Category Archives: Articles & Books

Maximizing UVic Libraries eBooks for Students

eTextbooks for Students (2022-2023)

We are continuing with UVic Libraries pilot project, started in fall 2021, to track the use of library licensed electronic books assigned in courses for the spring 2022-23 academic term. The eTextbooks project supports access and affordability efforts that are important to student success. The website lists the ebooks by title, Course number, term, and Instructors’ last name.

This project complements the Libraries’ advocacy efforts around open education resources (OER) and aligns with its Strategic Directions. Our OER initiative includes an annual offering of OER grants, cross-campus collaborations with Learning Teaching Support & Innovation, the Bookstore, and the Undergraduate Student Union (UVSS). The project gave us the opportunity to scan the university landscape to determine the extent to which the Libraries’ licensed resources were being used at all levels of course work. The Libraries’ expanded ebook collection allows instructors to assign quality course materials, while providing affordable solutions for students.

With the assistance of our Young Canada Works intern, Liam McParland, we identified 280 total titles used in 394 courses during the fall and spring terms. We searched the University Bookstore’s textbook catalog to identify titles adopted by instructors. In adopting the Libraries licensed resources for their courses, we believe instructors saved UVic students a total of $794,469 and in doing so created high impact for students’ access and affordability to a quality education. These savings improve students’ access to affordable, quality education and is closely aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals #4.

sdg-4

CALL TO ACTION:

FACULTY: Lets us know if you are using an open textbook or a UVic Libraries licensed resources for you course this academic year.

STUDENTS: Let us know if you are accessing an open textbook or library licensed resources for your course!

UVicSpace: Readership Snapshot

December 17, 2021

Since January 1, 2021, the University of Victoria’s institutional repository (UVicSpace) has seen 1068 fulltext uploads. Of that total, 369 comprise theses and dissertations. The theses and dissertations collection had 13,668 visits from across the world (e.g., US, Russia, Germany, France, Netherlands, etc.)

The top 5 downloads in the theses and dissertation collection are:

10353 Project-based learning through the eyes of teachers and students: Investigating opinions of PBL in adult ESL   (stats)
5658 The drafting of Vietnam’s Consumer Protection Law: an analysis from legal transplantation theories.   (stats)
5301 Form, content, body parts: an analysis of gender relations in contemporary Japanese film.   (stats)
5293 Evaluation of EHR Training as a catalyst to achieve clinician satisfaction with technology in acute care setting   (stats)
5107 Tarot cards: an investigation of their benefit as a tool for self reflection   (stats)

The top 5 downloads in our open access monograph publishing series are:

85961 Global corruption : Law, theory & practice   (stats)
7481 Handbook of eHealth Evaluation: An Evidence-based Approach   (stats)
5762 From Family to Philosophy: Letter-Writers from the Pastons to Elizabeth Barrett Browning   (stats)
4581 Greek and Latin Roots, Part 1 (Latin) and Part 2 (Greek). Contribution of Greek and Latin to the English Language   (stats)
3762 Narratives of Memory, Migration, and Xenophobia in the European Union and Canada   (stats)

To get started with uploading your work contact the UVic Libraries Copyright and Scholarly Communications office at scholcom (at) uvic.ca. We can help you archive your final published or accepted manuscript versions of your articles in UVicSpace after checking publisher permissions. Placing your research publications in an open repository increases knowledge dissemination and helps satisfy the Tri-Agency’s open access to publications requirement.

New Title: Cultivating Feminist Choices

Cultivating Feminist Choices: A FEminiSTSCHRIFT in Honor of Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres edited by Brigetta M. Abel, Nicole Grewling, Beth Ann Muellner, and Helga Thorson is a new release published by the University of Victoria. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/13021 or purchased from the UVic bookstore: https://www.uvicbookstore.ca/general/browse/uvic+publications/9781550586794

This book is a Festschrift in honor of Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, written by several former graduate students, whom she supervised over her years as professor of German Studies at the University of Minnesota, and some of her colleagues and collaborators. The book pays tribute to Joeres’s influence on the German Studies profession as well as to her influence on the contributors’ lives and the feminist choices they have made. Dr. Joeres is known for her feminist scholarly contributions to women’s writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, including her book Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation (U of Chicago Press, 1998), and her collaborative feminist editing practices as editor of both Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and the Women in German Yearbook.”Together with Angelika Bammer, she edited a volume On the Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) that navigates the terrain of academic writing practices and calls for a focus not only on what scholars write but on how they write it. Because of her critical interventions in the realm of academia in general and feminist studies and German studies, in particular, as well as her influence on the lives of the next generations, this book will be of interest beyond those who know her personally.

Editors

Brigetta (Britt) Abel is Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of Writing at Macalester College (St Paul, MN). She is a lead author and co-project director of Grenzenlos Deutsch, an open-access, collaboratively produced online curriculum for beginning German, which is funded in part through a digital humanities advancement grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Nicole Grewling is an Associate Professor of German Studies at Washington College (Chestertown, Maryland), where she has taught language, literature, and culture courses since 2011. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century literature and culture, portrayals of America in German literature, travel literature, and the exotic. Her work focuses particularly on German colonial fantasies and German relationships to their others, especially their love for Native Americans.

Beth Ann Muellner is a Professor of German Studies in the German and Russian Studies Department at the College of Wooster, where she has taught language and culture courses
since 2004. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiographical writing, photography studies, museum studies, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature.

Helga Thorson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria in Canada, on the traditional lands of the Lekwungen peoples. Her
research focuses on a diverse range of topics, including modernist German and Austrian literature and culture, Scandinavian studies, gender studies, history of medicine, foreign language pedagogy, and Holocaust studies.

 

New Title: As if they were the Enemy

As if They Were the Enemy: The Dispossession of Japanese Canadians on Saltspring Island by Brian Smallshaw is a new release published by the University of Victoria. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/12244

On 22 April 1942, the CPR ship, the SS Princess Mary, was docked at the wharf in Ganges on Saltspring Island. The 77 Japanese Canadians taken away to camps in the British Columbia interior that day were among the over 22,000 who were forced into internal exile, and less than a year later, had their property liquidated against their will. Eleven properties on Saltspring were sold, some to the Soldier Settlement Board, and others at auction, including the largest belonging to Torazo Iwasaki that ended up in the hands of the local agent of the Custodian of Enemy Property. In the 1960s Iwasaki took the government to court in an effort to get his property back in a widely publicized case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost his case, but this book argues that though the government was operating under the War Measures Act, the liquidation of Japanese Canadian property was a breach of trust, and the illegal application to Canadian citizens of a law governing the property of enemies.

Brian Smallshaw has a master’s degree in history from the University of Victoria. His interest in trans-Pacific history dates from his period of residence in Asia. He lived for many years in Japan prior to moving to Saltspring Island in British Columbia. His current studies centre on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.

Narratives of Memory, Migration, and Xenophobia

December 17, 2019

Narratives of Memory, Migration, and Xenophobia in the European Union and Canada is the distinct culmination of an intensive cross-cultural academic endeavour that explores how memories of the past are intricately intertwined with present-day realities and future aspirations. The book is based on a range of experiences that stem from a summer field school focusing on landscapes of memory in Hungary, Germany, France, and Canada, in the context of migration and xenophobia. Contributors include Canadian and European academics; directors, researchers, and educators working at various European memorial sites; as well as graduate students from a wide range of disciplines. This cross-disciplinary investigation is based on a symposium as well as a series of concert performances in Europe and Canada highlighting the complex and multi-layered narratives of memory. The ultimate goal of this scholarly undertaking is to understand how agents of memory — including the music we listen to, the (his)stories that we tell, and the political and social actions that we engage in — create narratives of the past that allow us to make sense of ourselves in the present and to critically contest and challenge xenophobic and nationalistic renderings of political possibilities.

Editors

Dr. Helga K. Hallgrímsdóttir is an Associate Professor in Public Administration and a Research Associate in the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria. Her research interests are primarily in historical sociology, comparative political sociology with a focus on grassroots mobilization and social movements claimsmaking. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight grant as Principal Investigator on the link between austerity policies, economic downturn, and the rise of nationalism in Europe; and the principal investigator on a Jean Monnet Erasmus+ grant and SSHRC Connections grant on memory politics in Canada and Europe.

Dr. Helga Thorson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria. She is the Co- Director of the I-witness Field School, a 4- week course on Holocaust memorialization in Europe, which she ran for the first time in 2011. In addition, she is the co-founder of “The Future of Holocaust Memorialization: Confronting Racism, Antisemitism and Homophobia through Memory Work” research collective and one of the co-organizers of the group’s first conference at Central European University in Budapest in 2014, followed by a second international conference at the University of Victoria in 2015. Dr. Thorson has received numerous teaching awards including the Faculty of Humanities Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Victoria in 2012; the Excellence in Teaching for Experiential Learning Award at the University of Victoria in 2017; and most recently a 2019 3M National Teaching Award.

Free Download: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/11314

Purchase a Copy: https://www.uvicbookstore.ca/general/browse/uvic+publications/9781550586503

From Family to Philosophy: Letter-Writers from the Pastons to Elizabeth Barrett Browning

December 16, 2019

A cultural change in the Renaissance freed talented European writers to compose letters rivaling the finest that survived from ancient Rome. This book traces the lives and outlooks of distinguished Britons as revealed in their correspondence. The subjects range from the fierce satirist Jonathan Swift to the long-lived, all-observing Horace Walpole and from the poet and freedom fighter Lord Byron to the tormented but brilliant Jane Carlyle. Accompanying the self-portraits these writers unwittingly create are their many sketches of their contemporaries. Moreover, the views they express on forms of government, feminism, literature, theology, religious toleration, and other topics serve to relate their lives to the progression from the Age of Reason through the Romantic period to the Victorian era.

Dr. Henry Summerfield was born in 1935 at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He has an M.A. from Oxford, where he studied at Exeter College, and an M.Litt. from the University of Durham. From 1962 to 1964, he taught at the M. S. University of Baroda, India, and from 1964 to 1966 at the University of Illinois. In 1966, he emigrated to Canada, and from that year until 2003 he taught at the University of Victoria. His special interests are eighteenth century British literature, twentieth century English poetry, and Bibliography. In addition to articles, he has published That Myriad-minded Man: A biography of George William Russell, “A.E,” (1867-1935); An Introductory Guide to The Anathemata and the Sleeping Lord Sequence of David Jones (1979); and A Guide to the Books of William Blake for Innocent and Experienced Readers (1998).

Free Download: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/11348

Purchase a Copy: https://www.uvicbookstore.ca/general/browse/print+on+demand/9781550586473

UVic Author Genevieve von Petzinger is “one to watch”

Cave art researcher and UVic doctoral candidate Genevieve von Petzinger has created a name for herself in the world of archaeology through her study of paleolithic cave images.

“Genevieve von Petzinger studies cave art from the European Ice Age and has built a unique database that holds more than 5,000 signs from almost 400 sites across Europe. Her work has appeared in popular science magazines such as New Scientists and Science Illustrated. A National Geographic Emerging Explorer of 2016, she was a 2011 TED Global Fellow, a 2013-15 TED Senior Fellow and her 2015 TED talk has more than 2 million views.” Simonandshuster.ca

We are looking forward to seeing what is next for this prolific UVic researcher!

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Featured Thesis: “A Computer for the Rest of You”: Human-Computer Interaction in the Eversion

Thesis of the Day*

UVic News recently announced that UVic ranks among the top performers in 10 fields, according to the 2019 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings by Subject.  To celebrate, we would like to feature some of our graduate research. Today, we feature a 2011 English Master’s Thesis:

“A Computer for the Rest of You”: Human-Computer Interaction in the Eversion

by Shaun Gordon Macpherson

Abstract:

With the increasing ubiquity of networked “smart” devices that read and gather data on the physical world, the disembodied, cognitive realm of cyberspace has become “everted,” as such technologies migrate the communications networks and data collection of the Internet into the physical world. Popular open-source “maker” practices—most notably the practice of physical computing, which networks objects with digital environments using sensors and microcontrollers—increasingly push human-computer interaction (HCI) into the physical domain. Yet such practices, as political theorists and some philosophers of technology argue, bypass the very question of subjectivity, instead lauding the socioeconomic liberation of the individual afforded by open-source hardware practices. What is missing across these discourses is a technocultural framework for studying the material ways that everted technologies articulate subjects. I argue that examining the various, contradictory forms of interface that emerge from physical computing provides such a framework. To support this claim, I focus on several case studies, drawn from popular physical computing practices and communities, and analyze the particular ways that these devices articulate subjectivity. I conclude by linking my technocultural framework with various feminist theories of boundary transgression and hybridity, and end by suggesting that, in an everted landscape, the subject is politically constituted by a proximity to present time and space.

To read more, visit UVicSpace https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/5286

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team