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Library News

IRis Highlight: Talker-Specific Phonetics

In the past semester, I cannot even count how many times I have overheard my roommate reciting “HOW NOW BROWN COW” loudly, slowly and often repetitively in our apartment. Although I first attributed this new habit to her unique personality, I soon learned it was part of her “Voice and Articulation” homework to record herself speaking. We started talking about this regularly, and as a result I began paying more attention to my “regional” accent.

This new interest in accents and pronunciation led me straight to Rachel Marie Theodore’s dissertation, “Some characteristics of talker-specific phonetic detail,” a paper on the IRis database  highlighting the specific sounds and details that make talkers differ. The dissertation includes an interesting experiment in which “two groups of listeners were differentially exposed to characteristic VOTs [voice-onset-time] for two talkers, one talker produced short VOTs and the other talker produced longer VOTs. Exposure was provided during training phases in which listeners heard both talkers produce one voiceless stop consonant, either /p/ or /k/, in the context of a word (e.g., pain or cane). In test phases, listeners were presented with a short-VOT and a long-VOT variant of the word presented during training as well as a novel word that began with a different voiceless stop than presented during training. In both cases, listeners were asked to select which of the two VOT variants was most representative of a given talker.”

If you find this interesting, be sure to check out the paper in full!

RILM adds to humanities offerings

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature from Ebscohost is the NU Libraries’ latest web resource in the humanities. Musicologists, ethnomusicologists, educators, psychologists, and anyone else interested in music research will enjoy using RILM to search for journal articles, dissertations, books, and much more on music topics.

RILM makes a nice pairing with some of our new music streaming services like the Jazz Music Library and Database of Recorded American Music. Doing research on the flugelhorn? Listen to it in Jazz Music Library and learn more about it in RILM. Need recently published research on a DRAM recording of the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger? Find journal articles about her in RILM.

Like our other abstract databases, RILM is connected to the library’s full text journal subscriptions, and to our interlibrary loan system, ILLiad, for ordering items not available in our print or online collections. RSS feeds and alerts are also available.

Find RILM through the library’s “Articles” database list, or right-click (Mac:control-click) and bookmark this URL:
http://0-search.ebscohost.com.ilsprod.lib.neu.edu/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=ehost&defaultdb=rih

IRis Highlight: Studies in American Fiction

Founded by the Northeastern University English Department and published for over three decades, Studies in American Fiction is a well-regarded, peer-reviewed journal that covers both “emergent writers and canons, as well as American literary classics.” IRis has a small selection of recent articles, and will hopefully include more backfiles in the future.

In Studies in American Fiction you can find articles on authors as diverse as John Cheever, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, and on topics as diverse as missionary literature, Orientalism, and temperance.

IRis also includes additional contributions from the Northeastern English Department, and you can even browse in IRis for more exposure to the fascinating array of subjects being studied by Northeastern’s other departments and research centers.

Earth Week means parting with old electronics

To celebrate Earth Week, Snell Library is participating in a campus-wide electronics waste collection effort.

If you have old chargers, hair dryers, lamps, plugs, cords or other electronics (not phones) please bring them to the collection box on the Circulation Desk in the lobby of Snell Library.

For questions about what items are eligible, contact Carol Rosskam, NU Sustainability Program Manager, at 617.373.8730, 617.828.2505 (cell) or c.rosskam@neu.edu.

Find out more about e-waste collection on the Sustainability@NU web site.

Top Ten list of most frequently challenged books for 2009

Last July we had a lively and thought provoking discussion about Censorship and the Library as a follow up to that discussion I thought I would post a link to the ALA Top Ten list of most frequently challenged books for 2009. What I find interesting is that the popular Twilight series of books has been added to the list. It seems that the challenges are theme based rather then content based for this series of books. The majority of these books are works of fiction which are challenged because they offend values of the complaining individuals. So the question that all this raises (again) is: should offended individuals prevent others from having general access to works of literature, art, music or film because they may have controversial themes or content? In my opinion taking the time to attempt to censor a particular work just calls attention to it and rather then removing the offending work from general circulation it just promotes that work to those who may indeed find it to be influential. Which is contrary the intent of the censors.