Spring often inspires us to close our laptops and venture outside to explore new territories. You can also channel this restlessness into exploring new intellectual areas by browsing through the book collections of the DePaul Libraries. Here are three recent additions to the shelves of the Loop Library.
Thousands of commercial ads were painted on the sides of buildings in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1997, Frank Jump began photographing these fading images to document this era of advertising, as well as the societal values the ads represented. His campaign also honored the work of the wall dogs–the artists and artisans who painted these images. Fading Ads of New York City evolved from a 1998 exhibit of Jumps photographs at the New York Historical Society. The photographs from that exhibit are included in the 72 images presented in this book. Jump brings these images to life with his creatively researched stories about the companies and products represented in the ads. (Loop Library, 659.1342 J949F)
Storytelling dates back to preliterate societies when information was passed along through dances and pictures. Dr. Ruth Page has written a book about the telling of stories in a very current and specific context, that of social media. She analyzed stories told through several different web applications, beginning with the earlier discussion forums and community archives, to the more recent sites of Twitter and Facebook. Even if you do not participate in online storytelling, Stories and Social Media is an interesting book about the effect of technology on relationships today. (Loop Library, 302.231 P1335)
With the proliferation of electronic information, many of us have become very skillful skimmers (or so we think) rather than careful and thorough readers of publications. The final book highlighted this month presents techniques for building academic skills to tackle the opposite type of reading, that of critical reading. While the target audience of this book is postgraduate students, the explanations, examples and exercises presented in Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates will also be valuable for undergraduate and graduate students. Wallace and Wray guide students through the process of selecting what to read, developing an argument, creating a mental map, critically analyzing texts, and producing a critical literature review. (Loop Library, 378.170281 W192C2)