Kate McDowell on Storytelling

I remember talking in college about "The Linguistic Turn" in academic perspectives that had occurred some 30 years before we got to academia.  These articles/chapters all make me think that perhaps there has since been an "Everyday Life Turn" of equal importance (as Sheringham, below, argues).  From the everyday information behavior of children and tweens to the everyday significance of racial micro-aggressions (more coming soon, as I prep for the second Reading Around Race group), it seems to me that there's something to this argument that the everyday has become at least a major rhetorical part of the direction of research in many disparate fields. First, here's an example of the kind of "everyday life" research that I often read, related to children and libraries: "Leisure and Work in Library and Community Programs for Very Young Children" by Roz Stooke and Pamela J. McKenzie ( Library Trends  57: 4, Spring 2009) After observin

This post is the first of what I hope will be a regular feature, a quick look through my recent Article Amassment.  Be they print journals or citations emailed me by colleagues, Article Amassment is all about fast skimming/reading a bunch of articles related to some aspect of youth services librarianship and blogging them here.  I expect entries to be more like abstracts or even annotations than summaries, with my own slant, of course.  So here goes, my first ever Article Amassment: Large, Andrew, et al.  "Developing a Visual Taxonomy:  Children's Views on Aesthetics"  JASIST 60(9): 2009, pp. 1808-1822. Bring together visualization and usability testing/design, with seven 6th grade young people as collaborators.  Includes children's prototype drawings of taxonomies, and uses them to suggest six aesthetic characteristics that should characterize such browsing interfaces for children, including "maplike metaphor."  They come up with six aesthetic

Lauren Oliver's Delirium follows the months before Lean is scheduled to be cured of deleria , the disease of love.  Everyone goes through it, and society is seemingly peaceful and calm as a result.  No falling in love means no insanity, no wars, no troublesome partner squabbles.  At eighteen, everyone is surgically operated on to remove the part of their brain that can love and matched with a suitable heterosexual partner for life.  And assigned a number of children to have.  But sometimes it goes wrong, as it did with Lena's mother, on whom the operation was not successful.  Despite four tries, they never did cure her of love.  As a result, Lena grew up first in a household full of love and games, and then, after her mother was said to have committed suicide, in her aunt's cold household, their whole family shamed by the blemish of her mother's failure. Very slowly (sometimes a bit too slowly for the pace of the story) Lena begins to understand that the world of s

Personally, I like to read websites or blogs about a sequence of events.  With a beginning, middle, and end.  Oh, that sounds a bit like narrative, doesn't it!  Funny how story creeps up as a defining element of all that I'm into even when I don't think it's the main point. So this blog, http://modernhypatia.info/201 1/08/job-hunt-index/ , is all about a particular person's job hunt in librarianship, but written in ways that so many folks will recognize.  I personally know several people, most of them recent former students, who are finding the same stories of successes and pitfalls.  It's out of season for our semester cycle, but well worth reading if you'll be job hunting as a librarian or information professional of any sort in the next year.

Sarah Dessen has a steady hand at writing emotionally involving YA books with female protagonists.  Her stories are usually about coming of age in one way or another, and this story is about Annabel Greene, whose two sisters have been in so much trouble lately (one nearly dying from anorexia) that she has stuffed her own problems deep out of sight.  Problems like the fact that she was raped by her best friend's boyfriend last summer, and her best friend Sophie dumped her over it because she blamed Annabel for being a "slut."  Now school has started, but Annabel still hasn't told a soul what really happened, and endures Sophie's stream of verbal abuse in silence and alone.  Until, one day, she starts to really talk to the guy who also sits alone at lunch.  Their friendship blossoms into romance, but then screeches to a halt when Annabel goes into total shut-down mode and can't tell him why she's so upset.  It's many things, but the main one is that Soph