The Internet Archive Will Digitize & Preserve Millions of Academic Articles with Its New Database, “Internet Archive Scholar”

in Archives, Data, Education, Internet Archive, Libraries | September 22nd, 2020

Open access pub­lish­ing has, indeed, made aca­d­e­m­ic research more acces­si­ble, but in “the move from phys­i­cal aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals to dig­i­tal­ly-acces­si­ble papers,” Saman­tha Cole writes at Vice, it has also become “more pre­car­i­ous to pre­serve…. If an insti­tu­tion stops pay­ing for web host­ing or changes servers, the research with­in could dis­ap­pear.” At least a cou­ple hun­dred open access jour­nals van­ished in this way between 2000 and 2019, a new study pub­lished on arx­iv found. Anoth­er 900 jour­nals are in dan­ger of meet­ing the same fate.

The jour­nals in per­il include schol­ar­ship in the human­i­ties and sci­ences, though many pub­li­ca­tions may only be of inter­est to his­to­ri­ans, giv­en the speed at which sci­en­tif­ic research tends to move. In any case, “there shouldn’t real­ly be any decay or loss in sci­en­tif­ic pub­li­ca­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly those that have been open on the web,” says study co-author Mikael Laasko, infor­ma­tion sci­en­tist at the Han­ken School of Eco­nom­ics in Helsin­ki. Yet, in dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing, there are no print­ed copies in uni­ver­si­ty libraries, cat­a­logued and main­tained by librar­i­ans.

To fill the need, the Inter­net Archive has cre­at­ed its own schol­ar­ly search plat­form, a “full­text search index” that includes “over 25 mil­lion research arti­cles and oth­er schol­ar­ly doc­u­ments” pre­served on its servers. These col­lec­tions span dig­i­tized and orig­i­nal dig­i­tal arti­cles pub­lished from the 18th cen­tu­ry to “the lat­est Open Access con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.” Con­tent in this search index comes in one of three forms:

  • pub­lic web con­tent in the Way­back Machine web archives (web.archive.org), either iden­ti­fied from his­toric col­lect­ing, crawled specif­i­cal­ly to ensure long-term access to schol­ar­ly mate­ri­als, or crawled at the direc­tion of Archive-It part­ners
  • dig­i­tized print mate­r­i­al from paper and micro­form col­lec­tions pur­chased and scanned by Inter­net Archive or its part­ners
  • gen­er­al mate­ri­als on the archive.org col­lec­tions, includ­ing con­tent from part­ner orga­ni­za­tions, uploads from the gen­er­al pub­lic, and mir­rors of oth­er projects

The project is still in “alpha” and “has sev­er­al bugs,” the site cau­tions, but it could, when it’s ful­ly up and run­ning, become part of a much-need­ed rev­o­lu­tion in aca­d­e­m­ic research—that is if the major aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ers don’t find some legal pre­text to shut it down.

Aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ing boasts one of the most rapa­cious legal busi­ness mod­els on the glob­al mar­ket, and one of the most exploita­tive: a dou­ble stan­dard in which schol­ars freely pub­lish and review research for the pub­lic ben­e­fit (osten­si­bly) and very often on the pub­lic dime; while pri­vate inter­me­di­aries rake in astro­nom­i­cal sums for them­selves with pay­walls. The open access mod­el has changed things, but the only way to tru­ly serve the “best inter­ests of researchers and the pub­lic,” neu­ro­sci­en­tist Shaun Khoo argues, is through pub­lic infra­struc­ture and ful­ly non-prof­it pub­li­ca­tion.

Maybe Inter­net Archive Schol­ar can go some way toward bridg­ing the gap, as a pub­licly acces­si­ble, non-prof­it search engine, dig­i­tal cat­a­logue, and library for research that is worth pre­serv­ing, read­ing, and build­ing upon even if it does­n’t gen­er­ate share­hold­er rev­enue. For a deep­er dive into how the Archive built its for­mi­da­ble, still devel­op­ing, new data­base, see the video pre­sen­ta­tion above from Jef­fer­son Bai­ley, Direc­tor of Web Archiv­ing & Data Ser­vices. And have a look at Inter­net Archive Schol­ar here. It cur­rent­ly lacks advanced search func­tions, but plug in any search term and pre­pare to be amazed by the incred­i­ble vol­ume of archived full text arti­cles you turn up.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Archive Makes 2,500 More Clas­sic MS-DOS Video Games Free to Play Online: Alone in the Dark, Doom, Microsoft Adven­ture, and Oth­ers

Libraries & Archivists Are Dig­i­tiz­ing 480,000 Books Pub­lished in 20th Cen­tu­ry That Are Secret­ly in the Pub­lic Domain

The Boston Pub­lic Library Will Dig­i­tize & Put Online 200,000+ Vin­tage Records

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Google Introduces 6‑Month Career Certificates, Threatening to Disrupt Higher Education with “the Equivalent of a Four-Year Degree”

in Education, Technology | September 5th, 2020

Update: You can find the first of the Google Career Cer­tifi­cates here. They’re also added to our col­lec­tion 200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies. 

I used to make a point of ask­ing every col­lege-apply­ing teenag­er I encoun­tered why they want­ed to go to col­lege in the first place. Few had a ready answer; most, after a deer-in-the-head­lights moment, said they want­ed to be able to get a job — and in a tone imply­ing it was too obvi­ous to require artic­u­la­tion. But if one’s goal is sim­ply employ­ment, does­n’t it seem a bit exces­sive to move across the state, coun­try, or world, spend four years tak­ing tests and writ­ing papers on a grab-bag of sub­jects, and spend (or bor­row) a large and ever-inflat­ing amount of mon­ey to do so? This, in any case, is one idea behind Google’s Career Cer­tifi­cates, all of which can be com­plet­ed from home in about six months. Find the first ones here.

Any such remote edu­ca­tion­al process looks more viable than ever at the moment due to the ongo­ing coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, a con­di­tion that also has today’s col­lege-apply­ing teenagers won­der­ing whether they’ll ever see a cam­pus at all. Nor is the broad­er eco­nom­ic harm lost on Google, whose Senior Vice Pres­i­dent for Glob­al Affairs Kent Walk­er frames their Career Cer­tifi­cates as part of a “dig­i­tal jobs pro­gram to help Amer­i­ca’s eco­nom­ic recov­ery.” He writes that “peo­ple need good jobs, and the broad­er econ­o­my needs their ener­gy and skills to sup­port our future growth.” At the same time, “col­lege degrees are out of reach for many Amer­i­cans, and you shouldn’t need a col­lege diplo­ma to have eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty.”

Hence Google’s new Career Cer­tifi­cates in “the high-pay­ing, high-growth career fields of Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment, and User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design,” which join their exist­ing IT Sup­port and IT Automa­tion in Python Cer­tifi­cates.

Host­ed on the online edu­ca­tion plat­form Cours­era, these pro­grams (which run about $300-$400) are devel­oped in-house and taught by Google employ­ees and require no pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence. To help cov­er their cost Google will also fund 100,000 “need-based schol­ar­ships” and offer stu­dents “hun­dreds of appren­tice­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties” at the com­pa­ny “to pro­vide real on-the-job train­ing.” None of this guar­an­tees any giv­en stu­dent a job at Google, of course, but as Walk­er empha­sizes, “we will con­sid­er our new career cer­tifi­cates as the equiv­a­lent of a four-year degree.”

Tech­nol­o­gy-and-edu­ca­tion pun­dit Scott Gal­loway calls that bach­e­lor’s-degree equiv­a­lence the biggest sto­ry in his field of recent weeks. It’s per­haps the begin­ning of a trend where tech com­pa­nies dis­rupt high­er edu­ca­tion, cre­at­ing afford­able and scal­able edu­ca­tion­al pro­grams that will train the work­force for 21st cen­tu­ry jobs. This could con­ceiv­ably mean that uni­ver­si­ties lose their monop­oly on the train­ing and vet­ting of stu­dents, or at least find that they’ll increas­ing­ly share that respon­si­bil­i­ty with big tech.

This past spring Gal­loway gave an inter­view to New York mag­a­zine pre­dict­ing that “ulti­mate­ly, uni­ver­si­ties are going to part­ner with com­pa­nies to help them expand.” He adds: “I think that part­ner­ship will look some­thing like MIT and Google part­ner­ing. Microsoft and Berke­ley. Big-tech com­pa­nies are about to enter edu­ca­tion and health care in a big way, not because they want to but because they have to.” Whether such uni­ver­si­ty part­ner­ships will emerge as falling enroll­ments put the strain on cer­tain seg­ments of the uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem remains to be seen, but so far Google seems con­fi­dent about going it alone. And where Google goes, as we’ve all seen before, oth­er insti­tu­tions often fol­low.

Note: You can lis­ten to Gal­loway elab­o­rate on how Google may lead to the unbundling of high­er ed here. Lis­ten to the episode “State of Play: The Shar­ing Econ­o­my” from his Prof G pod­cast:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies.

Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Mas­ters, Mini Mas­ters, Bach­e­lors & Mini Bach­e­lors from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Google Launch­es a Free Course on Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Sign Up for Its New “Machine Learn­ing Crash Course”

Google Launch­es Free Course on Deep Learn­ing: The Sci­ence of Teach­ing Com­put­ers How to Teach Them­selves

Mal­colm Glad­well Asks Hard Ques­tions about Mon­ey & Mer­i­toc­ra­cy in Amer­i­can High­er Edu­ca­tion: Stream 3 Episodes of His New Pod­cast

Niet­zsche Lays Out His Phi­los­o­phy of Edu­ca­tion and a Still-Time­ly Cri­tique of the Mod­ern Uni­ver­si­ty (1872)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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What Made Richard Feynman One of the Most Admired Educators in the World

in Education, Science | August 17th, 2020

If Richard Feyn­man had only ever pub­lished his work in the­o­ret­i­cal physics, his name would still be known far and wide. As it is, Feyn­man remains famous more than thir­ty years after his death in large part for the way he engaged with the pub­lic. From his pop­u­lar text­book The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics (which you can read free online here) to his best­selling con­ver­sa­tion­al essay col­lec­tions like Sure­ly You’re Jok­ing, Mr. Feyn­man to the class­es he taught at Cor­nell (now avail­able online) to his demon­stra­tion of what went wrong with the Space Shut­tle Chal­lenger, he kept in con­ver­sa­tion all his life with human­i­ty out­side the realm of pro­fes­sion­al sci­ence. This explains, in part, why Feyn­man became what Bill Gates calls, in the video above, “the best teacher I nev­er had.”

Gates points to Feyn­man’s lec­ture series “The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law,” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, as “a great exam­ple of how he could explain things in a fun and inter­est­ing way to every­one. And he was very fun­ny.”

That sense of humor com­ple­ment­ed a sense of rig­or: “Dr. Feyn­man used a tough process on him­self, where if he did­n’t real­ly under­stand some­thing, he would push him­self,” ask­ing ques­tions like “Do I under­stand this bound­ary case?” and “Do I under­stand why we don’t do it this oth­er way?” Such an effort to find the gaps in and fail­ures of one’s own under­stand­ing may sound famil­iar, fun­da­men­tal as it is to Feyn­man’s “note­book” tech­nique of learn­ing that we’ve post­ed about more than once before.

You only know how well you under­stand some­thing when you explain it to some­one else; many of us real­ize this, but Feyn­man lived it. The depth of his own under­stand­ing allowed him nev­er to be bor­ing: “Feyn­man made sci­ence so fas­ci­nat­ing,” Gates says, “He remind­ed us how much fun it is,” and in so doing empha­sized that “every­body can have a pret­ty full under­stand­ing. He’s such a joy­ful exam­ple of how we’d all like to learn and think about things.” Though the term “sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor” was­n’t in wide use dur­ing Feyn­man’s life­time, he played the role to near-per­fec­tion. And in the kind of mate­ri­als high­light­ed here, he con­tin­ues to con­vey not just knowl­edge but, as he liked to put it, the plea­sure of find­ing things out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Is Now Com­plete­ly Online

‘The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law’: Richard Feynman’s Leg­endary Course Pre­sent­ed at Cor­nell, 1964

Richard Feynman’s “Lost Lec­ture:” An Ani­mat­ed Retelling

Richard Feyn­man Intro­duces the World to Nan­otech­nol­o­gy with Two Sem­i­nal Lec­tures (1959 & 1984)

Richard Feynman’s “Note­book Tech­nique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at School, at Work, or in Life

The “Feyn­man Tech­nique” for Study­ing Effec­tive­ly: An Ani­mat­ed Primer

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Explore an Interactive, Online Version of the Beautifully Illustrated, 200-Year-Old British & Exotic Mineralogy

in Art, Education, Science | August 13th, 2020

What if I said the prob­lem with STEM edu­ca­tion is that it doesn’t include near­ly enough art? For one thing, I would only echo what STEAM pro­po­nents have said for years. This does­n’t only mean that stu­dents should study the arts with the same seri­ous­ness as they do the sci­ences. But that sci­ence should be taught through the arts, as it was in the 19th cen­tu­ry when Nat­u­ral­ists relied on fine art illus­tra­tion.

Maybe increas­ing com­plex­i­ty demands charts and graphs, but there are rea­sons oth­er than hip anti­quar­i­an­ism to cher­ish 19th cen­tu­ry sci­en­tif­ic art, and to aim for some­thing close to its high aes­thet­ic stan­dards. Humans seem to find nature far more awe-inspir­ing when it’s medi­at­ed by paint­ing, poet­ry, nar­ra­tive, music, fine art pho­tog­ra­phy, etc. We want to be emo­tion­al­ly moved by sci­ence. As such, few guides to the nat­ur­al world have ele­vat­ed their sub­jects as high­ly as British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy, a mul­ti­vol­ume ref­er­ence work for… well, rocks, to put it vul­gar­ly, pub­lished between 1802 and 1817.

Dur­ing these years, “notable nat­u­ral­ist, illus­tra­tor, and min­er­al­o­gist James Sower­by drew intri­cate pic­tures of min­er­als in an effort to illus­trate the topo­graph­ic min­er­al­o­gy of Great Britain and min­er­als not yet known to it,” writes Nicholas Rougeux. “These illus­tra­tions were some of the finest on the sub­ject and are still con­sid­ered by some to be to this day.” Though he was sure­ly com­pen­sat­ed for his work, Sowerby’s detailed draw­ings come across as labors of devo­tion.

Rather than just print­ing them on post­cards or tote bags (though he does sell posters), Rougeux has done for Sowerby’s min­er­als what he had pre­vi­ous­ly done for oth­er clas­sic text­books and tax­onomies from the past, such as the 200-year-old Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours and Euclid’s Ele­ments from 1847. Dig­i­tiz­ing the 718 illus­tra­tions on one sprawl­ing inter­ac­tive page allows him to retain their edu­ca­tion­al val­ue: click on any indi­vid­ual min­er­al and you’ll bring up an enlarged image fol­lowed by excerpts from the text.

You have nev­er seen such rocks as these, no mat­ter how many uncut gems you’ve held in your hand. Because these illus­tra­tions turn them into some­thing else—crystalline palaces, alien organs, pet­ri­fied explo­sions, moldy loaves of bread… all the many shapes that time can take in rock form. They aren’t all beau­ti­ful rocks, but they are each beau­ti­ful­ly-ren­dered with lines that might remind us of the most skilled com­ic artists, who are per­haps some of the last inher­i­tors of this kind of graph­ic style. Sower­by him­self illus­trat­ed sev­er­al oth­er sci­en­tif­ic works, includ­ing series on biol­o­gy, mycol­o­gy, and a col­or sys­tem of his own devis­ing.

“We feel much plea­sure in pre­sent­ing our friends with a fig­ure and account of the most per­fect and rare spec­i­men yet found of this sub­stance,” begins the text accom­pa­ny­ing Hydrargillite, above, which resem­bles a small, mis­shapen moon or aster­oid. Rougeux also takes quite a bit of plea­sure in his work of recov­er­ing these ref­er­ence books and mak­ing them beau­ti­ful­ly use­ful once again for 21st cen­tu­ry read­ers. You can read his detailed account of the orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions and his adap­ta­tion of them for use on the web here.

While appre­ci­at­ing the fin­er points of col­or, line, and com­po­si­tion in Rougeux’s tapes­try of vin­tage min­er­al illus­tra­tions, you might just inad­ver­tent­ly expand your knowl­edge and appre­ci­a­tion of min­er­al­o­gy. You can also read the entire British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy, if you’ve got the time and incli­na­tion, at the Inter­net Archive.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al World Free to Down­load

Explore an Inter­ac­tive, Online Ver­sion of Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours, a 200-Year-Old Guide to the Col­ors of the Nat­ur­al World

A Beau­ti­ful­ly-Designed Edi­tion of Euclid’s Ele­ments from 1847 Gets Dig­i­tized: Explore the New Online, Inter­ac­tive Repro­duc­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Free Stanford Course on How to Teach Online: Watch the Lectures Online

in Education, K-12, Stanford | July 26th, 2020

Ear­li­er this month, Stan­ford’s Online High School offered (in part­ner­ship with Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies) a free, five-day course “Teach Your Class Online: The Essen­tials.” With many schools start­ing the next aca­d­e­m­ic year online, this course found a large audi­ence. 7,000 teach­ers signed up. Aimed at mid­dle and high school teach­ers, the course cov­ered “gen­er­al guide­lines for adapt­ing your course to an online for­mat, best prac­tices for var­ied sit­u­a­tions, com­mon pit­falls in online course design, and how to trou­bleshoot stu­dent issues online.”

The videos from “Teach Your Class Online: The Essen­tials” are all now avail­able online. You can watch them in sequen­tial order, mov­ing from top to bot­tom, here. Or watch them on this Stan­ford host­ed page. Day 1 (above) pro­vides a gen­er­al intro­duc­tion to teach­ing online. See top­ics cov­ered in Days 2–5 below.

Please feel free to share these videos with any teach­ers. And if any­one watch­es these lec­tures and takes good class notes (ones oth­er teach­ers can use), please let us know. We would be hap­py to help share them with oth­er teach­ers.

Final­ly, just to give you a lit­tle back­ground, Stan­ford’s Online High School has oper­at­ed as a ful­ly-online, inde­pen­dent, accred­it­ed high school since 2006. Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­vides open enroll­ment cours­es to adults world­wide. All of its cours­es are cur­rent­ly online. For any­one inter­est­ed, Cours­era also offers a spe­cial­iza­tion (a series of five cours­es) on online learn­ing called the Vir­tu­al Teacher. It can be explored here.

 

Day 2

  • Get­ting Spe­cif­ic: Sit­u­a­tions and Tools
  • Sci­ence: Labs in Online Ped­a­gogy

 

Day 3

  • Online Class­room Exam­ple Clips
  • Build­ing and Main­tain­ing a Class­room
    Com­mu­ni­ty

 

Day 4

  • Review of Sub­mit­ted Sam­ple Les­son Drafts
  • Trou­bleshoot­ing Obsta­cles to Suc­cess in the Online Envi­ron­ment

 

Day 5

  • Math: Using Writ­ing Tablets and White­boards
  • Mod­ern Lan­guages: Tips for High­ly Inter­ac­tive Class Dur­ing Which Stu­dents Active­ly Speak and Write in the Tar­get Lan­guage
  • Human­i­ties: Pro­duc­tive Class­room Con­ver­sa­tions About Chal­leng­ing Sub­jects
  • Clos­ing Thoughts

 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

How Schools Can Start Teach­ing Online in a Short Peri­od of Time: Free Tuto­ri­als from the Stan­ford Online High School

“I Will Sur­vive,” the Coro­n­avirus Ver­sion for Teach­ers Going Online

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A Free Stanford Course on How to Teach Online: Designed for Middle & High School Teachers (July 13 — 17)

in Education, Online Courses | July 10th, 2020

This fall, many teach­ers (across the coun­try and the world) will be asked to teach online–something most teach­ers have nev­er done before. To assist with that tran­si­tion, the Stan­ford Online High School and Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies have teamed up to offer a free online course called Teach­ing Your Class Online: The Essen­tials. Taught by vet­er­an instruc­tors at Stan­ford Online High School (OHS), this course “will help mid­dle and high school instruc­tors move from gen­er­al con­cepts for teach­ing online to the prac­ti­cal details of adapt­ing your class for your stu­dents.” The course is free and runs from 1–3 pm Cal­i­for­nia time, July 13 — 17. You can sign up here.

For any­one inter­est­ed, Stan­ford will also offer addi­tion­al cours­es that give teach­ers the chance to prac­tice teach­ing their mate­r­i­al online and get feed­back from Stan­ford Online High School instruc­tors. Offered from July 20 — July 24, those cours­es cost $95. Click to this page, and scroll down to enroll.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,500 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

How Schools Can Start Teach­ing Online in a Short Peri­od of Time: Free Tuto­ri­als from the Stan­ford Online High School

“I Will Sur­vive,” the Coro­n­avirus Ver­sion for Teach­ers Going Online

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The History of the 1918 Flu Pandemic, “The Deadliest Epidemic of All Time”: Three Free Lectures from The Great Courses

in Education, Health, History, How to Learn for Free, Science | June 4th, 2020

In one cas­cade of events after anoth­er, peo­ple are find­ing out the nor­mal they once knew doesn’t exist any­more. Instead it feels as if we’re liv­ing through sev­er­al past crises at once, try­ing to cram as much his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge as we can to make sense of the moment. 2020 espe­cial­ly feels like an echo of 1918–1919, when the “dead­liest epi­dem­ic of all time,” as The Great Cours­es calls the “Span­ish flu,” killed mil­lions (then the U.S. devolved into a wave of racist vio­lence.) By offer­ing exam­ples of both neg­a­tive and pos­i­tive respons­es, the his­to­ry, soci­ol­o­gy, and epi­demi­ol­o­gy of the 1918 flu can guide deci­sion-mak­ing as we pre­pare for a sec­ond wave of COVID-19 infec­tions.

The Great Cours­es start­ed offer­ing free resources on the coro­n­avirus out­break back in March, with a brief “What You Need to Know” explain­er and a free lec­ture course on infec­tious dis­eases. After catch­ing up on the his­to­ry of epi­demics, we’ll find our­selves nat­u­ral­ly won­der­ing why we learned lit­tle to noth­ing about the Span­ish flu.

The three-part lec­ture series here, excerpt­ed from the larg­er course Mys­ter­ies of the Micro­scop­ic World (avail­able with a Free Tri­al to the Great Cours­es Plus), begins by bold­ly call­ing this his­tor­i­cal lacu­na “A Con­spir­a­cy of Silence.” Tulane pro­fes­sor Bruce E. Fleury quotes Alfred Cros­by, who writes in America’s For­got­ten Pan­dem­ic, “the impor­tant and almost incom­pre­hen­si­ble fact about the Span­ish influen­za, is that it killed mil­lions upon mil­lions of peo­ple in a year or less… and yet, it has nev­er inspired awe, not in 1918 and not since.”

Epi­dem­ic dis­eases that have had tremen­dous impact in the past have become the sub­ject of lit­er­ary epics. Few epi­demics have accom­plished mass death “through sheer brute force” like the 1918 flu. The num­bers are tru­ly stag­ger­ing, in the tens to hun­dreds of mil­lions world­wide, with U.S. deaths dwarf­ing the com­bined casu­al­ties of all the coun­try’s major wars. Yet there are only a few men­tions of the flu in Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture from the time. Fleury men­tions some rea­sons for the amne­sia: WWI “took cen­ter stage,” sur­vivors were too trau­ma­tized to want to remem­ber. We may still won­der why we should look back over 100 years ago and learn about the past when cur­rent events are so all-con­sum­ing.

“His­to­ry com­pels us not to look away,” pro­fes­sor Fleury says, “lest we fail to learn the lessons paid for by our par­ents and our grand­par­ents.” Faulkn­er, it seems, was right that the past is nev­er past. But we need not respond in the same failed ways each time. The abil­i­ty to study and learn from his­to­ry gives us crit­i­cal per­spec­tive in per­ilous, uncer­tain times.

Sign up here for a free tri­al to the Great Cours­es Plus now rebrand­ed as Won­dri­um.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Span­ish Flu: A Warn­ing from His­to­ry

Louis Arm­strong Remem­bers How He Sur­vived the 1918 Flu Epi­dem­ic in New Orleans

Watch “Coro­n­avirus Out­break: What You Need to Know,” and the 24-Lec­ture Course “An Intro­duc­tion to Infec­tious Dis­eases,” Both Free from The Great Cours­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Albert Einstein Explains Why We Need to Read the Classics

in Education | May 28th, 2020

Two pieces of read­ing advice I’ve car­ried through­out my life came from two ear­ly favorite writ­ers, Her­man Melville and C.S. Lewis. In one of the myr­i­ad pearls he toss­es out as asides in his prose, Melville asks in Moby Dick, “why read wide­ly when you can read deeply?” Why spread our minds thin? Rather than ago­nize over what we don’t know, we can dig into the rel­a­tive­ly few things we do until we’ve mas­tered them, then move on to the next thing.

Melville’s coun­sel may not suit every tem­pera­ment, depend­ing on whether one is a fox or a hedge­hog (or an Ahab). But Lewis’ advice might just be indis­pens­able for devel­op­ing an out­look as broad-mind­ed as it is deep. “It is a good rule,” he wrote, “after read­ing a new book, nev­er to allow your­self anoth­er new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”

Many oth­er famous read­ers have left behind sim­i­lar pieces of read­ing advice, like Edward Bul­w­er-Lyt­ton, author of noto­ri­ous open­er “It was a dark and stormy night.” As though refin­ing Lewis’ sug­ges­tion, he pro­posed, “In sci­ence, read, by pref­er­ence, the newest works; in lit­er­a­ture, the old­est. The clas­sic lit­er­a­ture is always mod­ern. New books revive and redec­o­rate old ideas; old books sug­gest and invig­o­rate new ideas.”

Albert Ein­stein shared nei­ther Lewis’ reli­gion nor Bulwar-Lytton’s love of semi­colons, but he did share both their out­look on read­ing the ancients. Ein­stein approached the sub­ject in terms of mod­ern arro­gance and igno­rance and the bias of pre­sen­tism, writ­ing in a 1952 jour­nal arti­cle:

Some­body who only reads news­pa­pers and at best books of con­tem­po­rary authors looks to me like an extreme­ly near-sight­ed per­son who scorns eye­glass­es. He is com­plete­ly depen­dent on the prej­u­dices and fash­ions of his times, since he nev­er gets to see or hear any­thing else. And what a per­son thinks on his own with­out being stim­u­lat­ed by the thoughts and expe­ri­ences of oth­er peo­ple is even in the best case rather pal­try and monot­o­nous.

There are only a few enlight­ened peo­ple with a lucid mind and style and with good taste with­in a cen­tu­ry. What has been pre­served of their work belongs among the most pre­cious pos­ses­sions of mankind. We owe it to a few writ­ers of antiq­ui­ty (Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, etc.) that the peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages could slow­ly extri­cate them­selves from the super­sti­tions and igno­rance that had dark­ened life for more than half a mil­len­ni­um.

Noth­ing is more need­ed to over­come the mod­ernist’s snob­bish­ness.

Ein­stein him­self read both wide­ly and deeply, so much so that he “became a lit­er­ary motif for some writ­ers,” as Dr. Anto­nia Moreno González notes, not only because of his par­a­digm-shat­ter­ing the­o­ries but because of his gen­er­al­ly well-round­ed pub­lic genius. He was fre­quent­ly asked, and hap­py to vol­un­teer, his “ideas and opinions”—as the title of a col­lec­tion of his writ­ing calls his non-sci­en­tif­ic work, becom­ing a pub­lic philoso­pher as well as a sci­en­tist.

We might cred­it Ein­stein’s lib­er­al atti­tude toward read­ing and education—in the clas­si­cal sense of the word “lib­er­al”— as a dri­ving force behind his end­less intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty, humil­i­ty, and lack of prej­u­dice. His diag­no­sis of the prob­lem of mod­ern igno­rance may strike us as gross­ly under­stat­ed in our cur­rent polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances. As for what con­sti­tutes a “clas­sic,” I like Ita­lo Calvi­no’s expan­sive def­i­n­i­tion: “A clas­sic is a book that has nev­er fin­ished say­ing what it has to say.”

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ita­lo Calvi­no Offers 14 Rea­sons We Should Read the Clas­sics

Vir­ginia Woolf Offers Gen­tle Advice on “How One Should Read a Book”

The New York Pub­lic Library Cre­ates a List of 125 Books That They Love

100 Nov­els All Kids Should Read Before Leav­ing High School

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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