Technology plays a major role in Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt’s new course titled Travel and Transformation in the Early 17th Century. The course “makes innovative use of all the tools and technical know-how a major university can deliver” including a course Web site with texts, images, artwork, music, geographic, cultural, and historical resources, even a virtual ship tour. According to Greenblatt, his use of new technologies - including GoogleEarth, digital images, and digital video - reflects his latest scholarly thinking, allows for true interdisciplinary approaches and stimulates deep engagement with the material and creativity in his students. Greenblatt is a world-renowned scholar of Renaissance literature and University Professor of the Humanities working on ways to “cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties.” For details of how the course is organized and how technology is used, see the Chronicle of Higher Education’s description.

The library guide for the course reflects the rich array of materials used.

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The Social Science Research Network has announced the creation of the Humanities Research Network (HRN). Humanities Research Network is intended to be a world-wide, comprehensive online resource for research in humanities, providing scholars with access to current work in their field and facilitating research and scholarship.

HRN will begin with the following networks:

HRN CLASSIC RESEARCH NETWORK (Director: Lesley Dean-Jones, University of Texas at Austin)

HRN ENGLISH & AMERICAN LITERATURE RESEARCH NETWORK (Director: Susan Heinzelman, University of Texas at Austin)

HRN PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH NETWORK (Directors: Lawrence Becker, Hollins University and Brie Gertler, University of Virginia)

A list of the eJournals abstracted by each of these networks is at: http://www.ssrn.com/update/crn/crnann/annA001.html

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ConvergeSouth is an annual blogger conference in Greensboro, NC, held October 19 and 20^th 2007. From the website, it’s a “combination of a blogger-con and a creativity center”

My questions about why people blog and how blogging can shape someone’s world were answered in a keynote presentation entitled “Changing Your World with Blogs” by Elisa Camahort, founder of BlogHer. Even if you don’t have your own blog, you are part of blogging community, by reading blogs and commenting, so your world is changing because of blogs. This session gave specific examples of blogs changing the world and I took many notes, summarized below.

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