Scavenger Hunt Report 2
My goal for this scavenger hunt was to find the answers as quickly as
possible. It took me approximately two hours, including time to re-visit
sites and find details for this report. Finding the location of the Book
of Thel gave me the most trouble because I was going too fast and I missed
an essential link. If I were to allow myself more time, I'd like to
search for more reliable sources for questions 1 and 5. I knew these
answers were correct, but I suspect that we were intended to find more
official sites than the ones listed below. (I would try searching for
"moveable feasts" for question 1, and looking at the Shuttle
reference section for question 5.)
First level bullets in what follows describe my path to the
information.
Second level bullets answer the questions assigned.
Jump to:
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4
Question 5
Just for fun!
- What was the date of Easter in 1725? Give me Western and Orthodox, please.
- A search in Metacrawler for "Easter and calendar" took me
to the Astronomical Society of
South Australia’s Easter Dating Method. This site lists Easter
dates, based on the Gregorian calendar, for 300 years in the past and
future. The site also explains how to calculate Orthodox Easter dates,
but the math was beyond me!
- Another Metacrawler link led to a page on the Calculation of the
Ecclesiastical Calendar. This is a personal site, but it looks
well-researched and has numerous awards. The date calculator allows you
to choose three methods of determining dates for moveable feasts
(Western, and old and new Othodox). I confirmed my earlier finding for
the Western date, and found the Orthodox as well.
- Old and new calendarists Orthodox: April 8th.
Back to the top
- What is the last line written above William Blake's illustration of
his cottage at Felpham? Where does "copy G" of his Book of Thel live?
- Metacrawler led me directly to the William Blake
Archive. I used the image search to find the Blake cottage. The
image search form is interesting – choosing by attributes would be useful
for research in this area – but I wish that I’d been able to search by
terms as well. I also found the number of steps required to reach the
images frustrating: the hit summaries didn’t make the image content clear
(which meant I had to check each response until I came to the correct
one), the main page for each image provided summaries but not the picture
itself (which meant double checking the picture, just in case), and the
pictures took a long time to load. On the other hand, I was thrilled
when I did get the pictures, and I appreciated the different levels of
information available.
- The line above Blake's cottage at Felpham is "Enter my cottage,
comfort her, for she is sick with fatigue."
- The Book of Thel, Copy G, gave me more difficulty. I tried the text
search in the Archive, but only saw the electronic versions. After
poking around a bit, I decided to try the Archive’s external links. I
went to the Blake Digital Text
Project. The Project has a concordance and a complete etext edition,
but it does not reference source locations. Next I tried the ESTC, which
told me where the copies were, but which did not differentiate the
copies. I was convinced
that the answer had to be in the Archive, and Irene confirmed
that it was. I ran my text search again, and this time noticed the
"About the Work" button at the top of the electronic versions
page, which led me to a page of history and background information,
including text locations.
- Copy G is at Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University.
Back to the top
- What is the first line of the Elizabethan homily Against Whoredom and Adultery? Can you name another homily in the same collection?
- I started with a search on Renaissance Literature in Metacrawler,
which took me to Luminarium's Renaissance
Literature. This personal labour of love is thorough, but only
lists works by author (and so probably does not contain the homilies).
This
site’s links, however, took me to The
Elizabethan Homilies at the University of Toronto. It turned out
that I’d entered through a back door, and the page I got was full of
visible code. I used Metacrawler to locate the home page for the
Renaissance
Electronic Texts, which was much more readable! There are a lot of
interesting texts on this site.
- The first line is "ALthough there want not (good
Christi{\-}...." Another sermon in the collection is "Against
Swearing and Perjury."
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- Name 4 illustrators of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Choose one of these illustrators, and tell me another book s/he illustrated.
- Metacrawler took me to Gulliver’s
Travels by Jonathon Swift. The site’s creator, Lee Jaffe, is a
Librarian at the University of California. The site appears to be a
personal project combining his interests in Gulliver’s Travels and the
internet, although he states that one purpose of his project is to
demonstrate the internet’s "value as a serious
tool for scholarly work." He lists several illustrators, and
provides links to online information about Arthur Rackham. Samples of
Rackham’s work can be found at Arthur
Rackham Art Images, part of the Art Images
Collections (a personal site focusing on a few specific artists and
themes), and at Aardvark The Antiquarian’s Fine Old
And Rare Books (a site devoted to illustrators of old and rare books).
The latter site also contains an essay on Rackham’s work.
- Some illustrators are R.G. Mossa, Milo Winter, Edwin Prittie, Thomas Morten, and Arthur Rackham. Rackham also illustrated the 1940 edition of The Wind in the Willows.
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- Who said "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely?" Can you find me a picture of the speaker? Can you find another aphorism about power?
- Knowing that some version of Bartlett’s exists online, I searched for
that first. Metacrawler took me to the Bartleby Library.
Unfortunately this site only searches a limited number of out-of-copyright texts, and it returns full documents, rather than phrases. I
went back to Metacrawler and used the references section to find a
searchable
quote guide (although I could also have gone through the Shuttle’s
reference section). I tried Creative
Quotations and found the phrase on the first search. This site is a
personal project, and its busy quality and bright colours made me
suspicious, but the responses were well-referenced.
- John Dalberg Acton, a 19th century English historian
wrote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,"
in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, dated April 3, 1887. ; in "The
Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton," 1904. Another aphorism about power – or specifically what is within our power – can be attributed to Rene Descartes: "Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power."
- Searching Metacrawler for information on Acton took me to the Acton Institute for the study of Religion
and Liberty. This well-established institute (1900) resides in
Michigan. This site also confirmed the information I found at Creative
Quotations.
Back to the top
Just for fun!