Digital library
Textbooks, references and open learning resources.
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Music on the Move
Danielle Fosler-Lussier · University of Michigan Press · 2020
Music is a mobile art. When people move to faraway places, whether by choice or by force, they bring their music along. Music creates a meaningful point of contact for individuals and for groups; it can encourage curiosity and foster understanding; and it can preserve a sense of identity and comfort in an unfamiliar or hostile environment. As music crosses cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries, it continually changes. While human mobility and mediation have always shaped music-making, our current era of digital connectedness introduces new creative opportunities and inspiration even as it extends concerns about issues such as copyright infringement and cultural appropriation. With its innovative multimodal approach, Music on the Move invites readers to listen and engage with many different types of music as they read. The text introduces a variety of concepts related to music's travels—with or without its makers—including colonialism, migration, diaspora, mediation, propaganda, copyright, and hybridity. The case studies represent a variety of musical genres and styles, Western and non-Western, concert music, traditional music, and popular music. Highly accessible, jargon-free, and media-rich, Music on the Move is suitable for students as well as general-interest readers. Citable link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855
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Where Does Art Come From?
Leah McCurdy · Mavs Open Press · 2022
Who am I? What is beautiful? Where do babies come from? These questions populate our lives and inform our perceptions of the world. Explore these questions according to the expressions of artists from all over the world. Go beyond Western art to consider where art comes from and how it impacts all of us.
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Introduction to Philosophy: Aesthetic Theory and Practice
Yuriko Saito ; Ruth Sonderegger ; Ines Kleesattel · Rebus Community · 2021
Aesthetic Theory and Practice offers fresh perspectives on canonical and emerging topics in aesthetics, and also brings attention to a number of culturally sensitive topics that are customarily silenced in introductions to philosophical aesthetics. The papers are heterogeneous in terms of length and degrees of difficulty, inviting the reader into the study of contemporary aesthetics, which spans a lifetime.
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Documentary Making for Digital Humanists
Darren Reid; Brett Sanders · Open Book Publishers · 2021
This fluent and comprehensive field guide responds to increased interest, across the humanities, in the ways in which digital technologies can disrupt and open up new research and pedagogical avenues. It is designed to help scholars and students engage with their subjects using an audio-visual grammar, and to allow readers to efficiently gain the technical and theoretical skills necessary to create and disseminate their own trans-media projects. Documentary Making for Digital Humanists sets out the fundamentals of filmmaking, explores academic discourse on digital documentaries and online distribution, and considers the place of this discourse in the evolving academic landscape. The book walks its readers through the intellectual and practical processes of creating digital media and documentary projects. It is further equipped with video elements, supplementing specific chapters and providing brief and accessible introductions to the key components of the filmmaking process. This will be a valuable resource to humanist scholars and students seeking to embrace new media production and the digital landscape, and to those researchers interested in using means beyond the written word to disseminate their work. It constitutes a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of digital humanities, as the first practical guide of its kind designed to facilitate humanist interactions with digital filmmaking, and to empower scholars and students alike to create and distribute new media audio-visual artefacts.
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Ancient Greek I: A 21st Century Approach
Philip Peek · Open Book Publishers · 2021
In this elementary textbook, Philip S. Peek draws on his twenty-five years of teaching experience to present the ancient Greek language in an imaginative and accessible way that promotes creativity, deep learning, and diversity. The course is built on three pillars: memory, analysis, and logic. Readers memorize the top 250 most frequently occurring ancient Greek words, the essential word endings, the eight parts of speech, and the grammatical concepts they will most frequently encounter when reading authentic ancient texts. Analysis and logic exercises enable the translation and parsing of genuine ancient Greek sentences, with compelling reading selections in English and in Greek offering starting points for contemplation, debate, and reflection. A series of embedded Learning Tips help teachers and students to think in practical and imaginative ways about how they learn. This combination of memory-based learning and concept- and skill-based learning gradually builds the confidence of the reader, teaching them how to learn by guiding them from a familiarity with the basics to proficiency in reading this beautiful language. Ancient Greek I: A 21st-Century Approach is written for high-school and university students, but is an instructive and rewarding text for anyone who wishes to learn ancient Greek.
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Fundamentals of Music Theory
Nikki Moran; Michael Edwards; Richard Worth; Zack Moir · University of Edinburgh · 2021
This open e-book is the result of a project funded by a University of Edinburgh Student Experience Grant, Open e-Textbooks for access to music education. The project was a collaboration between Open Educational Resources Service, and staff and student interns from the Reid School of Music. As a proof-of-concept endeavour, the project aimed to explore how effectively we could convert existing course content into convenient and reusable open formats suitable for use by staff and students both within and beyond the University. The resulting e-book presents open licensed educational materials that deal with the building blocks of musical stave (sometimes known as staff) notation, a language designed to communicate about musical ideas which is in use around the world. The resources in this e-book include video lectures and their transcripts, as well as supporting text explanations, examples and illustrations. The materials introduce topics such as the organisation of discrete pitches into scales and intervals, and temporal organisation of musical sounds as duration, in rhythm and metre. These rudiments are presented through an introduction to the elements of five-line stave notation, and through critical discussion of the advantages and limitations served by notational systems in the representation and analysis of musical sounds. This serves as the basis of further explanations, to illustrate musical concepts including key, time signature, harmonisation, cadence and modulation. We anticipate that subsequent versions of this e-book will update and develop the contents and presentation of the materials, following the success of this student-led collaboration.
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The Bright Continent: African Art History
Kathy Curnow · MSL Academic Endeavors · 2018
This book aims to act as your map through the world of African art. As such, it will help you define the competencies you need to develop–visual analysis, research, noting what information is critical, asking questions, and writing down your observations–and provide opportunities for you to practice these skills until you are proficient. It will also expose you to new art forms and the worlds that produced them, enriching your understanding and appreciation. This is an ongoing project. Your text will not be complete the day you first click on it, but will be written as we proceed through the course. Because it will be used for other courses beyond your own, you may find that it includes materials beyond those your class demands. Encourage your curiosity–chase after it.
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Tutt* a tavola!
Stacy Giufre; Melina Masterson · UMass Amherst · 2021
This new open educational resource is for Elementary Italian. Our goal is for this book to be comprehensive, user-friendly, inclusive, and cost-effective. Tutt* a tavola has two parts, one for each course, with six chapters in each. Generally speaking, each chapter addresses three to four grammatical topics and includes a vocabulary section related to a cultural theme. The vocabulary is also incorporated into the grammatical presentations and exercises. There is also a short reading in each chapter regarding different aspects of culture and language, to address those questions of diversity and inclusion that are often missing from the textbooks we have used in the past. To include more culture, we have also included multimedia: each chapter begins with a song that is used as a starting point for the inductive presentation of the chapter’s content, and ends with a video (a film clip, an interview, social media) that summarizes the ideas covered.
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CITOYEN.NE.S: Conversation en Français
Annabelle Dolidon · Portland State University Library · 2021
CITOYEN.NE.S is a French language method for the conversation class at the intermediate/ advanced level. Content and activities are built around the concepts of diversity, inclusivity and equity, and engage students to practice French while questioning and participating in the world they live in – to be full citizens whatever their background, their race or their gender identity. As the French spelling of the title indicates, the book embraces écriture inclusive and uses it for instructions and general information for all students. The book is composed of five chapters covering various themes. None of them provides again basic vocabulary from first- and second-year French courses, like food and body parts. Instead, each chapter builds on students’ previous knowledge and takes them further to develop language and cultural skills. Each chapter presents a mix of vocabulary lists and activities, authentic documents and others that have been written for the book, based on research. Chapters end with creative activities and one overarching assignment that help students go deeper in topics of interest. Early chapters have two grammar reviews, later chapters only one.
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Guide to Byzantine Art
Evan Freeman; Anne McClanan · Smarthistory · 2021
The “Beginner’s guide” introduces foundational concepts, such as the chronology of Byzantine history, sacred imagery, and wearable objects. Subsequent sections are arranged chronologically, covering the Early Byzantine period (c. 330–700), the Iconoclastic Controversy (c. 700s–843), the Middle Byzantine period (843–1204), the Latin Empire (c. 1204–1261), and the Late Byzantine period (c. 1261–1453) and beyond. These sections include thematic essays on Byzantine art and architecture, essays that focus on key works (subtitled artworks in focus or architecture in focus), and essays that explore Byzantium’s relationships with other cultures (subtitled cross-cultural perspectives). Finally, we have included questions for study or discussion to encourage teachers, students, and other readers to engage with videos and other content on the Smarthistory website which could not be included in this book format but which we believe richly compliments what is presented here.
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Music in World Cultures
Matthew Mihalka ; Justin Hunter · University of Arkansas · 2021
This text provides just a small sampling of some of the various musical styles and traditions that might be found, though the skills developed in this course can be applied to any type of music.
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Fundamentals, Function, and Form: Theory and Analysis of Tonal Western Art Music
Andre Mount · Milne Open Textbooks · 2020
Fundamentals, Function, and Form by Andre Mount—with editorial and pedagogical input from Lee Rothfarb—provides its readers with a comprehensive study of the theory and analysis of tonal Western art music. Mount begins by building a strong foundation in the understanding of rhythm, meter, and pitch as well as the notational conventions associated with each. From there, he guides the reader through an exploration of polyphony—the simultaneous sounding of multiple independent melodies—and an increasingly rich array of different sonorites that grow out of this practice. The book culminates with a discussion of musical form, engaging with artistic works in their entirety by considering the interaction of harmonic and thematic elements, but also such other musical dimensions as rhythm, meter, texture, and expression. Along the way, Mount supplements the text with over eight hundred musical examples which, in the online version of the text, include embedded audio files for immediate aural reinforcement of theoretical concepts. Most of these examples are drawn from the literature, including nearly 200 excerpts by women and other underrepresented groups. The reader is also given the opportunity to check their understanding of the text with interactive exercises at every step of the way. Fundamentals, Function, and Form was written with the undergraduate music student in mind, but self-guided readers would also be rewarded with a deep understanding of this musical tradition.
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Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
Robert Hutchinson · Robert Hutchinson · 2017
Music Theory for the 21st–Century Classroom is an openly–licensed online four–semester college music theory textbook. This text differs from other music theory textbooks by focusing less on four–part (SATB) voiceleading and more on relating harmony to the phrase. Also, in traditional music theory textbooks, there is little emphasis on motivic analysis and analysis of melodic units smaller than the phrase. In my opinion, this led to students having difficulty with creating melodies, since the training they are given is typically to write a “melody” in quarter notes in the soprano voice of part writing exercises. When the assignments in those texts ask students to do more than this, the majority of the students struggle to create a melody with continuity and with appropriate placement of harmonies within a phrase because the text had not prepared them to do so. In Music Theory for the 21st–Century Classroom, students learn about motive, fragment, phrase, and subphrase, as well as types of melodic alteration like inversion, intervallic change, augmentation, diminution, rhythmic change, ornamentation, extension, and retrograde. By understanding motive and subphrase (also known as “phrase segment” or “phrase member”), I believe students will better understand the logic and construction of melodies, which will aid them in creating their own music. This text is meant to take the student from the basics of reading and writing pitches and rhythms through twelve–tone technique and minimalism over the course of four semesters. Whenever possible, examples from popular music and music from film and musical theater are included to illustrate melodic and harmonic concepts, usually within the context of the phrase.
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Guide to Italian art in the 1400s
Ruth Ezra; Beth Harris; Steven Zucker · Smarthistory · 2020
This book contains all of Smarthistory’s content for Italian art in the 1400s.
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Guide to Italian art in the 1300s
Ruth Ezra; Beth Harris; Steve Zucker · Smarthistory · 2020
This book contains all of Smarthistory’s content for Italian art in the 1300s.
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Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar!
Jeannette Okur · COERLL · 2021
Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar! was developed for intermediate level Turkish language courses at the University of Texas at Austin. Intermediate learners and their instructors may use it for different purposes: self-study, classroom instruction, tutoring, or as a pastime. The lessons in Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar! integrate reading, listening and viewing comprehension, writing and speaking practice, grammar, vocabulary, and cultural activities. Dozens of audio and video clips of Turkish speakers describing their lives, their culture, and their country support and enhance these activities. The Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar! textbook, interactive H5P exercises, and YouTube channel comprise a media-rich open educational resource (OER) developed by Dr. Jeannette Okur at the University of Texas at Austin and published by the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning under the U.S. Department of Education Title VI Grant #P229A180003, with additional support from the UT Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services and the UT Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
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Brass Techniques and Pedagogy
Brian Weidner · Palni Press · 2020
Textbook for undergraduate brass methods course focusing on brass instrument techniques and pedagogy.
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A Guide to Good Reasoning: Cultivating Intellectual Virtues
David Wilson · University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing · 1999
A Guide to Good Reasoning has been described by reviewers as “far superior to any other critical reasoning text.” It shows with both wit and philosophical care how students can become good at everyday reasoning. It starts with attitude—with alertness to judgmental heuristics and with the cultivation of intellectual virtues. From there it develops a system for skillfully clarifying and evaluating arguments, according to four standards—whether the premises fit the world, whether the conclusion fits the premises, whether the argument fits the conversation, and whether it is possible to tell.
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Elementary New Testament Greek
Joseph Dongell · First Fruits Press · 2014
The need for this particular grammar arises from the peculiar shape of the MDiv curriculum at Asbury Theological Seminary. Several years ago the faculty adopted a curriculum that required one semester of Greek and one semester of Hebrew, each as preparatory for a basic exegesis course in each discipline. It became clear after several years of trial and error that a “lexical” or “tools” approach to learning Greek and Hebrew was inadequate, no matter how skilled the instructors or how motivated the students. In today's general vacuum of grammatical training in public education across the United States, students typically enter seminary training with no knowledge of how languages work. Any training we might give them in accessing grammatical information through the use of Bible software programs will, we learned, come to naught in the absence of an understanding of just what such information actually means. We agreed that we actually needed to “teach the language itself,” at least in some rudimentary fashion, if we hoped students would make sense of grammatical and linguistic issues involved biblical interpretation. The first 12 chapters of this grammar are designed to correspond to the first semester's instructional agenda. In these chapters we introduce all the parts of speech, explain and drill the basic elements of grammar, set forth the larger verb system (excluding the perfect system), teach the tenses of the Indicative Mood only (again, excluding the perfect system), and help students build a vocabulary of all NT words occurring 100 times or more. We also lead students into the NT itself with carefully chosen examples, while at the same time guiding them in each lesson to learn the use of the standard NT lexicon [BDAG] and an exegetical grammar [Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics]. We are well aware of the limitations of this approach, but genuinely believe that some instruction along these lines is better than none, and that such an approach provide a fo
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Intermediate Biblical Greek Reader: Galatians and Related Texts
Nijay Gupta; Jonah Sandford · George Fox University Library · 2018
After completing basic biblical Greek, students are often eager to continue to learn and strengthen their skills of translation and interpretation. This intermediate graded reader is designed to meet those needs. The reader is “intermediate” in the sense that it presumes the user will have already learned the basics of Greek grammar and syntax and has memorized Greek vocabulary words that appear frequently in the New Testament. The reader is “graded” in the sense that it moves from simpler translation work (Galatians) towards more advanced readings from the book of James, the Septuagint, and from one of the Church Fathers. In each reading lesson, the Greek text is given, followed by supplemental notes that offer help with vocabulary, challenging word forms, and syntax. Discussion questions are also included to foster group conversation and engagement. There are many good Greek readers in existence, but this reader differs from most others in a few important ways. Most readers offer text selections from different parts of the Bible, but in this reader the user works through one entire book (Galatians). All subsequent lessons, then, build off of this interaction with Galatians through short readings that are in some way related to Galatians. The Septuagint passages in the reader offer some broader context for texts that Paul quotes explicitly from the Septuagint. The Patristic reading from John Chrysystom comes from one of his homilies on Galatians. This approach to a Greek reader allows for both variety and coherence in the learning process. This reader is a collaborative project that developed out of an advanced Greek course at Portland Seminary (2017-2018). The following students contributed equally to the content of the textbook. Alexander Finkelson (MATS, Portland Seminary, 2018) Bryn Pliska Girard (MATS, Portland Seminary, 2018) Charles E. R. Jesch (MDIV, Portland Seminary, current student) Paul C. Moldovan (MDIV, Portland Seminary, current student) Jenny E. Sie