But there are a few shining lights, sites that organize their podcasts well and give enough information for browsers like me to find just the right podcast, even if we didn’t know exactly what we were looking for ahead of time.

One of these is the University of Oxford. Yes, stodgy old Oxford. Lectures are organized by Division (the Humanities Division is right at the top), then by Faculty (that’s “department” on this side of the pond), and enough information is given about each series of lectures to allow the listener to decide which one best suits her or his mood. There’s a series on Tolkien at Oxford, for instance, and a philosophy lecture series on Ethics of the New Biosciences. Plus, it’s Oxford, the mystique of which has yet to fade for most of us.

Our sister organization in Maine, the Maine Humanities Council, releases about one or two new podcasts every month on their Humanities on Demand blog. The lectures span the humanities disciplines, and each podcast is accompanied by a nice description of the lecture and the scholar who gave it. Thanks, Maine!

Finally, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History offers over seventy podcasts available for free! Their podcasts feature “eminent historians discussing major topics in American history,” and new podcasts are uploaded weekly.  Podcasts are organized by historical period, and you can also select from a list of their most popular podcasts (right now, “Myths of the American Revolution” is most popular). Each lecture has its own discussion board, too, so you can respond to the ideas in the lecture and to other listeners’ comments. Anyone dumping podcasts online pell-mell should be directed here for a lesson in how to do it right!

The 50 States Project is an online photographic tour of the country, courtesy of 50 photographers, one in each state. From their website:

Each photographer lives in one of the 50 states and during the year long project each photographer will represent the state where they currently live. Every two months each photographer will be sent an assignment by e-mail, they then have two months to produce one image in response. The images must represent both their style and their state.

By the end of the project there will be 300 images which hopefully represent the talent of the photographers involved and have something to say about the USA today.

The photographers are midway through the yearlong project right now, having completed photographs for the “People,” “Habitat,” and “Landscape” assignments. “Industry” will be up next month. The images are not all brilliant — I found some of them disappointingly predictable — but the images from Jeremy and Claire Weiss, the duo photographing California, are wonderfully surreal (they have a nifty blog, too). And if you head straight for the quietly nostalgic, sepia-toned photos of Wyoming, taken by Story’s own Adam Jahiel, well, who could blame you?

Google Insights for Search offers a fascinating (and often overwhelming) look at who is Googling what, when, and where, sometimes with surprising results. I plugged “humanities” into their search engine and learned that the state where the most people run searches that include the word “humanities” is Alaska — and Wyoming comes in at a more than respectable number ten! Hooray for Wyoming humanities! “Humanities council” is the second most popular search that includes the word, after the more straightforward “the humanities.” And the related search that has increased the most over time is “digital humanities.” Hours of fun, everyone. Hours of fun.

Finally, for the second year in a row, the Boston Phoenix celebrated the Fourth of July by naming the best band in each state in the union in their 50 Bands, 50 States feature (last year, they also named the best all-time band and solo artist from each state). Being an alternative weekly, their tastes run a little more punky and hard rock than mine, but it’s still fun to see what musicians are up to across the country. I’ll ruin the suspense and tell you that this year’s Wyoming pick was Laramie’s Looker; last year’s was Teenage Bottlerocket; and they claim that the best all-time Wyoming band is The Dirty Dogs, with the best solo artist being Jeb Loy Nichols. Feel free to agree or disagree (both with their choices, and about whether they all even count as Wyoming bands). I’ll leave the other forty-nine states to swallow your Friday afternoon…

Sure enough, twistori and Visible Tweets are keeping up-to the moment tabs on what people are twittering about. At Visible Tweets, you can plug in a word — or a phrase, your name, whatever — and any recent tweets that include that word will slowly form and disintegrate and reform on your computer screen. It’s quite lovely to watch, and it’s interesting to see what place, say, “Wyoming” has in the online conversation right now. (In case you’re curious, my two favorite Wyoming tweets for today are “i just saw camels… in wyoming” and “6:20 in Jackson, Wyoming seems a lot earlier than I thought it would at midnight.”)

twistori has, well, a little different twist. You can select one of six words: love, hate, think, believe, feel, and wish. twistori then scrolls tweets that include those words up the screen. It moves a lot faster than Visible Tweets, which I personally don’t like as well, but multiple tweets on the screen provide opportunities for funny juxtapositions, like “i feel bad about this, but cats totally creep me out” and “i feel like i dreamed about cats?” Sometimes watching the tweets on these sites is a sad reminder of how little we do with language, but sometimes it really does offer a glimpse into which topics are on the minds and keyboards of a lot of different people.

Another fun way to take the pulse of  online communities is We Feel Fine, which culls blogs from all over the world every ten minutes for sentences about how the bloggers feel. We Feel Fine then cross indexes the feeling with the blogger’s location, age, sex, weather, and date. Each sentence is represented as a colorful dot or square in a swirl of other “feelings.” We Feel Fine is searchable, so if you want to know how Wyoming bloggers felt in July, you can. If you want to know how many Canadians feel “vague” when it’s rainy as opposed to sunny, you can. If a sentence really catches your eye, you can click through to that blog. They make no promises about being the least bit scientific, but it is interesting to see how bloggers are representing themselves, both close to home and far away.

While we’re on the topic of word frequency, it seems fitting to mention Wordle, an online tool that generates word clouds that visibly demonstrate the frequency of all the words in a text. Cut and paste or type in a selection of text or a blog URL, and Wordle will create a word cloud for you, in which the sizes of the words vary from huge (frequently used words) to tiny (seldom used words). I generated a word cloud for this blog; it’s up at the top of this post!

The Wyoming Humanities Council’s Humanities Matter! conference will bring together representatives of community organizations, museum and library personnel, interested community members, and humanities faculty from across Wyoming to explore how to work together to create humanities courses and public programming that will address issues relevant to their lives, communities, and world.

To encourage collaboration between humanities scholars and community organizations following the conference, the council has created a special Humanities Matter! grant initiative to fund new projects in which college and university faculty work with museums, libraries, and other community organizations to serve their communities.  Conference travel scholarships will also be available.

The conference keynote address will be given by David Berry, winner of the National Humanities Medal and Director of the Community College Humanities Association. He also sits on the board of Imagining America, a consortium of colleges and universities that (as stated on their website) promotes “scholarly and creative work jointly planned and carried out by university and community partners.”

Another conference highlight will be a workshop led by four representatives from the Art of Regional Change (ARC) program at the University of California, Davis: the director, two faculty members, and a community partner. As described on their website, ARC creates “community cultural development projects that involve faculty, students, and community members in collaborative, place-based storytelling.” The ARC workshop at Humanities Matter! will provide attendees with an overview of ARC programs and look at the benefits and challenges of combining academic and public work. ARC representatives will then be available to guide conference participants as they begin to put together their own community projects for the Humanities Matter! grant initiative.

Topics that will be addressed by Wyoming scholars and nonprofit representatives include how to create courses and public humanities programming for specific audiences, such as nurses or veterans; how to combine humanities courses and programming with the sciences or the arts; a roundtable discussion of successful humanities programming around the state; the importance of exposing Wyomingites to global cultures; and how to implement service learning, which integrates community service with instruction, into colleges and their communities.

Humanities Matter! is sponsored by the Wyoming Humanities Council, with support from the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund; the Wyoming Community College Commission; the University of Wyoming American Studies Program; and the University of Wyoming Foundation. The conference is also made possible by the We the People initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Visit the council website or call Jenn Koiter at (307) 721-9248 for further information.

Educators are conservatives by nature, always as responsible to remembering the past as we are to solving problems in the present and using evidence to think about the future.

This means we live in the world of change. The demands of carefully studying the past, reading the times, and looking to the future require a downright giddy embrace of and respect for change. The past comes to light differently with new evidence. The present opens up previously unknown realities. Using both of these types of knowledge to look to the future never promises certainty.

I end up pitching my lot with the educators who both respect tradition but also challenge assumptions about what is right and wrong about the way we do things now, with an eye toward the future impacts of how we live.

Bill Hurr was the first teacher to raise a question fueled by environmental sciences that challenged me to question whether what I assumed was “natural and good” was either. Based on evidence already available to a science teacher back in the late 1970s, he talked about the problems that arose when open spaces and agricultural lands were subdivided for what he called “hobby ranches.”

There was a problem, he argued, when people in the semi-arid Western states with irrigation projects began to subdivide land that had previously been developed to produce food. Home by home, fence by fence, dogs and cats by dogs and cats, the suburbanization of agricultural land under the guise of rural living was going to stress our environmental resources, from the resilience of wildlife to the ability of a people to feed themselves.

Since my dream at the time was to have a beautiful log home with enough land for a few horses, I had to ask myself about what the impacts of my dream were for everything from food production to habitat destruction.

(The full text of this column can be found here.)

At the same time, it is comforting to know that there’s a brave band of grammarians, scattered across the globe, fighting to maintain some sense of order in the chaotic swirls of English that buffet us to and fro. The great essayist and teacher Joseph Epstein used to say that there is elegance in correctness. I’ve yet to find a better reason to at least think about whether I’m following the rules.

So here is a sampling of my favorite online grammar sites. This list is by no means exhaustive; I only included the ones I think are fun:

My hands-down favorite is The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. Run by Bethany Keeley, a grad student from Athens, Ga., this blog collects and displays signs in public places that misuse quotation marks.

Along the same lines, Literally, A Web Log tracks public misuses of the word “literally.” They’ve found some doozies, though they now seem to be more active on Twitter.

If you prefer your grammar to have a British flair, check out  GrammarBlog. I am indebted to this blog for directing me to a lovely rant about spelling and grammar by David Mitchell of That Mitchell and Webb Look. Marvelous.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Grammar Girl, whose podcasts on English language usage (and their transcriptions, if you’d rather read than listen) are clear, accessible, and memorable.

Finally, if you’ve had enough of thinking about words for now, why not play with them for a while? Deep Leap is an online game that asks you to create words from a panel of letters that slowly appear and (if you don’t use them) disappear. Just don’t let it suck away your entire Friday afternoon…

First off, if you haven’t seen Garfield Minus Garfield, you are missing out! The site claims it is

dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.

Garfield deconstructed and redeemed. I love it. There’s even a book, which displays some of the top posts next to the original strips, if you’re wondering how they came about.

Then there’s Japes for Owre Tymes, written by a self-described “bad-tempered English prof” who procrastinates writing articles on Chaucer by translating comic strips into Middle English. Hard to go wrong, really, especially since her commentary is so darn funny (I’m thinking here of her David Foster Wallace-esque use of the footnote and her evolving argument that Marmaduke is, in fact, the “Antecryst”).

Of course, there are plenty of comics that have long warranted reverence instead of mockery. If, like me, you’ve always meant to learn more about the early history of comics and just never gotten around to it, then Don Markstein’s Toonopedia is made for you. He’s written over a thousand short articles on different cartoon characters so far, and new ones are added all the time. So if you aren’t sure why Little Nemo in Slumberland or Happy Hooligan was such a big deal, Toonopedia’s articles provide a nice thumbnail sketch, with lots of links to articles about other comics, so you can see how they all fit together.

Once you’ve got your bearings, you’ll probably want to check out more of the strips themselves. With articles and info to support the strips themselves, Coconino County is the most comprehensive Krazy Kat site I’ve found, though The Comic Strip Library has a nice collection of Krazy Kat too, as well as almost 500 gorgeous and intricate Little Nemo strips.

Forvo bills itself as the largest pronunciation database on the web: their wonderfully ambitious tag line is “All the words in the world. Pronounced.” Their list of word and phrase pronunciations isn’t quite there yet, of course, but it’s growing daily. So if you’ve been wondering how to pronounce that Urdu or Portuguese word you came across, you can browse an alphabetical list to see if it’s there. Or you can post a request, and a native speaker can upload an audio clip of the correct pronunciation to add to the database. And if you see a word request you know how to pronounce, feel free to help out by uploading your own clip.

In a move I never would have expected in ninth grade, quizzes actually got fun when they stopped having anything to do with school. If you think you’re good with accents, try Can You Guess Where My Accent Is From?, a game on the Language Trainers Group website. They’ve filmed folks from various countries reading two lines of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” to provide a sample of their accents, and you get to guess which country each reader is from, with bonus points if you can guess the city! (I, for one, am terrible at it.) They’re also setting up new versions of the game, so if you or someone you know has a hard to place accent, and you’d like to try to stump the masses with a couple lines from Wordsworth or Dylan Thomas, you can send in a video of yourself!

Finally, as a handy reminder that foreigners aren’t the only ones with accents, urlesque has gathered a nice sampling of Non-Americans Speaking in American Accents. Some of them are excellent.  Others are cringe-inducing. Either way, it’s not a bad thing to remember that sometimes we’re “them” instead of “us.”

Enter The Museum of Online Museums, a clearinghouse of collections big and small. Sure, they’ve got links to heavy hitters like the Rijksmuseum and The Art Institute of Chicago, but they also feature quirky online exhibits like Toothpaste World, the Gallery of Pulp Paperback Covers, and the Virtual Shoe Museum. Prefer audio collections? Try the Speech Accent Archive or the Locomotive Horn Sound File Collection. My personal favorites are Plan59 (of course), which bills itself as “The Museum of Mid-Century illustration,” and the Condiment Packet Gallery.

Since collage is one of my recent obsessions, I’ve also enjoyed nu-real: a timeline of fantastic photomontage and its possible influences, 1857-2007. I do wish the photomontages were bigger, but I’ve enjoyed scrolling through and reading random entries about the form’s various incarnations.

Finally, if satire is your thing, the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), whose stated goal is “to bring the worst of art to the widest of audiences,” might just become your new favorite online hangout. The works featured on MOBA, many of which are listed as “acquired from trash,” are accompanied by mock serious interpretations. Here’s the one that accompanies Mama and Babe, right:

The flesh tones bring to mind the top shelf liqueurs of a border bistro. With an astonishing emphasis on facial bone structure, the artist flirts with caricature and captures features of Mamma’s face which remind us of a Presidential candidate. The upright marionettish pose of the babe hints that the early bond between mother and child is as formal as it is familiar. Good old fashioned parental respect is at the center of this celebration of color and contour.

If you think you can top that, you can enter MOBA’s “Guest Interpretator’s Challenge“!

They also sell t-shirts. What more could we ask for?

Last week’s post dealt with how new technology facilitates direct encounters with masterpieces of art. But the whole reason the discipline of Art History exists is that there’s always much more to a work of art than meets the eye.

Enter smARThistory, a “free multi-media web-book” created by two art historians: Dr. Beth Harris, Director of Digital Learning at The Museum of Modern Art, and Dr. Stephen Zucker, Dean of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Here’s a nice explanation, in their own words, of what smARThistory is trying to accomplish:

In smARThistory, we have aimed for reliable content and a delivery model that is entertaining and occasionally even playful. Our podcasts and screen-casts are spontaneous conversations about works of art where we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy. We have found that the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more compelling to our students (and the public) than a monologue. When students listen to shifts of meaning as we seek to understand each other, we model the experience we want our students to have—a willingness to encounter the unfamiliar and transform it in ways that make it meaningful to them. We believe that smARThistory is broadly applicable to our discipline and is a first step toward understanding how art history can fit into the new collaborative culture created by web 2.0 technologies.

So if, for instance, you took a look at Leonardo’s The Last Supper after last week’s post and want to know a bit more about it (this being Holy Week and all), you can check out Beth and Stephen’s nifty screencast on the work.

Another fabulous online resource is the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. It’s a little more staid than smARThistory, and not quite as user friendly, but there’s some fascinating content there. There are, as you may have guessed, art history timelines for all regions of the world, which include links to representative pieces from each era (and area). You can also search an image database of 6,000 works of art from the Met’s extensive collections and read succinct, informative essays on everything from Egyptian amulets to Japanese incense to my beloved Georgia O’Keeffe.

Oh, my, look at the time! Let’s continue our online art history discussion next week, shall we?