Although there were many handwritten, often informal catalogues of Sir Robert Cotton’s manuscripts and books during his lifetime and in the years afterwards, the desire for an official printed catalogue which could be circulated in the public realm did not really bear fruit until the late 1600s. And when two versions finally did appear — the…[Read more]

The Exhibition Library reimagines the medium of art exhibition as well as that of art catalogue. Catalogues carry exhibitions through time and space, figuring as tropes for imagining arrangements and the course of works and settings they describe. However, they rarely give us a clue about what really happened, since they are often made before the…[Read more]

Whilst “The Problem with Linear B” (https://hcommons-staging.org/deposits/item/hc:20833/) focused on the physical or visual aspects of Linear objects, this paper mainly examines the secondary assumptions and arguments used to support the thesis that those objects are purely administrative.

This essay is partly a response + riposte to Johanna Drucker’s Jan. 2014 essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing,” and partly a plea for the University, and the Humanities, along with their publishing “arms,” to be refashioned, not as sites of cultural Authority from which Knowledge…[Read more]

A 5-page paper discussing the Linear signage and visual aspects of a Linear B tablet from Thebes, Greece, apparently discovered in the 1990s.

Relative to many of the ongoing discussions and debates around the changing (and often precarious) landscapes of scholarly publishing, and especially around Open Access publishing, we at punctum books have put together a sort of “primer” (which also serves as our own, expanded vision statement) on what we see as the perils of the commodification…[Read more]

Review of C. Tsagalis (ed.), “Poetry in Fragments: Studies on the Hesiodic Corpus and its Afterlife.” Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes, 50. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2017

Notice of (D.) Sider (ed.) Hellenistic Poetry. A Selection. Pp. xx + 579, ills. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Paper, US$49.50 (Cased, US$90). ISBN: 978-0-472-05313-1 (978-0-472-07313-9 hbk).

The significance and influence of Attic drama on Hellenistic poetry has been a topic of little consistent focus in recent scholarship, reflecting the dominant academic emphasis on Hellenistic poetry as a written artefact, allegedly detached from any immediate context of performance. This paper attempts to reverse this trend by setting out the…[Read more]

Drawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/ early fifth centuries, this paper tracks the intertwined lives of divine image-things and rabbis living in late Roman and Byzantine period Palestine. The paper argues that the religious image-things of others (or avodah zarah, in rabbinic terms) pressed in different ways on…[Read more]

This article provides an overview of design thinking as a component of, and contributor to, great library user experiences. When design thinking is used to shape the environment in which users connect with library spaces and personnel, the result is a better library experience—by design.

Good Night, Sleep Tight is an interactive virtual reality performance created by theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK. It was previewed at Gerry’s Kitchen in July 2017. Combining VR and binaural technologies, participants are put to bed and transported to a dreamscape composed of childhood imagery and aerial cityscapes. This artistic position r…[Read more]

The book demonstrates the invalidity of existing assumptions about the administrative nature of Linear B (“Mycenaean Greek”) and related objects, proposes an alternative revolving around cult art, and explores similar evidence relating to scripts and art from the same and other regions and periods.

In the libraries of Celsus at Ephesus and of Rogatianus at Timgad, the function of which is attested by inscriptions, bookcases are usually reconstructed in the niches. These examples have been used to identify other buildings which contained niches as libraries. However, Lora Johnson, in her 1984 Ph.D. thesis, rightfully questioned such an…[Read more]

This report presents preliminary results of experimental archaeological investigations on the reproduction of the Roman porridge puls. The archaeological experiment “LNF2012” was performed under laboratory conditions as part of the “Lange Nacht der Forschung” 2012 on April 27, at the Department of Classical Archaeology of the University of Vie…[Read more]

This is a combined museum catalogue entry discussing coins from ancient Egypt.

The Music Library at the University of Washington is fortunate to count among its holdings a substantial collection of rare musical scores. A highlight of our special collections is the William Crawford III Music Collection. Given to the UW in 2014, the Crawford Collection includes over 700 rare, early-edition vocal scores, spanning six centuries…[Read more]

As librarians, we recognize that the ways in which our students access information are changing, rapidly and dramatically. The students we work with today face an information landscape that is often very different from what we remember from our student years. So much of what our music students need is seemingly readily available online through…[Read more]

These are the slides from a talk given at the JACT Summer School, Bryanston, on 1/8/2018.
How did ancient Greek writers and poets use imaginary cities to think about how to live well, what kind of community to develop, and how to maintain relationships between individual, community and cosmos? From Homer to Aristotle, the imaginary city provides…[Read more]

Critlib, or critical librarianship, is the discussion and application of social justice issues in the library field. Generally, the application of critlib has been focused on information literacy and pedagogy, as well as cataloging, but one important aspect of the discussion that is often overlooked is that of library management. Just like…[Read more]