OpenSource Shakespeare - An Experiment in Literary Technology

OpenSource Shakespeare - An Experiment in Literary Technology is a collection of open source texts providing its users with a clean design and easy access to the 1864 Globe Edition of Shakespeare's complete works. Plays are organized by genre, by number of lines and the site also offers a character list and a character search feature. The Sonnets and Poems section facilitates sonnet-by-sonnet or side-by-side comparison viewing.

All texts have a print/save version, which looks even better than the online counterpart.

The website of the Week!

I know, I know! Holidays are for having fun, going out etc. but in the mean time, it's alright to get a bit nerdy and check out the most interesting websites ever.

This week I've read a couple of nice things on the site below:
The Shakespeare Resource Center. You'll find here collected links from all over the World Wide Web to help you find information on William Shakespeare.

Online Summer School :)

"An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware." (OpenCourseWare website)

In other words: free education for all. Let's not discuss get into ethical issues here; just run a search and tell me what you think!

The Internet Polyglot

The Internet Polyglot provides us with a great example of a CALL system. Funny games/tests on many topics: insurance, medical terms, etc. Just 21 for now but it looks promising!

Linguee.com/Linguee.de

... or the web as a dictionary! I haven't tested this yet, but it basically helps you to check terminology, phrases and sentences in a bilingual environment, i.e. English-German, German-English. Read the authors' description of this FREE service, test it and tell us what you think (use the "comment" option as, unfortunately, we won't have the chance to meet again in our translation/interpretation class this year):

"What is Linguee? With Linguee, you can search many millions of bilingual texts in English and German for words and expressions. Every expression is accompanied by useful additional information and suitable example sentences.
What is the benefit?When you translate texts to a foreign language, you usually look for common phrases rather than translations of single words. With its intelligent search and the significantly larger amount of stored text content, Linguee is the right tool for this task. You find:

• In what context a translation is used
• How frequent a particular translation is
• Example sentences: How have other people translated an expression?

By searching not only for a single word, but for a respective word in its context, you can easily find a translation that fits optimal in context. With its large number of entries, Linguee often retrieves translations of rare terms that you don't find anywhere else." (www.linguee.com)

The Phrase Finder

Does your dictionary suit your needs? Does it provide you with enough information on a certain word/phrase? If your answer is YES, then don't bother clicking on this link: The Phrase Finder.

THE COMPLETE SITE ON MAHATMA GANDHI

A Place to learn about Gandhi, his life, work & philosophy. This comprehensive site is regularly updated & maintained by non-profit Gandhian Organizations in India & has a wealth of information & material for researchers, students, activists & anyone interested in Gandhi. Click HERE to visit the site!

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was a prominent political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement. He was the pioneer of satyagraha—resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience, firmly founded upon ahimsa or total non-violence—which led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. He is commonly known around the world as Mahatma Gandhi (Sanskrit: mahātmā or "Great Soul", an honorific first applied to him by Rabindranath Tagore) and in India also as Bapu (Gujarati: bāpu or "Father"). He is officially honoured in India as the Father of the Nation; his birthday, 2 October, is commemorated there as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Non-Violence.

The Master List of Free Online College Courses

Click HERE  to visit a collection of free online college classes available to the general public. 

Contents: 

   1. General Collections

   2. Math and Science

   3. History

   4. Arts and Humanities

   5. Business and Economics

Academic Earth

Click HERE to watch thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars on various subjects such as:

* Astronomy
* Biology
* Chemistry
* Computer Science
* Economics
* Engineering
* English
* Entrepreneurship
* History
* Law
* Mathematics
* Medicine
* Philosophy
* Physics
* Political Science
* Psychology
* Religion

The BBC Knowledge Magazine

I strongly recommend the new BBC Knowledge Magazine - a magazine about science, nature and history, invention, innovation and more. Click HERE to read it for FREE!

YouTube EDU has launched!

For starters, you could try a video on translation studies and listen to one of the major figures in the field: Susan Bassnett, Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick, speaking about the future of doctoral programs in Translation. 

If you just want to have fun, click HERE! 

NB: This is not what an interpreter should be!

The Arts and Humanities pages of Intute

Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the best Web resources for education and research, selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists. There are over 21,000 Web resources listed here that are freely available by keyword searching and browsing.

Quick pick: E-Journals --- English.

BigThink: Paul Krugman on Post-Consumer Society

Watch Paul Krugman speaking about the impact of the financial crisis on shopping mall culture. (Click on the title of this post to go to the BigThink website!)

Paul Robin Krugman, born February 28, 1953, is an American economist, columnist, intellectual and author.He is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, a centenary professor at the London School of Economics, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity". Krugman is known in academia for his work in international economics, including trade theory, economic geography, and international finance.

LitSum: Free Literature Summaries and Study Guides

Litsum is a totally new alternative for free literature summaries! If you are looking for free book summaries or book notes, Litsum has more free literature summaries than any other site. Their literature study guides and enotes include full chapter summaries and analysis, topics for discussion, quotes, style, themes and character analysis. Litsum is probably the largest free literature summary website online! It is a great tool, but you should also consider reading the books. Otherwise, most study guides available on Litsum are useless!

Free E-book Download: Fiction

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a contemporary fantasy novel by Canadian author Cory Doctorow. (click on the title of the book or on the title of this post to download it for FREE!)

This novel reverses many of the conventions of the cyberpunk genre. With the exception of a brief story written by the main character, it takes place wholly in a "real" world (albeit a strange one) instead of involving a complex digital simulation. The characters that would be most associated with the "punks" are older guys who are well aware of their age and show a strong emotional side instead of being younger, detached, and augmented. (It stands to note that the "standard" mohawk does appear on at least one character's head.) Some of the ones closest to the "hacking scheme" are even part of the iconic big business that would normally be a threat in a similar setting. Rather than hacking tons of code in elaborate, secretive plans, the characters use dumpster diving to piece together technology that is free to all. They are open about what they are doing, actively seeking assistance from whatever source. The rebellious youth of the novel often scorn computer technology or work on the project without knowing what they are doing. Anarchists shun helping Alan and Kurt, while big business delights in it.

A Great Tool for Students - Bartleby.com

Bartleby.com - one of the best internet publishers of literature offers free access to open domain texts. I strongly recommend: Columbia Encyclopedia, American Heritage Dictionary, Columbia World of Quotations, Oxford Shakespeare, Gray's Anatomy, Strunk's Elements of Style and World Factbook.

Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary Online

The Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary Online is a great resource for all of us who want to improve our general vocabulary and understanding of specialized terminology.  The 15 major themes contain more than 6,000 images and see words like never before. Click HERE to watch a demo.

Get FREE Babylon license for EDUCATIONAL USE!

Good news for people in need of a translation software, but short on money. Babylon Ltd., provider of dictionary and translation solutions, started to give away free licenses for educational use. I joined in today and immediately got a reply. So give it a try. You may apply for a license of this handy translation tool to on this page .

EUR-Lex: FREE Access to EU Law

EUR-Lex provides direct free access to European Union law. Here you can consult the Official Journal of the European Union as well as the treaties, legislation, case-law and legislative proposals. You can also use the extensive search facilities available on EUR-Lex.
The information is available in ALL the official languages of the EU.

Click on the following link to go to the EUR-Lex website: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/index.htm

Recommended:

1. Recognition of diplomas and qualifications in the European Union
2. Multilingualism in the EU
3. Employment

eScholarship Editions

The eScholarship Editions collection includes almost 2000 books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction. Over 500 titles are available to the public.

Recommended FREE books:

1. Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition - by Christopher Beach

2. Suggestion and Covert Meaning in the Works of Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Austen - by Irvin Ehrenpreis

3. America at Century's End - edited by Alan Wolfe

4. Asceticism and Society in Crisis. John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints - by Susan Ashbrook Harvey

5. Authors of Their Own Lives. Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists - Edited by Bennett M. Berger