FALL 2011
BIBLIOTHECA: The Library Past/Present/Future with John Palfrey (Harvard Law)
Graduate School of Design 3498
This seminar combines exploration of the history of the library as an institution of knowledge storage, retrieval and production with a design studio concerned with a series real-world problem sets involving library spaces on the Harvard campus as well as the future shape and functions of library spaces. Topics include: libraries in the cultural imagination, library infrastructures from registers to card catalogues to digital catalogues, the history of shelving systems and lecterns, library architectures from the Library of Alexandria to the Digital Public Library of America.
The Cosmos of the Comedy
RLL Italian/Comp Lit 131
This lecture course provides an in-depth introduction to Dante Alighieri’s 14th century masterpiece, the Comedy, as a point of entry to the history of Western poetics, philosophy, natural science and cosmology. The course combines attention to Dante’s dialogue with classical antiquity in these and other fields with an exercise in multimedia translation and adaptation aimed at prompting critical reflection on the ways in which present cultural practices are built upon the past.
SPRING 2012
Digital Humanities 2.0: a metaLAB (at) Harvard seminar
RLL/Comp Lit 219
A seminar and workshop for the development of semester-long projects, the course provides an introduction to new scholarly models in the arts and humanities via readings, case studies and conversations with expert practitioners.
Boccaccio and/on Authority (Latin to Vernacular, Vernacular to Latin)
RLL Italian/Comp Lit 155
This course provides an in-depth survey of Giovanni Boccaccio’s experiments in a range of genres from epic to elegy, narrative to allegory, geography to mythography. It emphasizes the question of the relation between vernacular and Latin models of authorship and Boccaccio’s engagement with both ancient and contemporary sources.
BIBLIOTHECA II: The Library Test Kitchen with Jeff Goldenson (Law Library Innovation Lab)
What form should the Harvard Library of the 21st century assume? Should it simply vanish into virtual desktops and merge into a timeless and placeless universal database? Should it alter its identity and become a workshop, a laboratory, an innovation incubator where emerging and future forms interact and dialogue with the relics of the past? Or should it simply merge with the university itself as a place of knowledge production and reproduction?
PAST
