English 4600a: Beowulf (Spring 2021)
Posted: January 11, 2021 Filed under: Current-Interest, spring-2021 Leave a comment »About this course
In this course we will read the poem Beowulf in the original Old English. The principal focus of the course will be reading the poem above all else: it can be difficult to read the entire poem in a semester, though every class I’ve taught has managed in the end.
Because we will be reading Beowulf in the original Old English, the course has a mandatory prerequisite: English 3450 (Introduction to Old English) or an equivalent course or preparation. You must already know how to read Old English in order to take this course.
Learning goals
The goal of the course is to read Beowulf. By the end of the course you should be
- familiar with this early medieval poem
- an accomplished and quick reader of Old English poetry Read the rest of this entry »
English 3901a: History of the English Language (Spring 2021)
Posted: January 10, 2021 Filed under: Current-Interest, spring-2021 | Tags: history of english, Teaching Leave a comment »About this course
Why don’t we spell knight n – i – t – e?
Where does ‘silent e’ come from?
Why is it book and books but not sheep and sheeps?
Do we say somebody is six foot or six feet tall?
All of us have asked questions like these about the English language. This course will teach you how to find the answers. Read the rest of this entry »
Bulk converting and moving docx files to pdf
Posted: December 19, 2020 Filed under: Computers, Linux Leave a comment »The issue I had was a set of student assignments downloaded from Moodle. Most were in Word format (.docx), but to grade them quickly I wanted them in pdf.
The Moodle download was a zip file that expanded to a series of directories of the format “studentName/randomwassignmenttitle.docx.” So I also wanted to collect all the files one directory higher up BUT add the student names to the files.
So to put in steps:
- I wanted to convert all . Read the rest of this entry »
Joining a Todoist project
Posted: November 9, 2020 Filed under: Computers, todoist Leave a comment »This is a quick reference for people joining a project set up by me in Todoist.
1. You’ll get an invitation from me
You’ll get an invitation by email to join the project. After you accept it, tasks can be assigned to you.
You can email tasks to the Board
One of the great strengths of Todoist is that each project (in fact each card) has both a URL and an email address. You can email tasks to a project and comments to a card.
When you email a task to a project,
Read the rest of this entry »Crash course on translating OE verb, adjective, and noun inflections
Posted: September 17, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »This page is a crash course for translating Old English verb, adjective, and noun inflections. It provides some really quick Present Day English equivalents so that you can “hear” what each case sounds like in PDE. This is only meant to get you started in the first week or two. We’ll return to them more formally and analytically later.
Old English Cases
Old English has four main cases (and a fifth that is very limited in distribution that we’ll deal with later):
| OE Case | PDE function | Example | PDE translation | PDE Personal Pronoun equivalent [ignoring gender] |
| Nominative | Subject | dæg | the day | he / they |
| Accusative | Object | naman | the name | him / them |
| Genitive | Possessive | stanes | The stone’s | of him (i.e. his) / of them (i.e. Read the rest of this entry » |
How to uninstall Shift from a linux computer
Posted: August 24, 2020 Filed under: Computers, Linux Leave a comment »Shift is an app that allows you to combine several productivity apps in a single package — email, calendars, and so on. I hope to use it to combine my union and university accounts.
I’m having some problems getting it to work, however, the various tech people keep asking me to uninstall Shift before or after doing something. Unfortunately, unlike a lot of applications, Shift doesn’t come with a handy uninstall.sh to match its install.sh installation script.
It does have relatively clear uninstallation instructions on its website, though you need to find them (I didn’t see any direct links from any page dealing with installation) and there’s an error in the Linux instructions. Since I have to keep finding this page and then rediscover the error every time, I thought I’d record the corrected instructions here:
Read the rest of this entry »When I was a child… An interesting acknowledgement of scholarly immaturity in Ogilvie’s Books known the the English
Posted: July 25, 2020 Filed under: Research-and-comment, research-communication Leave a comment »When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (1 Cor. 13:11)
I just bought a copy of J.D.A. Ogilvy’s Books Known to the English, 597-1066. Well actually not just “a” copy: the fly paper tells me it used to belong to R.H. Rouse, the famous UCLA historian and part of the great team with M. Read the rest of this entry »
Using multiple signatures in Microsoft Outlook OWA (Web version)
Posted: July 6, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Contents
Different Strokes for Different Folks
Like many academics, I have a number of different positions on campus, nationally, and internationally.
I am a professor in my department, an Associate Member of another department on campus, and of the graduate school and various institutes at Lethbridge and elsewhere, Principal Investigator of a couple of projects, editor of one journal, associate editor of another, and Vice President and Chief Spokesperson for my faculty union. If you’ve seen signatures of other professors, you’ll know that this is not a particularly lengthy list.
Not all of these positions are independent of each other. Read the rest of this entry »
English 3450a: Old English (Fall 2020)
Posted: May 20, 2020 Filed under: Current-Interest, fall-2020 Leave a comment »Contents
Rotating one or more pages in a PDF in linux
Posted: March 23, 2020 Filed under: Computers, Linux | Tags: pdf, pdftk, terminal, ubuntu Leave a comment »Had to rotate a single page of a PDF. Here’s how to do it using pdftk (from makandra.com):
- rotate page 1 by 90 degrees clockwise:
pdftk in.pdf cat 1east output out.pdf # new pdftk- To rotate all pages clockwise:
pdftk in.pdf cat 1-endeast output out.pdf # new pdftkThe east etc. Read the rest of this entry »
Various remote work guides and tips
Posted: March 17, 2020 Filed under: Computers, Teaching Leave a comment »Here’s a place where I’m collecting various tips and tricks for remote work in light of the University of Lethbridge moving to “alternate methods of delivery.” I’ll update this as I go.
Contents
Some Zoom tips.
The university is encouraging us to use Zoom for meetings, office hours, and classes. Read the rest of this entry »
Zoom in the time of COVID-19: Setting up Zoom for classes and office hours at the U of L
Posted: March 17, 2020 Filed under: Computers, technology Leave a comment »The University of Lethbridge is moving to an ‘alternate delivery model’ for classes as of Wednesday March 18. Mostly, this seems to me subscribing to Zoom, a widely-used teleconferencing system, and encouraging faculty to use it. Since the University of Lethbridge has not previously subscribed to Zoom, this means that a lot of faculty members will be doing two new things starting on Wednesday: using Zoom and teaching on Zoom.
I’ve used Zoom a lot in the last couple of years for my research (in fact my lab has a subscription of its own). The following are some tips and hints for faculty that are using it for the first time to teach. They are based on my experience running workshops and meetings, rather than teaching. I’ll update them as I get tips and experience. They are not meant to replace online guides to using Zoom (such as this one from UC San Diego). Just things you might not think about or see in such guides. Read the rest of this entry »
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari/The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Posted: March 15, 2020 Filed under: movie-reviews, Research-and-comment | Tags: babylon berlin, carl mayer, conrad veidt, criterion channel, das cabinet des dr. caligari, friedrich feher, german film, hans janowitz, movie reviews, robert wiene, the cabinet of dr. caligari, werner krauss Leave a comment »- Title: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari/The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
- Country: Germany
- Year: 1920
- Director: Robert Wiene
- Criterion: https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-cabinet-of-dr-caligari
- IMDB: https://www. Read the rest of this entry »
If…. (1968)
Posted: March 1, 2020 Filed under: movie-reviews, Research-and-comment Leave a comment »- Title: If….
- Country: United Kingdom
- Year: 1968
- Director: Lindsay Anderson
- Criterion: https://www.criterionchannel.com/if
- IMDB: https://www.imdb. Read the rest of this entry »
The “Anglo-Saxonist” Controversy
Posted: September 9, 2020 | Author: dpod | Filed under: fall-2020, Research-and-comment | Leave a comment »Here is a beginning bibliography on the recent “Anglo-Saxonist” controversy in Early Medieval English Studies (Thanks to Barbara Bordalejo):
tags:
Read the rest of this entry »