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A Different Kind of Web
New Connections Between Archives and Our Users
Kate Theimer
American Library Association, 2011

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The Internet and the Madonna
Religious Visionary Experience on the Web
Paolo Apolito
University of Chicago Press, 2005
In 1994, a devout Catholic woman from Vermont began having religious visions and hearing the voice of the Virgin Mary. To spread word about her mystical experiences, she turned to the Internet. As Paolo Apolito records here, she is only one of many people who use the Web as a tool of religious devotion. Every day, thousands of Catholics—from Italy and Latin America to the United States and Bosnia—use the Internet to describe and celebrate apparitions of Mary, to exchange relics and advice in chat rooms, to make pilgrimages to religious Web sites, and to practice the rites of their faith online.

But how has this potent new mix of technology and religiosity changed the way Catholics view their faith? And what challenges do the autonomous qualities of the Internet pose to the broader authority of Catholicism? Does the democratic nature of access to digital technologies constitute a return to a more archaic and mystical form of Catholicism that predates the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council?

In working through these questions, Apolito considers visions of Mary on the Web over the past two decades, revealing a great deal about religion as it is now experienced through new information technologies. The Internet, he explains, has made possible a decentralized community of the devoted, even as it has absorbed God into the shifts and complexities of electronic circuitry. And this profound development in religious life will only accelerate as use of the Internet spreads around the world.

An indispensable guide to the future of Catholicism, The Internet and the Madonna offers a compelling glimpse into the spiritual life of the connected soul.
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Interwoven
Junipers and the Web of Being
Kristen Rogers-Iversen
University of Utah Press, 2017
Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society. Affiliated with the Utah Division of State History, Utah Department of Heritage & Arts.

Throughout prehistory and history, junipers have influenced ecosystems, cultures, mythologies, economics, politics, and environmental controversies. In terms of their effects on human lives the juniper may be the most significant tree in the interior West. Interwoven explores these interconnecting aspects of junipers. Ghost beads, biotic communities, gin, tree masticators, Puebloan diapers, charcoal, folklore, historic explorers, spiral grain, tree life cycles, spirituality, packrat middens, climate changes, wildfire, ranching, wilderness, and land management policies are among the many different threads the book follows. These and other topics shed light on a fascinating organism, but the book is more than a compilation of facts. At once a scientific, experiential, historical, and metaphorical walk among junipers and their interrelationships, Interwoven may change readers’ experiences with these trees and the natural world. 

Finalist for the Utah State Historical Society Best Book Award.
Finalist for the 2019 ASLE Book Award for excellence in ecocriticism and environmental creative writing.
Named a “notable book” by the prize committee of the 2018 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award.
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Jainism and Ecology
Nonviolence in the Web of Life
Christopher Key Chapple
Harvard University Press, 2002

The twenty-five-hundred-year-old tradition of Jainism, which emphasizes nonviolence as the only true path leading to liberation, offers a worldview seemingly compatible with the goals of environmental activism.

But can Jainism adopt a sociocentric environmentalism without compromising its own ascetic principles and spiritual tradition? How does traditional Jain cosmology view the natural world? How might a Jain ethical system respond to decisions regarding the development of dams, the proliferation of automobiles, overcrowding due to overpopulation, or the protection of individual animal species? Can there be a Jain environmental activism that addresses both the traditional concern for individual self-purification and the contemporary dilemma of ecosystem degradation? The voices in this volume reflect the dynamic nature of the Jain faith and its willingness to engage in discussion on a modern social issue.

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Law and the Web of Society
Cynthia L. Cates and Wayne V. McIntosh
Georgetown University Press, 2001

From birth certificates and marriage licenses to food safety regulations and speed limits, law shapes nearly every moment of our lives. Ubiquitous and ambivalent, the law is charged with both maintaining social order and protecting individual freedom. In this book, Cynthia L. Cates and Wayne V. McIntosh explore this ambivalence and document the complex relationship between the web of law and everyday life.

They consider the forms and functions of the law, charting the American legal structure and judicial process, and explaining key legal roles. They then detail how it influences the development of individual identity and human relationships at every stage of our life cycle, from conception to the grave. The authors also use the word "web" in its technological sense, providing a section at the end of each chapter that directs students to relevant and useful Internet sites.

Written for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in law and society courses, Law and the Web of Society contains original research that also makes it useful to scholars. In daring to ask difficult questions such as "When does life begin?" and "Where does law begin?" this book will stimulate thought and debate even as it presents practical answers.

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Linked Data Tools
Connecting on the Web
Karen American Library Association
American Library Association

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Morphology and the Web of Grammar
Essays in Memory of Steven G. Lapointe
Edited by C. Orhan Orgun and Peter Sells
CSLI, 2003
This collection presents papers in memory of Steven G. Lapointe, a distinguished professor of linguistics at the University of California, Davis, at the time of his death in 1999. Lapointe's work on morphology and its connection to other linguistic subfields was the basis of a workshop held at UC Davis in 2000. This selection of papers from that workshop discusses the relationship of morphology to phonology, syntax, and semantics, as well as the details of modern morphological theory—forming a natural continuation of the intellectual developments in Lapointe et al.'s Morphology and Its Relation to Phonology and Syntax.
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Web as History
Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present
Edited by Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder
University College London, 2017
The World Wide Web has now been in use for more than 20 years. From early browsers to today’s principal source of information, entertainment and much else, the Web is an integral part of our daily lives, to the extent that some people believe ‘if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist.’ While this statement is not entirely true, it is becoming increasingly accurate, and reflects the Web’s role as an indispensable treasure trove. It is curious, therefore, that historians and social scientists have thus far made little use of the Web to investigate historical patterns of culture and society, despite making good use of letters, novels, newspapers, radio and television programmes, and other pre-digital artefacts. This volume argues that now is the time to question what we have learnt from the Web so far. The 12 chapters explore this topic from a number of interdisciplinary angles – through histories of national web spaces and case studies of different government and media domains – as well as an introduction that provides an overview of this exciting new area of research.
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The Web of Athenaeus
Christian Jacob
Harvard University Press, 2013
In The Web of Athenaeus, Christian Jacob produces a completely fresh and unique reading of Athenaeus’s Sophists at Dinner (ca. 200 CE). Jacob provides the reader with a map and a compass to navigate the unfathomable number of intersecting paths in this enormous work: the books, the quotations, the diners, the dishes served, and—above all—the wordplay, all within the simulacrum of an ancient Greek library. A text long mined merely for its testimonies to lost classical poets, the Sophists at Dinner has now received a full literary re-imagining by Jacob, who connects the world of Hellenistic erudition with its legacy among Hellenized Romans. The Web of Athenaeus simultaneously offers a literary history of the rarest and finest of Greek culture along with a creative anthropology of a Roman imperial world obsessed with the Greek past.
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The Web of Iniquity
Early Detective Fiction by American Women
Catherine Ross Nickerson
Duke University Press, 1998
The Web of Iniquity is a study of detective fiction written by American women between the Civil War and World War II. Refuting the idea that no American detective fiction of substance was produced between the times of Edgar Allan Poe and Dashiell Hammett, Catherine Ross Nickerson shows how these women writers blended Gothic elements into domestic fiction to create a unique and all-but-ignored subgenre that she labels “domestic detective fiction.”
This subgenre allowed women writers to participate in postbellum culture and to critique other aspects of a rapidly changing society. Domestic detective fiction combined elements of sensationalist papers, popular nonfiction crime stories, and the domestic novel. Nickerson shows how it also incorporated the gothic tropes found in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Brontë and influenced the work of Pauline Hopkins. Mid-nineteenth-century writer Metta Fuller Victor, who represented such important areas of cultural conflict as the role of professions in the formation of class identity and the possibility of women's independence and self-determination, paved the way for the appearance of women detectives in the late-nineteenth-century fiction of Anna Katharine Green. Nickerson credits Mary Roberts Rinehart, in particular, for bringing sophistication to the subgenre by amplifying the humorous, terrifying, and feminist elements inherent in earlier detective novels by women. Throughout the volume, Nickerson focuses on the narrative qualities of the domestic novel tradition and the ways in which it reflected ideologies of domesticity and gender. Also included are a discussion of various rewritings of the Lizzie Borden scandal in this tradition and an afterword on the relation of domestic detective fiction to the hard-boiled style.
The Web of Iniquity places the detective fiction written by women between 1850 and 1940 into ongoing discussions regarding women, culture, and literature and will appeal to scholars and students of women's studies, American studies, and literary history.
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The Web of Violence
From Interpersonal to Global
Edited by Jennifer Turpin and Lester Kurtz
University of Illinois Press, 1996

Violence is a topic of concern everywhere--in the media, in churches, in the halls of governments. In every land and in every culture violence is considered by most to be taboo, a last resort. Yet under certain conditions, from the level of the family to the level of nations, violence is used as a mechanism of social control. Various rationalizations thus emerge to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence.

The Web of Violence explores the interrelationship among personal, collective, national, and global levels of violence. This unique collection brings together a number of internationally known contributors to address the genesis and manifestations of violence in the search for a remedy for this confounding social problem.

As the global community becomes more intimate, we must better understand the nature of violence. The Web of Violence supports this aim by examining the dangerous human phenomenon from many perspectives, at different levels, and using multiple methodologies.

Contributors: Robert Jay Lifton, Christopher G. Ellison, John P. Bartkowski, Yuan-Horng Chu, Philip Smith, Robert Elias, Birgit Brock-Utne, Riane Eisler, Johan Galtung

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What Good Are Bugs?
Insects in the Web of Life
Gilbert Waldbauer
Harvard University Press, 2003

We shriek about them, slap and spray them, and generally think of insects (when we think of them at all) as pests. Yet, if all insects, or even a critical few, were to disappear--if there were none to pollinate plants, serve as food for other animals, dispose of dead organisms, and perform other ecologically essential tasks--virtually all the ecosystems on earth, the webs of life, would unravel. This book, the first to catalogue ecologically important insects by their roles, gives us an enlightening look at how insects work in ecosystems--what they do, how they live, and how they make life as we know it possible.

In What Good Are Bugs? Gilbert Waldbauer combines anecdotes from entomological history with insights into the intimate workings of the natural world, describing the intriguing and sometimes amazing behavior of these tiny creatures. He weaves a colorful, richly textured picture of beneficial insect life on earth, from ants sowing their "hanging gardens" on Amazonian shrubs and trees to the sacred scarab of ancient Egypt burying balls of cattle dung full of undigested seeds, from the cactus-eating caterpillar (aptly called Cactoblastis) controlling the spread of the prickly pear to the prodigious honey bee and the "sanitary officers of the field"--the fly maggots, ants, beetles, and caterpillars that help decompose and recycle dung, carrion, and dead plants. As entertaining as it is informative, this charmingly illustrated volume captures the full sweep of insects' integral place in the web of life.

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