University Press
· Marcial Pons Ediciones de Historia S.A.
· MIT Press
· Oxbow Books
· Princeton University Press
· Purdue University Press
· Rutgers University Press
· University of California Press
· University of Massachusetts Press
· University of North Carolina Press
· University of Pennsylvania Press
· University of Virginia Press
· Yale University Press

Remember to access JSTOR through the library’s website in order to get access to these books, as well as other Falvey-only content.

We’d love to know if you have feedback on JSTOR e-books. Send your comments to: nikolaus.fogle@villanova.edu.

Nikolaus Fogle maintains the Philosophy blog and is the Philosophy, Theology and Humanities team coordinator. Nik can be reached by email or phone at 610-519-5182.

Fall is the season when we all begin to move indoors and even pastimes get a little more ambitious – things like binge watching Game of Thrones, knitting Christmas stockings for the dog and tackling fat serious novels by Authors You Should Read come to mind. 

This fall is loaded with releases of buzzy books from authors Salman Rushdie, Elena Ferrante, John Irving and a host of celebrity authors. Fall break just may afford you time to get through one, or at least at procure it for your night table to enjoy over semester break. Some library staff have perused the fall lists and have picked their favorites. For a Booktober special, we’ll bring you their thoughts each day this week.

Semester deep and head aswirl from a rigorous graduate Strategic Communication theory class, I remember being quite relieved to recognize a familiar writer’s name on our syllabus tucked amongst Saussure and Baudrillard: Umberto Eco, author of the book, The Name of the Rose (and basis for this movie starring Sean Connery and a youthful, pre-Heathers Christian Slater). The film’s opening credits are quick to point out, however, that Eco’s novel about murder in a medieval monastery provides merely the palimpsest for the flick. (I’ll save you the Google – a palimpsest is something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.)

Eco, aside from being a famed novelist and bibliophile (I’ve read that the man owns 50,000+ volumes) is also a medieval scholar and semiotician. At age 83, he is Italy’s top selling author and one of the world’s top contemporary thinkers on media culture, having written extensively on the subject including scathing critiques on American culture and postmodern hyperreality. 

His most recent book, a sixth novel entitled Numero Zero, has been translated by Richard Dixon and will be published in English on November 3. The tale revisits Eco’s milieu of dark and murky clerical murder, but this time, it’s Pope John Paul I, 1992 Milan. The book has resided on Italian bestseller lists since March.

Social Science and Business Research support librarian, Kristyna Carroll, has provided the following links if you’d like to learn more.

• Here are books by Eco.
• Entry from Encyclopedia of World Biography
• Variety of sources from Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context
• Some search results from Social Sciences Full Text RE Eco
• Similarly, find search results from Humanities Full Text.

And, below, an excerpt about this book lover’s thoughts on libraries.

Links curated by Kristyna Carroll, research support librarian for Business and Social Sciences. Article by Joanne Quinn. 

There was a time when Wildcat book lovers and library patrons could read about new book titles and library events in the “Library Corner” section of the Villanovan. The excerpts below are from 1949 and 1950 when library news shared a page with articles about the school radio station and the Physics club. We know that ‘Cats still read books and articles, our circulation statistics tell us that, but these days they read about new resources, books, and events on the Library’s news blog online.

(If you’re interested in book reviews, check out the “Book-tober” feature in The Eight Thirty daily blog this month. Our first review was posted on Oct. 2.)

Images courtesy of the Villanova University Digital Library.

‘Caturday blog post by Luisa Cywinski, editorial coordinator on the Communication & Service Promotion team and team leader of the Access Services team.

Even though Philadelphia is only 13 miles away, navigating the city may seem like another world in some sense. With world class institutions, museums, and parks, coupled with a rich history running throughout the city, it is no wonder people can feel overwhelmed when visiting Philadelphia. Luckily Falvey has access to many resources to help navigate and research any topic on Philadelphia. Whether the resource is in print or online, the Library can help resolve any confusion when it comes to researching the City of Brotherly Love.

Books

Falvey has a vast collection of books on Philadelphia; where that collection is located in the Library depends on your subject of research. Start with “Philadelphia” in the subject line to narrow your results.

Use the facets on the right to filter the results down to your area of interest:

In this example, the results are filtered down into books about Philadelphia politics. The picture below displays that books on this subject can be found in the F 158 call number section of the library.

Online Resources

Jutta Seibert, History Librarian and Academic Integration Team Leader, suggests the following free resources readily available online:

Historical Images of Philadelphia – 20,000 historical images of the city dating back to 1841 courtesy of the Free Library.

Library Company of Philadelphia – The Library Company was founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin and remains to this day an independent cultural institution. Its rare books, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera, prints, photographs, and works of art are worth a visit to its Locust Street location. The Library Company currently hosts “Fashioning Philadelphia – the Style of the City, 1720-1940.” Selected exhibits such as the “Black Founders: The Free Black Community in the Early Republic” are available online.

Digital Maps of Philadelphia – Digital access to city maps ranging from 1834 to 1962 courtesy of the Free Library.

This is a short, starting point for researching tips on Philadelphia. Remember to always contact your subject librarian for a more in depth search.