Academic Folks, has everyone got the memo that Mendeley desktop app is being discontinued on Sept 1?
(Mendeley is a reference manager that handles bibliographies, in-text-citations, research tagging and annotating etc.)
https://blog.mendeley.com/category/new-release-2/
It will still be useable but no longer downloadable, and there will be no updates, repairs, or integration with newer Word versions. Elsevier is pushing a new paid app called Mendeley Reference Manager (because of course they are).
You can use Zotero's Import function to pull any Mendeley reference lists over, and EndNote should be able to do something similar, but if you stop using Mendeley, or have future edits after Word no longer plays nicely with it, you’ll need to reset any links within docs with managed reference sections. Passing it along.
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4. Oktober 2022
Die Migration der E-Mail-Postfächer
Seit ein paar Wochen – konkret: seit dem 19. August 2022 – droht die IT-Abteilung der Hochschule mit der Migration der E-Mail-Postfächer. Das Ganze läuft unter dem Motto „Rollout Microsoft 365“. Ausser der IT-Abteilung arbeitet gefühlt niemand an der Hochschule mit Microsoft (sondern mit macOS), doch das ist der IT-Abteilung egal. In der Nacht von Sonntag auf Montag war es soweit: Der Hochschul-Mailserver wurde zum Cloud-Dienst Exchange Online migriert. Viele Dozierende, so auch ich, arbeiten auf privaten Geräten, in meinem Fall ist das ein MacBook Air (2017), auf dem seit Jahren und ohne Probleme macOS Sierra 10.12 läuft. Ich lese die Anweisungen im Intranet und stelle fest, dass ich Apple Mail nicht umstellen kann. Ich müsste mindestens macOS Mojave 10.14 installiert haben. Ich unterrichte den ganzen Tag und habe keine Zeit mich darum zu kümmern. Ich erledige meine Mail-Korrespondenzen vorerst über Webmail.
Am Dienstag habe ich in der Mittagspause eine halbe Stunde Zeit und suche das Service-Desk der IT-Abteilung auf. Dort hat sich bereits eine lange Schlange Verzweifelter gebildet. Die Serviceleute sind wie immer unfreundlich. Nach so vielen Jahren, sagt der Mensch, der sich mein MacBook anschaut, vorwurfsvoll, sei es schon mal an der Zeit, ein neueres System zu installieren und da sei ja auch schon eines drauf, macOS Monterey, ich müsse es halt nur noch installieren, was ein paar Stunden dauern könne, und ach ja, danach funktionierten einige Programme nicht mehr, Word zum Beispiel und Endnote, die beiden von mir neben Chrome und Apple Mail am meisten gebrauchten Werkzeuge, da müsse ich mich halt dann kümmern und sonst mal einen Tag frei nehmen und das MacBook im Service lassen, das könne dauern. Jetzt erinnere ich mich auch, warum ich das Betriebssystem-Update zwar irgendwann mal runtergeladen, dann aber doch nicht eingerichtet hatte. Ich atme ein und aus und bin dankbar, dass ich diesmal offenbar und immerhin keinen neuen Computer kaufen muss, was frühere Änderungen in der Hochschul-IT auch schon notwendig gemacht hatten.
Am Abend setze ich mich hin, mache ein Backup auf eine externe Festplatte, installiere macOS Monterey 12.1, kaufe ein Update für Endnote und einige Microsoft-Dinge (Word, Excel …), richte meinen Hochschulaccount in Apple-Mail neu ein und irgendwann nach Mitternacht und viel Geklicke, einigem Nachlesen und Ausprobieren, sieht zwar alles ein wenig anders aus, doch es scheint zu funktionieren. Mal sehen, wie lange.
(Franziska Nyffenegger)
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Alternativas a BibGuru: Herramientas para la gestión de referencias bibliográficas
Cuando se trata de realizar investigaciones académicas o redactar artículos científicos, una parte fundamental es la correcta gestión de las referencias bibliográficas. Estas referencias permiten respaldar nuestras ideas, brindar crédito a los autores originales y ofrecer una base sólida para nuestras argumentaciones. Afortunadamente, existen diversas herramientas en línea que nos ayudan a organizar y citar de manera eficiente nuestras fuentes bibliográficas.
En este artículo, exploraremos algunas alternativas a BibGuru, una popular aplicación de gestión de referencias. Estas alternativas ofrecen características similares y pueden ser opciones valiosas para investigadores, estudiantes y profesionales que deseen mejorar su flujo de trabajo en la gestión de referencias.
A continuación, presentaremos cuatro de estas alternativas y proporcionaremos enlaces a sus sitios web oficiales para que puedas obtener más información y decidir cuál se ajusta mejor a tus necesidades.
Zotero
- Sitio web oficial: https://www.zotero.org/
- Costo: Zotero es una herramienta de gestión de referencias gratuita y de código abierto. Puedes descargarla y utilizarla sin costo alguno. Sin embargo, existen planes de almacenamiento en la nube disponibles por una tarifa mensual si deseas acceder a funciones adicionales y más espacio de almacenamiento.
Mendeley
- Sitio web oficial: https://www.mendeley.com/
- Costo: Mendeley ofrece una versión gratuita con características básicas de gestión de referencias y almacenamiento limitado en la nube. También hay planes de suscripción premium disponibles, como Mendeley Plus, que ofrecen más almacenamiento y características adicionales. Los precios de los planes premium se pueden encontrar en el sitio web oficial.
EndNote
- Sitio web oficial: https://endnote.com/
- Costo: EndNote es un software de gestión de referencias que se compra mediante licencia. Se ofrece una versión de prueba gratuita por un período limitado. Para obtener los detalles de precios y licencias, es recomendable visitar el sitio web oficial de EndNote.
RefWorks
- Sitio web oficial: https://www.refworks.com/
- Costo: RefWorks ofrece diferentes planes de suscripción que varían en función de las necesidades del usuario, como instituciones académicas o individuos. Para conocer los precios y las opciones de suscripción, se recomienda visitar el sitio web oficial de RefWorks.
Recuerda que los precios y planes de suscripción pueden estar sujetos a cambios, por lo que es mejor verificar la información más reciente en los sitios web oficiales de cada herramienta.
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Cross-posting an essay I wrote for my Patreon since the post is free and open to the public.
Hello everyone! I hope you're relaxing as best you can this holiday season. I recently went to see Miyazaki's latest Ghibli movie, The Boy and the Heron, and I had some thoughts about it. If you're into art historical allusions and gently cranky opinions, please enjoy. I've attached a downloadable PDF in the Patreon post if you'd prefer to read it that way. Apologies for the formatting of the endnotes! Patreon's text posting does not allow for superscripts, which means all my notations are in awkward parentheses. Please note that this writing contains some mild spoilers for The Boy and the Heron.
Hayao Miyazaki’s 2023 feature animated film The Boy and the Heron reads as an extended meditation on grief and legacy. The Master of a grand tower seeks a descendant to carry on his maddening duty, balancing toy blocks of magical stone upon which the entire fabric of his little pocket of reality rests. The world’s foundations are frail and fleeting, and can pass away into the cold void of space should he neglect to maintain this task. The Master’s desire to pass the torch undergirds much of the film’s narrative.
(Isle of the Dead. Arnold Böcklin. 1880. Oil on Canvas. Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland.)
Arnold Böcklin, a Swiss Symbolist(1) painter, was born on October 16 in 1827, the same year the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church bought a plot of land in Florence from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II, that had long been used for the burials of Protestants around Florence. It is colloquially known as The English Cemetery, so called because it was the resting place of many Anglophones and Protestants around Tuscany, and Böcklin frequented this cemetery—his workshop was adjacent and his infant daughter Maria was buried there. In 1880, he drew inspiration from the cemetery, a lone plot of Protestant land among a sea of Catholic graveyards, and began to paint what would be the first of six images entitled Isle of the Dead. An oil on canvas piece, it depicts a moody little island mausoleum crowned with a gently swaying grove of cypresses, a type of tree common in European cemeteries and some of which are referred to as arborvitae. A figure on a boat, presumably Charon, ferries a soul toward the island and away from the viewer.
(Photo of The English Cemetery in Florence. Samuli Lintula. 2006.)
The Isle of the Dead paintings varied slightly from version to version, with figures and names added and removed to suit the needs of the time or the commissioner. The painting was glowingly referenced and remained fairly popular throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The painting used to be inescapable in much of European popular culture. Professor Okulicz-Kozaryn, a philologist (someone with a deep interest in the ways language and cultural canons evolve)(2) observed that the painting, like many other works in its time, was itself iterative and became widely reiterated and referenced among its contemporaries. It became something like Romantic kitsch in the eyes of modern art critics, overwrought and excessively Byronic. I imagine Miyazaki might also resent a work of that level of manufactured ubiquity, as Miyazaki famously held Disney animated films in contempt (3). Miyazaki’s films are popularly aspirational to young animators and cartoonists, but gestures at imitation typically fall well short, often reducing Miyazaki’s weighty films to kitschy images of saccharine vibes and a lazy indulgence in a sort of empty magical domestic coziness. Being trapped in a realm of rote sentiment by an uncritical, unthoughtful viewership is its own Isle of Death.
(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)
The Boy and the Heron follows a familiar narrative arc to many of Miyazaki’s other films: a child must journey through a magical and quietly menacing world in order to rescue their loved ones. This arc is an echo of Satsuki’s journey to find Mei in My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Chihiro’s journey to rescue her parents Spirited Away (2001). To better understand Miyazaki’s fixation with this particular character journey, it can be instructive to watch Lev Atamanov’s 1957 animated film, The Snow Queen (4)(5), a beautifully realized take on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1844 children’s story (6)(7). Mahito’s journey continues in this tradition, as the boy travels into a painted world to rescue his new stepmother from a mysterious tower.
Throughout the film, Miyazaki visually references Isle of the Dead. Transported to a surreal world, Mahito initially awakens on a little green island with a gated mausoleum crowned with cypress trees. He is accosted by hungry pelicans before being rescued by a fisherwoman named Kiriko. After a day of catching and gutting fish, Mahito wakes up under the fisherwoman’s dining table, surrounded by kokeshi—little wooden dolls—in the shapes of the old women who run Mahito’s family’s rural household. Mahito is told they must not be touched, as the kokeshi are wards set up for his protection. There is a popular urban legend associated with the kokeshi wherein they act as stand-ins for victims of infanticide, though there seems to be very little available writing to support this legend. Still, it’s a neat little trick that Miyazaki pulls, placing a stray reference to a local legend of unverifiable provenance that persists in the popular imagination, like the effect of fairy stories passed on through oral retellings, continually remolded each new iteration.
(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)
Kiriko’s job in this strange landscape is to catch fish to nourish unborn spirits, the adorable floating warawara, before they can attempt to ascend on a journey into the world of the living. Their journey is thwarted by flocks of supernatural pelicans, who swarm the warawara and devour them. This seems to nod to the association of pelicans with death in mythologies around the world, especially in relationship to children (8). Miyazaki’s pelicans contemplate the passing of their generations as each successive generation seems to regress, their capacity to fulfill their roles steadily diminishing.
(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)
As Mahito’s adventure continues, we find the landscapes changing away from Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead into more familiar Ghibli territories as we start to see spaces inspired by one of Studio Ghibli’s aesthetic mainstays, Naohisa Inoue and his explorations of the fantasy realms of Iblard. He might be most familiar to Ghibli enthusiasts as the background artists for the more fantastical elements of Whisper of the Heart (1995).
(Naohisa Inoue, for Iblard Jikan, 2007. Studio Ghibli.)
By the time we arrive at the climax of The Boy and the Heron, the fantasy island environment starts to resemble English takes on Italian gardens, the likes of which captivated illustrators and commercial artists of the early 20th century such as Maxfield Parrish. This appears to be a return to one of Böcklin’s later paintings, The Island of Life (1888), a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reaction to the overwhelming presence of Isle of the Dead in his life and career. The Island of Life depicts a little spot of land amid an ocean very like the one on which Isle of the Dead’s somber mausoleum is depicted, except this time the figures are lively and engaged with each other, the vegetation lush and colorful, replete with pink flowers and palm fronds.
(Island of Life. Arnold Böcklin. Oil on canvas. 1888. Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland.)
In 2022, Russia’s State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg acquired the sixth and final Isle of the Dead painting. In the last year of his life, Arnold Böcklin would paint this image in collaboration with his son Carlo Böcklin, himself an artist and an architect. Arnold Böcklin spent three years painting the same image three times over at the site of his infant daughter’s grave, trapped on the Isle of the Dead. By the time of his death in 1901 at age 74, Böcklin would be survived by only five of his fourteen children. That the final Isle of the Dead painting would be a collaboration between father and son seemed a little ironic considering Hayao Miyazaki’s reticence in passing on his own legacy. Like the old Master in The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki finds himself with no true successors.
The Master of the Tower's beautiful islands of painted glass fade into nothing as Mahito, his only worthy descendant, departs to live his own life, fulfilling the thesis of Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 book How Do You Live?, published three years after Carlo Böcklin’s death. In evoking Yoshino and Böcklin’s works, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron suggests that, like his character the Master, Miyazaki himself must make peace with the notion that he has no heirs to his legacy, and that those whom he wished to follow in his footsteps might be best served by finding their own paths.
(Isle of the Dead. Arnold and Carlo Böcklin. Oil on canvas. 1901. The State Hermitage Museum. Saint Petersburg, Russia.)
INFORMAL ENDNOTES
1 - Symbolists are sort of tough to nail down. They were started as a literary movement to 1 distinguish themselves from the Decadents, but their manifesto was so vague that critics and academics fight about it to this day. The long and the short of it is that the Symbolists made generous use of a lot of metaphorical imagery in their work. They borrow a lot of icons from antiquity, echo the moody aesthetics from the Romantics, maintained an emphasis on figurative imagery more so than the Surrealists, and were only slightly more technically married to the trappings of traditionalist academic painters than Modernists and Impressionists. They're extremely vibes-forward.
2 - Okulicz-Kozaryn, Radosław. Predilection of Modernism for Variations. Ciulionis' Serenity among Different Developments of the Theme of Toteninsel. ACTA Academiae Artium Vilnensis 59. 2010. The article is incredibly cranky and very funny to read in parts. Contains a lot of observations I found to be helpful in placing Isle of the Dead within its context.
3 - "From my perspective, even if they are lightweight in nature, the more popular and common films still must be filled with a purity of emotion. There are few barriers to entry into these films-they will invite anyone in but the barriers to exit must be high and purifying. Films must also not be produced out of idle nervousness or boredom, or be used to recognise, emphasise, or amplify vulgarity. And in that context, I must say that I hate Disney's works. The barrier to both the entry and exit of Disney films is too low and too wide. To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience." from Miyazaki's own writing in his collection of essays, Starting Point, published in 2014 from VIZ Media.
4 - You can watch the movie here in its original Russian with English closed captions here.
5 If you want to learn more about the making of Atamanoy's The Snow Queen, Animation Obsessive wrote a neat little article about it. It's a good overview, though I have to gently disagree with some of its conclusions about the irony of Miyazaki hating Disney and loving Snow Queen, which draws inspiration from Bambi. Feature film animation as we know it hadonly been around a few decades by 1957, and I find it specious, particularly as a comic artistand author, to see someone conflating an entire form with the character of its content, especially in the relative infancy of the form. But that's just one hot take. The rest of the essay is lovely.
6 - Miyazaki loves this movie. He blurbed it in a Japanese re-release of it in 2007.
7 - Julia Alekseyeva interprets Princess Mononoke as an iteration of Atamanov's The Snow Queen, arguing that San, the wolf princess, is Miyazaki's homage to Atamanoy's little robber girl character.
8 - Hart, George. The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods And Goddesses. Routledge Dictionaries. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge. 2005.
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