UGA Library November 2010 Classics-Related Acquisitions

In the five weeks since I last posted, the UGA Libraries have added 4473 items to the Main Library collection (yikes; I need to do this more often!)  The following may be of interest to scholars in Classics and related fields:

• Greek popular religion in Greek philosophy; Mikalson, Jon D., 1943-
  Location:  Main Library 6th floor, B187.R4 M555 2010
• Plutarch’s practical ethics : the social dynamics of philosophy; Van Hoof, Lieve.
  Location:  Main Library 6th floor, B601.M673 V36 2010
• Kierkegaard and the Greek world
  Location:  Main Library 6th floor, B4377 .K45526 2010
• Classical mythology,   9th ed.;     Morford, Mark P. O., 1929-
  Location:  Main Library 6th floor,BL723 .M67 2011
• Gods of ancient Greece: identities and transformations
  Location:  Main Library 6th floor, BL783 .G637 2010
• Cambridge guide to Jewish history, religion, and culture
  Location:  Main Library 6th floor, BM155.3 .C25 2010
• Dead Sea scrolls : transmission of traditions and production of texts
  Location:  Main Library 6th floor, BM487 .D4498 2010
• Dead Sea scrolls today,2nd ed.; VanderKam, James C.
  Location:  Main Library 6th floor, BM487 .V26 2010
• Orosius: seven books of history against the pagans; Orosius, Paulus.
  Location:  Main Library 6th floor, BR60.F3 O7 2010
• Early Church: history and memory; Loˆssl, Josef.
  Location:  Main Library 6th floor, BR162.3 .L66 2010
• Classics and national cultures
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, CB151 .C53 2010
• From tribe to province to state: an historical-ethnographic and archaeological perspective for reinterpreting the settlement processes of the Germanic populations in western Europe between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages; De Vingo, Paolo.
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, Folio CC65 .B86 2010
• Becoming villagers: comparing early village societies
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, CC72.4 .B44 2010
• Archaeology and memory
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, CC83 .A73 2010
• Scientific methods and cultural heritage : an introduction to the application of materials science to archaeometry and conservation science; Artioli, Gilberto, 1957-
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, CC135 .A785 2010
• Avoiding archaeological disasters: a risk management approach; Stapp, Darby C., 1954-
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor,CC135 .S73 2009
• Coinage in Roman Syria: Northern Syria, 64 BC-AD 253; Butcher, Kevin.
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, Folio CJ1093 .B88 2004
• Vale of York hoard; Williams, Gareth.
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, CJ2498.Y67 W55 2010
• Boubon: the inscriptions and archaeological remains; a survey 2004-2006
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, CN415.B82 B8 2008
• Epigrafia dei cristiani in Occidente dal III al VII secolo: ideologia e prassi; Carletti, Carlo.
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, CN750 .C37 2008
• Reflections: 50 years of medieval archaeology, 1957-2007
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, D125 .R445 2009
• Finds from the frontier: material culture in the 4th-5th centuries
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, Folio DA145 .F56 2010
• Upper Tisza Project: studies in Hungarian landscape archaeology
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, Folio DB999.T59 U66 2010
• Faces of Hellenism: studies in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean, 4th century B.C.-5th century A.D.
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DF77 .F2234 2009
• Archaeology in situ: sites, archaeology, and communities in Greece
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DF78 .A645 2010
• Domestic space in classical antiquity, Nevett, Lisa C.
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DF99 .N47 2010
• Mochlos IIB: period IV, the Mycenaean settlement and cemetery: the pottery; Smith, R. Angus K. (Robert Angus K.), 1968-
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DF221.C8 S656 2010
• Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire: Comte de Marcellus and the last of the classics, 1st ed.; Van Steen, Gonda Aline Hector, 1964-
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DF801 .V36 2010
• “A€ l’ecole de toute l’Italie”: pour une histoire de l’Ecole francaise de Rome
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG12.E33 A23 2010
• Mercator placidissimus: the Tiber Valley in antiquity: new research in the upper and middle river valley: Rome, 27-28 February 2004
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG55.T52 M47 2008
• Cites grecques dans l’Empire romain: les privile€ges et les titres des cites de l’orient hellenophone d’Octave Auguste a€ Diocletien; Guerber, E. (Eric)
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG59.A8 G84 2009
• Why we’re all Romans: the Roman contribution to the Western world; Richard, Carl J.
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG77 .R53 2010
• Unwritten Rome; Wiseman, T. P. (Timothy Peter)
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG77 .W724 2008
• Rome and Constantinople: rewriting Roman history during late antiquity; Van Dam, Raymond.
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG205 .V36 2010
• Livy on the Hannibalic War; Levene, D. S.
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG247.L533 L48 2010
• Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the darkest hour of the Roman republic, 1st ed.; O’Connell, Robert L.
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG247.3 .O25 2010
• Between Rome and Carthage: Southern Italy during the Second Punic War; Fronda, Michael P., 1970-
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG247.33 .F76 2010
• Citizens of discord: Rome and its civil wars
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG254.2 .C57 2010
• Ides: Caesar’s murder and the war for Rome; Dando-Collins, Stephen.
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG267 .D26 2010
• Aspects of Roman history, 82 BC-AD 14: a source-based approach; Swain, Hilary.
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DG276 .S93 2010
• Konstantin der Grosse: das Bild des Kaisers im Wandel der Zeiten
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor
• Archaeology of the countryside in medieval Anatolia
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DR431 .A73 2009
• Kingdoms of ruin: the art and architectural splendours of ancient Turkey; Stafford-Deitsch, Jeremy.
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DR431 .S73 2010
• Children of Achilles: the Greeks in Asia Minor since the days of Troy, Freely, John.
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DR435.G8 F74 2010
• Not reckoned among nations: the origins of the so-called “Jewish question” in Roman antiquity; Avidov, Avi, 1954-
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DS122 .A95 2009
• Chronology and archaeology in ancient Egypt: (the third millennium B.C.), Vyd. 1.
  Location:  Main Library 4th floor, DT85 .C48 2008
• Fylo: engendering prehistoric “stratigraphies” in the Aegean and the Mediterranean: proceedings of an international conference, University of Crete, Rethymno, 2-5 June 2005
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, Folio GN772.22.A34 F956 2009
• Celtic fortifications; Ralston, Ian.
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, GN789 .R35 2006
• Archaeology of measurement: comprehending Heaven, Earth and time in ancient societies
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, GN799.B8 A73 2010
• Prehistoric rock art: polemics and progress; Bahn, Paul G.
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, GN799.P4 B34 2010
• Chariot racing in the Roman Empire; Meijer, Fik.
  Location:  Main Library 2nd floor, GV33 .M45 2010
• Public land in the Roman Republic: a social and economic history of ager publicus in Italy, 396-89 B.C.; Roselaar, Saskia T.
  Location:  Main Library 5th floor, HD137 .R67 2010
• Republic of Plato, 3rd ed.; Plato.
• Evolution of arms control: from antiquity to the nuclear age; Burns, Richard Dean.
  Location:  Main Library 6th floor, JZ5625 .B82 2009
• Pittura etrusca: atti del IV corso di perfezionamento (anno accademico 2005- 2006). L’Italia prima di Roma: atti del V corso di perfezionamento (anno accademico 2006-2007).
  Location:  Main Library 7th floor, ND130.E8 P54 2008
• Greek vases: gods, heroes and mortals; Backe-Dahmen, Annika.
  Location:  Main Library 7th floor, NK4623.5.G4 B47 2010
• Komast dancers in archaic Greek art; Smith, Tyler Jo.
  Location:  Main Library 7th floor, NK4648 .S65 2010
• Phraseology of Latin building inscriptions in Roman North Africa; Saastamoinen, Ari.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, P9 .F5 v.127
• Earliest Cretan scripts; Woudhuizen, Fred.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, P1035 .W68 2006
• Latin historiography and poetry in the early empire: generic interactions
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA9 .M686 Suppl. no. 321
• Valuing others in classical antiquity
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA9 .M686 Suppl. no. 323
• Greek: a history of the language and its speakers, 2nd ed.; Horrocks, Geoffrey C.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA227 .H76 2010
• On conditionals in the Greek Pentateuch: a study of translation syntax; Tjen, Anwar.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA379 .T58 2010
• Sur le vocalisme du verbe latin: etude synchronique et diachronique; Garnier, Romain.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA2150 .G37 2010
• Idea of iambos; Rotstein, Andrea.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA3113 .R68 2010
• Law and drama in ancient Greece
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA3133 .L39 2010
• Tangled ways of Zeus: and other studies in and around Greek tragedy; Sommerstein, Alan H.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA3133 .S66 2010
• Brill’s companion to the study of Greek comedy
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA3161 .B75 2010
• Invention comique: enque‚te sur la poetique d’Aristophane; Jay-Robert, Ghislaine.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA3879 .J39 2009
• Five Epinician odes (3, 5, 9, 11, 13); Bacchylides.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA3943 .E5 2010
• Ctesias’ History of Persia: tales of the Orient; Ctesias.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA3948.C9 P43513 2010
• Euagoras des Isokrates: ein Kommentar; Alexiou, Evangelos.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA4218 .A427 2010
• Histories, Rev.; Polybius.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA4391 .A2 2010
• Scholia vetera in Sophoclis Electram
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA4413.E5 S36 2010
• Centones christiani: metamorphoses d’une forme intertextuelle dans la poesie latine chretienne de l’Antiquite tardive; BazŒil, Martin.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor; PA6053 .B395 2009
• Motherhood and the other: fashioning female power in Flavian epic; Augoustakis, Antony.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA6054 .A84 2010
• Form and function in Roman oratory
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor
• Roman drama: a reader; Manuwald, Gesine.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA6137 .M36 2010
• Companion to Horace
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor; PA6411 .C592 2010
• Playing gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the politics of fiction; Feldherr, Andrew, 1963-
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA6519.M9 F45 2010
• Relative Datierung der Tragoˆdien Senecas; Dingel, Joachim, 1938-
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA6686 .D56 2009
• Exemplary epic: Silius Italicus’ Punica; Tipping, Ben.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA6695 .T57 2010
• Aeneid I; Virgil.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA6803.B21 M32 2010
• Virgil in the Renaissance, Wilson-Okamura, David Scott, 1970-
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA6825 .W537 2010
• Neo-Latin epigram: a learned and witty genre
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PA8055 .N46 2009
• Ancient epic; King, Katherine Callen.
  Location:  Main Library 3rd floor, PN1307 .K56 2009

As usual, my choices of titles to include were somewhat capricious, especially at the edges of the “related fields” (i.e. religious studies, medieval archaeology, etc.)

Librarian in the Classroom

It’s the time of year when I write up an annual report of what I’ve done, for my supervisor to review.  This year I taught 20 classes, up from 11 in 2009 (yes, we keep statistics on this, as on, well, practically everything).  What does it mean when a librarian teaches a class?

Unlike faculty members, librarians mainly teach one session of a class, having been invited in by the regular faculty member to cover library resources related to a class project, often a research paper.  Except at the 4000 and graduate level, I have usually never seen the students before, and am unlikely to see them again, although some do follow up for individual meetings.  I don’t have much knowledge about their background or level of competence at conducting university-level research; I can assume that senior majors and grad students know more than freshmen, but most classes have a mix of skill levels.  I usually have 50 minutes to cover topics as varied as how to use Wikipedia (very carefully if at all!), the importance of Boolean searching in scholarly article databases (searching ‘etruscan tombs with images of charon’ will net you nada in Jstor), how to parse a call number and find a book on the shelf, and how the heck to use L’Annee Philologique.

My saving grace is a web page I custom-create for each class.  At UGA we use an open-source software developed by Oregon State University called Library a la Carte, which allows us to create modular chunks of content and re-use and mix them on multiple web pages.  Thus I use some of the same content, but with variations based on student need, in pages for a 3000-level Latin class writing a term paper on the Aeneid, a 1000-level Honors class writing a short paper on Greek Civilization, and a 4000-level theater class playing the Reacting to the Past Athens Game.  The faculty member can embed these pages in the campus course management software (at UGA, it’s eLearning Commons).  Teaching, and providing a page of resources like this, is one of the best ways that we as librarians can reach out to groups of students, rather than waiting for them to come to us, often after they’ve wasted time fruitlessly Googling.  It results in better papers for the faculty members as well.

If your class has an assignment of any kind that asks the students to do research, please consider inviting a librarian to your class to teach the students college-level research skills – don’t assume they come to you with these skills.  Most universities have a subject specialist librarian assigned to every department; if you don’t know yours, ask at the Reference Desk the next time you are in the library.

Resource Reviews: Mythology Web Sites

Undergraduates in entry-level survey classes like Mythology like to Google.  And Googling the name of an ancient mythological figure will certainly bring them results.  Good ones?  That’s more debatable.

Wikipedia, as with all subjects, is variable.  (I have previously posted some general thoughts on Wikipedia on this blog.)  The general article on Greek Mythology has a reasonable number of footnotes, many of them to a 2002 Encylopedia Brittanica article.  It also has sections at the end for primary sources (which link out to Perseus texts) and secondary sources, many of which are good quality scholarly articles and books.   Articles on specific mythological figures, like Hera, are not as good – the level of detail and documentations is inconsistent, there are many facts relayed without footnotes, and the sources listed for further reading are only general ones about classical mythology.  (Adopting and improving Wikipedia articles on classical mythology topics might be a good project for an upper-level or honors class!)

Jenkins discusses two websites covering classical mythology:

Encyclopedia Mythica (Jenkins 903).  This site contains entries by multiple contributors (listed here), including both PhDs and middle school students, but the majority of the work is by Micha F. Lindemans, who Google reveals to be a Dutch web editor; I could not find any academic credentials of his.  The site has been in existence for a long time (2010 marks its 15th anniversary) and is widely linked, but I agree with Jenkins’ evaluation of it as “far inferior to most printed sources.”

Greek Mythology Link (Jenkins 918), by Carlos Parada, a former lecturer in Classics at Lund University, Sweden, began as a outgrowth of his 1993 book, Genealogical Guide to Greek Mythology (Jenkins 917), UGA Main Library 6th Floor Folio BL785 .P37 1993.  The site was begun in 1997 and new content is still being added as of fall 2010.  Jenkins is not a fan of the book, but of the web site notes: “Extensive primary source references, images, and genealogical information are the great strengths of this site; ease of use is not.  It is relatively complete and reliable compared to other mythological resources on the web.”  I agree on all counts – it makes good use of primary sources, but navigation is not easy.

Another much-linked web site, not mentioned by Jenkins, is the Theoi Project.   Edited by Aaron J. Atsma of New Zealand, for whom I could find no academic credentials using Google, the site is currently showing “What’s New” as of December 2007.  This site is heavily linked from Wikipedia, and I would guess as a result sees a lot of traffic from undergraduates.  It shares the strengths of the Greek Mythology Link site discussed above, as it also relies heavily on primary sources (in translation, but with accurate scholarly citations) and images.  Entries include information about cults (mostly relying on Pausanias) as well as myths, attributes, and associated personages.  It is slightly opaque to navigate – the pages include many layers of links – but they are cross-referenced well and the site as a whole is searchable.

My previous Resource Review on Mythology discussed LIMC.  Future reviews will cover other print works.

Taken by Tilemahos Efthimiadis, used under a Creative Commons license.

Annotated Bibliography Assignments

For another project (Ancient World Open Bibliographies) I’ve created a Zotero account and am playing around with it, trying to figure out how to easily generate annotated bibliographies using the software (which is a web site plus a Firefox plugin).  Unfortunately right now the answer is that it’s not very easy to annotate bibliographies in a way that lets them be printed or shared, although there are some workarounds.

My search for information on this topic led to me to an interesting assignment, by Brian Croxall, who teaches English Literature.  He had his students find a scholarly resource outside the required reading for the class, and write an annotation (in this case, the annotations were fairly long, more like a short review, in some cases several paragraphs).  His description of the virtues of bibliographic annotation is:

Annotated bibliographies get students experience with some of the important steps of literary scholarship: finding secondary criticism and digesting it. While I could (and might!) just assign the standard end-of-term research paper, the unintended consequence of doing so often results in students looking around for any quotations they can throw in to meet the arbitrary requirement of sources. I hope that annotated bibliographies provoke students to read the other sources more carefully: reading for the source’s own argument rather than how it can fit into one’s paper that is due in 12 hours. An annotated bibliography requires you to take more time, giving you a chance to see what kinds of conversations go on amongst scholars of contemporary literature.

One of of my colleagues who is a teaching model for me is a big fan of annotated bibliography assignments.  She works with one class, for example, in which instead of a paper, the students produce an annotated bibliography of 10 items.  They are required to use no more than 3 popular sources (anything from Glamour to web sites) and no more than 3 of what the professor calls “popular scholarly sources” (I think this term is made up, but what is meant is journalistic sources – newspapers, Time, The New Yorker, etc.).  The class is in the anthropology of food, so for a topic like high fructose corn syrup, a mix of scientific resources explaining what it is and how it is processed by body, journalistic treatments, and fluffy stuff like diet magazines allows the student to turn in a well-rounded exploration of the topic and how it is treated in varying types of sources.  For a different subject, requiring only scholarly sources might be a better fit.  The student gets the experience of doing research for a term paper: finding and evaluating sources.  For the faculty member teaching a large class, grading 75 10-item annotated bibliographies is possible in a way that grading 75 10-page papers is not.  Would this kind of an assignment work for you in your larger classes – or even as a preliminary step in the process of writing a term paper?  My guess is it would lead to better papers if required and graded.

As an aside, I would love to see more online discussions and repositories of good assignments, assignments that worked, for classics and ancient studies.  Some faculty blog about their teaching but I found, for example, when I was trying to think of a good assignment for a graduate class that would incidentally teach them to use TLG, that Google was a howling wasteland in this area.  I don’t teach regular classes, only one-shot library instruction sessions, but I do see part of my role as working with faculty to help brainstorm about what assignments work for what learning goals.  I hope to be able to put more ideas on this blog.

Reference Resources: Mythology

There are a lot of reference works on classical mythology published, with new ones out every single year, it seems.  Mythology is probably the classics topic with the most widespread appeal, from 2nd graders to 300-seat college lectures to Learning in Retirement programs, so many of the available mythological dictionaries and encyclopedias are targeted very broadly, and marketed to public and school libraries as well as (or instead of) universities.  What I would like in a classical mythology encyclopedia for college students is:

• clear summary of the various myths associated with a figure
• accurate and full citations to the primary sources for those myths (it is shocking how often these are not included)
• examples and discussions of depictions of those myths in classical art
• discussion of places, temples, rituals associated with the myths

So, obviously my favorite reference resource on mythology is Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC).  I first used it as an undergraduate, and when I was in graduate school the final volumes were not yet published, so we’d all scramble to choose mythological figures whose names began with the letters A-H.  Woe bedtide you if you got Zeus – no LIMC to do your legwork for you!  Now all the volumes are available (8 sets of 1 print and 1 plates volumes, for a total of 16 books).  At UGA our copy is at Main Reference (1st floor) NX650 .M9 L40.  Jenkins (no. 913) describes it as “by far the best source for locating and studying myths as they appear in ancient art” but does not seem as overwhelmingly fond of it for general purposes as I am.

Unfortunately, LIMC is a challenge for many undergraduates, especially those at the entry level – the level most likely to be studying classical mythology.  They are intimidated by foreign languages which they mostly do not read, and the terse (i.e. professional-level) citation style for primary sources in LIMC can be confusing.  I do show LIMC to many classes; many honors undergraduates and upper-level majors are happy to tackle it, and my goal is to make every grad student love and cherish it as I do.  But for the average 1000-level mythology student, it’s too much.  I will tackle some of the alternatives they turn to in forthcoming posts.