MF080 Nash Island Light Project Collection

A series of two interviews with Jenny Cirone, age 86, done on behalf of a group wishing to restore the Nash Island Lighthouse, by Anu Dudley in October, 1998. The interviews primarily focused on Jenny Cirone’s reminiscences of growing up on Nash Island, Maine, where her father was the lighthouse keeper. Topics include: raising and shearing sheep; fishing; lobstering; clamming; gardening; schooling; tending the Nash Island lighthouse; tourists; ice skating; hurricanes; games; boats; clothing; social life; storms; and wrecks. NA2545 Jenny Cirone, interviewed by Anu Dudley, September 29, 1998, at Mrs. Cirone’s home in South Addison, Maine. Cirone, age 86, talks about growing up on Nash Island, Maine; raising and shearing sheep; fishing; lobstering; clamming; gardening; schooling; and tending the Nash Island lighthouse (her father was the lighthouse keeper); tourists; ice skating; hurricanes. NA2549 Jenny Cirone, interviewed by Anu Dudley, Michel Chalufour, and Barbara Hannania, October 12, 1998, at Mrs. Cirone’s home in South Addison, Maine. A second interview with Cirone, age 86, where she talks about growing up on Nash Island, Maine; raising and shearing sheep; games; boats; gardening; schooling; clothing; social life; tending and painting the Nash Island lighthouse (her father was the lighthouse keeper); storms and wrecks.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/ne_findingaids/1023/thumbnail.jp

The Lighthouse Keeper

Lighthouses are the heart and soul of hundreds of communities across Atlantic Canada; they were integral to the survival and growth of their people while acting as a safety net around the coasts. These communities no longer require lighthouses to guide their fishing vessels and passing ships to safety. Now that their primary purpose is no longer required, many of these buildings are being lost. This is due to a lack of resources to keep them properly maintained, especially when faced with the increasing frequency of harsh weather conditions due to climate change. Their histories and experiences tied to them are usually kept isolated from each other, tucked away in an old photo album or journal drifting into obscurity. This research aims to provide new ways to preserve the histories and stories associated with these buildings in a way these small communities can access and afford while allowing a broader range of people across the world a glimpse into this unique community. To achieve this, new emerging accessible technologies have been utilized such as interactive web mapping and 3D scanning to create an immersive virtual experience. A variety of media will be hosted in this virtual environment such as photos, videos, and audio recordings, collected from each lighthouse in order to best understand these iconic buildings. This research and resultant web tool will empower small coastal communities by providing them new more accessible ways of recording their histories while simultaneously increasing outside intrigue and potentially bolstering their tourism economies and preservation resources

Intertextual Illuminations: “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by Henryk Sienkiewicz in Malcolm Lowry’s “Through the Panama”

The article offers a reading of “Through the Panama” by Malcom Lowry in light of an intertext connected with Polish literature. Lowry mentions a short story “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel prize winner for the whole of his literary output. What Lowry stresses in his intertextual allusion is the perilous illumination that the eponymous lighthouse keeper experiences. The article contends that the condition of the lighthouse keeper anticipates that of the Lowry protagonist who in “Through the Panama” fears death by his own book, or, to take Lowry’s other phrase, being “Joyced in his own petard.” Basing her analysis on Mieke Bal’s idea of a participatory exhibition where the viewer decides how to approach a video installation, and can do so by engaging with a single detail, Filipczak treats Lowry’s text as a multimodal work where such a detail may give rise to a reassessment of the reading experience. Since the allusion to the Polish text has only elicited fragmentary responses among the Lowry critics, Filipczak decides to fill in the gap by providing her interpretation of the lighthouse keeper’s perilous illumination mentioned by Lowry in the margins of his work, and by analyzing it in the context of major Romantic texts, notably the epic poem Master Thaddeus by Adam Mickiewicz whose words trigger the lighthouse keeper’s experience, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose text is quoted in the margins of “Through the Panama.” This choice allows to throw a different light on Lowry’s work which is also inhabited by echoes of futurist attitude to the machine and the Kafkaesque fear of being locked in one of the many locks of the canal “as if in experience.

Mediterranean resistance in Paolo Rumiz's Il Ciclope : the island and the lighthouse

Within the growing scholarly attention, in the field of Italian Studies, devoted to contemporary travel writing, on the one hand, and to writers coming from the geo-historical ‘margins’ of the peninsula, on the other, Paolo Rumiz’s works have sparked critical interest in recent years. In contrast with the prevailing reading of Rumiz’s work as mostly concerned with Eastern Europe, in this essay I assess the centrality of the Mediterranean in the author’s narrative imaginary, as it emerges in Il Ciclope (2015). Drawing on geocritical and ecocritical theories, I show how Rumiz’s Mediterranean island – where the real and imaginary travel of Il Ciclope takes place – narratively reveals itself as a space that comprises land and sea at the same time; a space that, while being localised, can also address global concerns, and that, from its supposedly marginal position in the global world, can become a centre of critical thinking.PostprintPeer reviewe

Defining openness: updating the concept of “open” for a connected world

The release of free resources by the education sector has led to reconsideration of how the open approach implied by Open Educational Resources (OER) impacts on the educator and the learner. However this work has tended to consider the replication of standard campus based approaches and the characteristics of content that will encourage other institutions and individuals to join in (Wiley, 2006), rather than the approach to open learning itself and the changes that embracing openness imply. This paper will look at the experience of acting as an open university over 40 years, and how the understanding of the concept of openness has changed in the last 10 years by considering changes in how we view learners. The Open University was built on open concepts that allow learners to avoid barriers to study and successfully enabled more than 2 million people to experience formal higher education. However the openness that applied to the Open University did not cover all aspects that might be commonly assumed - such as free access, choice of start times, global availability. Offering free access to some material online has shown the impact that openness can have on learners and identified a range of behaviours that cluster around content driven and social driven approaches to learning. A combined view that considers the original values of open attached to The Open University alongside the emerging view from OER gives us the opportunity and driver for revising our view of openness and developing a position that helps bridge between formal and informal learning

On the relation between the probabilistic characterization of the common cause and Bell's notion of local causality

In the paper the relation between the standard probabilistic characterization of the common cause (used for the derivation of the Bell inequalities) and Bell's notion of local causality will be investigated. It will be shown that the probabilistic common cause follows from local causality if one accepts, as Bell did, two assumptions concerning the common cause: first, the common cause is localized in the intersection of the past of the correlating events; second, it provides a complete specification of the `beables' of this intersection. However, neither assumptions are a priori requirements. In the paper the logical role of these assumptions will be studied and it will be shown that only the second assumption is necessary for the derivation of the probabilistic common cause from local causality

Gothic Matters: Introduction

Once considered escapist or closely linked to fantasy, the Gothic genre (or mode, as scholars increasingly call it) has recently begun to be explored for its material concerns and engagement with real-world matters. This special issue of Text Matters features essays that develop this line of inquiry, focusing on how the Gothic attempts to matter in concrete and critical ways, and maps its rhetorical and aesthetic strategies of intervention and narration, affect and influence. Chapters include work on the French Revolution and the representation of the female body, Frankenstein, colonialism and museum displays in the 19th century, disembodied hands, Native American vampires, neoliberal anxieties in horror film, gender, and post-industrial culture

Submarine landslide as the source for the October 11, 1918 Mona Passage tsunami : observations and modeling

This paper is not subject to U.S. copyright. The definitive version was published in Marine Geology 254 (2008): 35-46, doi:10.1016/j.margeo.2008.05.001.The October 11, 1918 ML 7.5 earthquake in the Mona Passage between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico generated a local tsunami that claimed approximately 100 lives along the western coast of Puerto Rico. The area affected by this tsunami is now significantly more populated. Newly acquired high-resolution bathymetry and seismic reflection lines in the Mona Passage show a fresh submarine landslide 15 km northwest of Rinćon in northwestern Puerto Rico and in the vicinity of the first published earthquake epicenter. The landslide area is approximately 76 km2 and probably displaced a total volume of 10 km3. The landslide's headscarp is at a water depth of 1200 m, with the debris flow extending to a water depth of 4200 m. Submarine telegraph cables were reported cut by a landslide in this area following the earthquake, further suggesting that the landslide was the result of the October 11, 1918 earthquake. On the other hand, the location of the previously suggested source of the 1918 tsunami, a normal fault along the east wall of Mona Rift, does not show recent seafloor rupture. Using the extended, weakly non-linear hydrodynamic equations implemented in the program COULWAVE, we modeled the tsunami as generated by a landslide with a duration of 325 s (corresponding to an average speed of ~ 27 m/s) and with the observed dimensions and location. Calculated marigrams show a leading depression wave followed by a maximum positive amplitude in agreement with the reported polarity, relative amplitudes, and arrival times. Our results suggest this newly-identified landslide, which was likely triggered by the 1918 earthquake, was the primary cause of the October 11, 1918 tsunami and not the earthquake itself. Results from this study should be useful to help discern poorly constrained tsunami sources in other case studies