Today's edition of Saturday Sharing offers a portal to fascinating historical maps in libraries around the world, spotlights the Poet Laureate Map of Canada, tells you where to go to select a word and set it free, highlights a list of free e-books, introduces you to a site for culturally and artistically significant but overlooked literary works, and shows you what happens when you set books up to fall. Tonight's the night of the SuperMoon, too!
✦ A dedicated Website titled Margellos World Republic of Letters has debuted. Its purpose is to identify culturally and artistically significant literary works that have been overlooked by translators and publishers, important contemporary authors whose writing has not yet been translated into English, and literary and philosophical works requiring new translations. A project of Yale University, the site includes interviews, book excerpts, essays, and poetry and offers a wonderful collection of titles. In addition, the expansive Resources section provides links to numerous worthwhile translation sites, academic associations, publishers, and blogs.
✦ A list of free e-books, primarily classics, also including nonfiction and poetry, is available at Open Culture. The titles are organized alphabetically by author name, beginning with Aeschylus, and notated to indicate whether the text is downloadable and, if so, to what electronic device.
✦ The Poet Laureate Map of Canada features a bio, photo, and poem from the country's past and current laureates, as well as audio and video files if available. The site's a great introduction to Canada's poetic voices.
✦ Discover historical maps in libraries around the world using Old Maps Online, a portal created by The Great Britain Historical GIS Project and Klokan Technologies of Switzerland. A list of searchable digital collections accessible through the portal is here. The aim is to offer to the public by year's end access to some 60,000 maps.
✦ Choose a word and set it free via Freedom Dictionary, created by Amnesty International of Portugal to give a voice to protesters in the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa. On May 3, World Press Freedom Day, 11 copies of the dictionary were mailed to 11 countries where revolutions continue to take place. A video explaining the concept is here.
✦ Books make for a much more interesting "Domino Topple". This attempt to set a world record was made by Responsible Fishing UK, a collective that is home to artist James Brunt and photographer Timm Cleasby, who collaborate on the creation of dramatic installations and images.
Responsible Fishing UK on FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube
✦ Do try to stay up long enough (11:34 p.m. on the East Coast) tonight to witness the Super Moon, a phenomenon explained in this NASA video:
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5 comments:
Thanks for these, Maureen! Best wishes for a happy weekend.
Maureen, that book domino video is just delightful. And I do hope it clears up enough here to see the moon tonight. And now, I'm off to check out free books.
Love the of books!!!!!
very cool.
and... the perigee moon is also the Festival of Wesak --
The Festival of Wesak is the Festival of the Buddha, the spiritual intermediary between the highest spiritual centre, Shamballa, and the Hierarchy. The Buddha is the expression of the wisdom of God, the embodiment of light and the indicator of divine purpose. The energy at the event transmits the second principle of divinity, love-wisdom, of which the Buddha and the Christ are the two outstanding expressions. This Festival is fixed annually in relation to the full moon of May; it is the great Eastern Festival.
such a big fat moon hanging in the sky...oh my.
and the books...woooohooo! fun :-)
i like the part at the end where i could hear someone day "do it again!"
i totally enjoyed the phone call.
Oh! I thought last month's moon was a super moon. Maybe it was just building to this one.
I'm happy for the source for more free e-books. Thank you. I love getting free books to download from the University of Chicago for the Adobe digital reader.
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