Presentations

    Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb Monday, October 15, 2012

    This session, focusing on Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb, was hosted on October 15, 2012 by the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program. It featured both author Camilla Gibb and Professor William Granara of Harvard's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures.

    View a recording of the session here: http://cmes.adobeconnect.com/p7o6afb749v/

    When Lilly is eight years old, her hippie British parents leave her at a Sufi shrine in Morocco and inform her they will be...

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    In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez Wednesday, December 5, 2012

    This session on In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez was hosted by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies on December 5, 2012.  The program featured Julia Alvarez herself.

    Book description: It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the...

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    Kamikaze Girls by Novala Takemoto Thursday, February 28, 2013

    This session on Kamikaze Girls by Novala Takemoto was hosted by the Reischeuer Institute for Japanese Studies on February 28, 2013.  It featured Professor Tomiko Yoda of Harvard's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

    Book description: Life in the boondocks of rural Japan is anything but glamorous, and to escape her humdrum existence, Momoko, a "Lolita," fanaticizes about French rococo, dreams of living in the palace of Versailles, and decks herself out in the finest (and frilliest) of 18th century haute couture from an expensive Tokyo...

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    The Bamboo Grove: An Introduction to Sijo Tuesday, April 2, 2013

    This session on The Bamboo Grove: An Introduction to Sijo was hosted by the Asia Center on April 2, 2013.  It featured Professor David McCann of Harvard's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

    The sijo is the most popular and most Korean of all traditional Korean poetic forms, originating with the old songs of the Hyangka of the Sylla Empire (668-936) and the prose songs of the Koryo Dynasty (918-1392). Sometimes likened to haiku for its brevity, a typical sijo poem follows a three-line pattern, with each line containing approximately fifteen...

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    The Accompanist by Nina Berberova Wednesday, May 15, 2013

    This session on The Accompanist by Nina Berberova was hosted by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies on May 15, 2013.  It featured a discussion with Professor Julie Buckler of Harvard's Slavic Languages and Literatures.

    Book description: Written right before the height of Stalin's purges by a Russian émigré living in Paris, this novella explores the tangled relationship between an opera singer, her husband, and her accompanist.  The accompanist of the title is Sonechka, an 18-year-old girl, talented but impoverished and self-deprecating by reason...

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    Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Wednesday, June 5, 2013

    This session on Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was hosted by the Committee on African Studies on June 5, 2013.  It featured Professor Akua Sarr of Boston College and Kristen Robinson, Ph.D. Candidate in Harvard's English Department.

    Book description: From the outside, fifteen-year-old Kambili has the perfect life. She lives in a beautiful house, has a caring family, and attends an exclusive missionary school. She's completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less than...

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    Alyssa Goodman: Why do we need a WorldWide Telescope and glue to solve the Mysteries of the Universe?, at Institute for Astronomy, Hawaii, Tuesday, October 22, 2013

    Description: The great statistician John Tukey didn't just invent the Fast Fourier Transform.  In the 1970s, Tukey began experimenting with what is now called "linked view" data visualization, where many views of data are investigated on an interactive computer display at once, linked together so that selections in one view automatically highlight relevant corresponding data in another view.   A (very) few scientists adopted Tukey's ideas and started using this approach in their work, but since linked-view principles were only implemented within very limited...

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    An Integrated Data Publishing Workflow, at RDA Second Plenary Meeting, National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC, Tuesday, September 17, 2013:

    Presented "An Integrated Data Publishing Workflow: Enabling data deposit to a public repository as part of article’s submission to a journal" by Mercè Crosas, Director of Data Science, IQSS, Harvard University during the Data Publication Workflows Working Group session.

    Making Research Data More Accessible (Poster), at Research Data Symposium, Columbia University, New York, NY., Wednesday, February 27, 2013:

    This poster by Gustavo Durand and Eleni Castro provides a brief overview of the Dataverse Network Project (http://thedata.org), a web application for sharing, citing, analyzing and preserving research data, created at The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University and supported by the Harvard Library, Harvard University Information Technology and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This application facilitates making research data available to others for the purposes of re-use and citation....

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    Alyssa Goodman: Linking Visualization & Understanding in Astronomy, at CFA, Cambridge, MA, Monday, February 10, 2014

    Abstract

    In 1610, when Galileo pointed his small telescope at Jupiter, he drew sketches to record what he saw. After just a few nights of observing, he understood his sketches to be showing moons orbiting Jupiter. It was the visualization of Galileo’s observations that led to his understanding of a clearly Sun-centered solar system, and to the revolution this understanding then caused. Similar stories can be found throughout the history of Astronomy, but visualization has never been so essential as it is today, when we find ourselves blessed with a larger wealth...

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    NDSR Informational Webinar, at Online, Wednesday, February 19, 2014:

    First informational webinar for potential hosts and residents of the NYC and Boston area NDSR program. Presenters included Jefferson Bailey (METRO), Andrea Goethals (Harvard Library), and Nancy McGovern (MIT Libraries).

    The recorded version of this session is now available for viewing at http://bit.ly/1bqwTyM.

    The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin Wednesday, November 13, 2013

    This session, focusing on The Dream Life of Sukhanov, was hosted on November 13, 2013 by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. It featured the novel's author, Olga Grushin.

    View a recording of the session here: http://cmes.adobeconnect.com/p19rulo7ln6/

    The story of Anatoly Sukhanov, who many years before abandoned the precarious existence of an underground artist for the perks of a Soviet apparatchik. But, at the age of 56, his perfect life is suddenly disintegrating. Buried dreams return to haunt him. New political alignments threaten to undo him. Vaulting effortlessly from...

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