It is a truth universally acknowledged that not all books find their reader. This February we invite you to come look at some of our "wallflower" books. They tell a great story and deserve some book love. Who knows you might find "the one" that makes your readerly heart swell.
On Tuesday, February 5, in the Bender Room at Green Library, Jessica Riskin and Oussama Khatib will join Nicole Coleman in conversation about robotics past and future. Both have been thinking deeply about artificial life and artificial intelligence throughout their careers. While Khatib has been building robots and breaking new ground in human-robot collaboration, Riskin’s work explores the way that early automatons influenced the mechanistic view of mind and body, evolution and inheritance, and how our relationship to machines continues to influence our thinking today about whether human beings have agency in shaping their destiny.
Last week, Stanford Libraries hosted our 10th two-day Carpentries workshop (I think -- I'm starting to lose count!). These workshops are designed to teach foundational coding and data science skills to graduate students, post-docs, research staff -- really, anyone on Stanford's campus who is doing research and needs to develop computational skills to help them get their tasks done more efficiently and less painfully.
This workshop focused on the open source tools of shell, Git, and R, and focused on tasks like automation, version control, and modular programming. We had a fabulous all-female instructor team that included the Libraries' Claudia Engel, Mary-Ellen Petrich from LOCKSS, and Melissa Ko, lecturer in the Thinking Matters program. Our instructors were assisted by helpers John Borghi, Max Czapanskiy, Edgar Vivanco, and Amy Hodge.
The Carpentries (and the Libraries, for that matter) are very interested in assessment so that we can check how good a job we're doing. Fourteen of the nineteen attendees at our workshop filled out our survey at the end of the event, and here's what they had to say:
![Sophoclis trageodiae septem... [Haguenau, France: Ex officina Seceriana, 1534] (Stanford Libraries Department of Special Collections PA4413 .A2 1534). Photo by Elizabeth Ryan.](https://www-library.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/styles/150xh/public/blog/image/sophocles_a.jpg?itok=fkU2_idi)
February will be a busy month for booklovers and the book community in the Bay Area and beyond, with a delightful buffet of events and opportunities to enjoy:
The Archive of Recorded Sound announces two new appointments.
Each year Cubberley Education Library gets many books for children and young adults which we list in our guides by various subjects, genre, etc. for our patrons. However, sometimes we get books that don't fit the usual categories. Here are two of them:
The Seine at Night, original manuscript by Virgil Thomson (1896 – 1989)
Memorial Library of Music, MLM 1087
The Science and Engineering Libraries have a lot of great workshops planned for the winter quarter. Check the offerings below and join us for one or more of these awesome opportunities!
January 23-24, 2019 (Wednesday & Thursday)
8:30 am – 4:30 pm
Software Carpentry Workshop
Host: Amy Hodge, Science Data Librarian
Location: Hartley Conference Center, Mitchell Earth Sciences Building
Registration with SUNet ID required