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Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Sunday at Norwich & Norfolk Beer Festival at Dragon Hall Dickinson ...
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Sunday at the Norfolk Beer Festival at Dragon Hall was much better than I expected it to be. Saturday night was just as packed as Friday night, and those two days drained the beer supply that had been purchased for the festival. Thankfully, there were bottled beers, two types of cider, and someone was able to grab two casks of beer from a local brewer for Sunday. No one expected Sunday to be a big day either, and it turned out to very well be an easy going day. There was only an afternoon session and it worked out very well.
           I was surprised because no one seemed extremely upset that there was almost no selection in beer there. At the door the prices were altered and costumers were made aware that the festival was basically out of alcohol, so everyone was well aware of the situation before purchasing admission into Dragon Hall. However, this did not stop a good number of people from showing up. Sunday afternoon welcomed the same amount of visitors that Saturday afternoon had. The bottled beer sold well, one of the cider casks was completely consumed, and both the new casks of beer were drunk by the end of the day.
           Looking back on my experience at Dragon Hall and my time volunteering at the Norwich and Norfolk Beer festival, I’ve come to realize that I could not have chosen a better place to do my mandatory volunteer/internship hours. This experience opened the eyes of an American boy who used to prefer a cold Fosters to warm local ale. I tried so many different types of local beers, all tasting different with unique qualities in colour and texture. My favourite would have been one of the Fat Cat’s contributions called the Cat & Canary. It was light and refreshing, with a fruity taste.
           At the end of my time there, I remembered something that another volunteer, Dodge, had mentioned to us before we started working on Friday. He reminded us that we should have fun, that the whole point of this festival was to have fun, try some new and interesting beers, and help others try them as well. Of course, the whole “have fun†part is something that you hear wherever you may be putting in effort to get something done, whether or not in reality it has any chance of being fun. I’ve heard it before starting a summer of sailing lessons with a bunch of bratty 11 year old girls (…not fun). But now I realize that Dodge meant that, and that it was possible. I spent a weekend serving delicious beer to interesting people, working alongside other knowledgeable and friendly volunteers, learning a lot about what kinds of tastes I like in a beer, and enjoying the beers myself. Not once were any of us volunteers without a glass at least half way full. This was actually encouraged, we were supposed to know the beers, we could only help customers with their decisions if we had made our own. I did have trouble describing the differences, beyond the colour of the beer, to costumers, but I was reassured that this skill will come in time, and for now I should just learn as much as I can. So that’s what I did, I drank beer and learned (probably the only place in the world where the words “beer†and “learned†accurately can describe an experience).
           After working on Sunday, I went out with some of the volunteers and some of the men playing in the band. We walked to a pub that was having another beer festival that weekend. I am only mentioning this to show how my relationship with the other members of the team developed throughout the weekend. By the time I was in the pub Sunday evening I was talking about where I was getting advice about where I should visit in Europe and how to handle life after college. Many of the other volunteers became my friends because of how close and well we all worked together. They all said that I need to do the Norwich Beer Festival held at St. Andrew’s Hall, but unfortunately I had to tell them that I was not going to be around for it.
           So I have this one last thing to say: If you have been to a beer festival, you should try working at one. You meet the best people on both sides of the bar, you get to drink amazing beers for free, and you learn so much about what makes beers special.
Date:Â 31 April 2011 Time: 11:30-16:30 Total Hours: 27
Location: Dragon Hall Supervisor: Rachel M.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Public Humanities at City Hall: What Providence could have looked ...
While you were holed up in the library writing papers about various long-dead white men on Wednesday, the students of AMCV1550: Methods in Public Humanities finished their last day of class in a slightly more enjoyable way.  As their final project, the members of the class prepared an exhibit entitled “Capital Ideas: Planning Providence†which commemorates the city’s history by displaying various unimplemented design plans from the city’s archives.  In addition, the students in the class asked members of the Providence community to draw sketches of their ideal visions of Providence.
The event was held at City Hall, and Mayor Taveras came out to give a short speech on the way that the exhibit celebrates the history of Providence (shown above). Â Some of the designs (both from the archives and those contributed by Providence community members) were relatively standard (and close to what exists today, in fact), but others were pretty unconventional. Â Being writers for BlogDailyHerald, we were naturally far more interested in the weird than the newsworthy. Â So, we present to you what we (and apparently at least one other person) wish Providence actually looked like:
From the city’s archives
The ’70s were a crazy time.  In 1974, downtown Providence had become a bustling workplace, without many full time residents, which called for creating a more efficient public transportation system to ease the commuter stress of getting in and out of the city center.  One proposal was for a “Personal Rapid Transit†system to be built consisting of “small pods, each seating 4 to 6 individuals†that would zip around elevated tracks to various hubs around the city center.  While this may sound a lot like the transportation system used in the Will Smith movie, I, Robot which is set in the year 2036, this was a serious plan to create a new form of public transportation as well as end the use of cars in the city entirely.  So, here’s the real question: why was this awesome (although admittedly impractical) idea trashed?  For shame, Providence.
Other absurd plans that were actually proposed by city planners include sticking both City Hall and the State House on some sort of island surrounded by a moat and demolishing a fair number of the historic houses Benefit St. and College Hill to build sleek, modern buildings under the guise of “renewal.â€
From Providence community members (this is where it starts to get strange)
First up: Godzilla 2011. In this artist’s ideal Providence, it rains fire, and giant dinosaur-like creatures roam the streets, terrorizing the masses.  The capitol building also has a huge red beam that acts as a portal into space (so now we know the real back-up plan in case a disaster hits the city). Naturally feisty, Providence residents seem to be protesting against Godzilla’s despotic reign by gathering on a bridge and holding up signs.  Damn liberals. They’re probably Brown students.
This community member (RISD student?…if we correctly inferred from the artistic talent displayed here) envisions a time in the future when Providence is no longer located in boring old Rhode Island.  Rather, it has been relocated to the land of Super Mario Sunshine, where pineapple trees are ubiquitous and everything is shaded in primary colors.
Idea Gathering « Digital Humanities Connections
Idea Gathering
My catch-all job description includes advising on preservation issues here at the Cleveland Institute of Music. I’m curious about tools for developing a digital archive here at CIM. “Tools†includes funding, partnering, platforms, open-source options, strategies for obtaining internal support, etc. This would ideally include an audio archive. CIM’s 100 year anniversary is coming up within the next 10 years, so the thought is timely. Looking forward to listening and learning later today.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Margaret R. Ewalt | Faculty Database | The Humanities Institute ...
Margaret R. Ewalt
Margaret R. Ewalt, Associate Professor of Spanish, has been teaching at Wake Forest University since 2001. She received her B.A. from Colby College, Maine and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her teaching, research, and publication interests include the Enlightenment in Spain and Spanish America, Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Latin American Literature, and Colonial Spanish American Literature. She is the author of _Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge, and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco_ (Bucknell University Press, 2008) and several articles on trans-Atlantic eighteenth-century natural history writing.
Her current book project is tentatively titled _Francis Bacon in Hispanic Science: Knowledge, the Nature of Modernity, and the Spanish World, 1539-1782_. “Modernity†is the focus of many studies on the 19th- and 20th century Spanish world. Less attention has been paid to Hispanic modernity during the 16th-18th centuries. This book studies Francis Bacon’s debts to the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta and reveals ways that writers born in Spain and the Spanish viceroyalties opened learned Northern European discourse to non-European knowledge paradigms through their articulations of Baconianism. It challenges a myth of modernity that assigns the Spanish world a marginal role in the cultural history of western science and contributes to the humanities by documenting and interpreting a number of previously unidentified reciprocities of knowledge production during the 16th-18th centuries that upend Eurocentric claims about “scientific universality†and legitimate sources of knowledge, which continue to shape intercultural relations into the present day.
