Notes from the Walter Ong Collection

Just in time for the Media Ecology Association’s tenth annual convention here at SLU, Pius Library has launched a new and improved website to showcase the Walter J. Ong papers in our collection.  The site, which will be known as the Walter J. Ong Archives at Saint Louis University, is available at the following URL:

http://libraries.slu.edu/special/digital/ong/index.php

The new website features an improved design and a copy of the archival finding guide to Fr. Ong’s papers.  In addition, there are digitized materials from the collection, including papers, photos, and audio recordings.  More material will be added soon, so please check back or subscribe to our RSS feed for regular updates.

Drew Kupsky
Digital Resources Librarian
Pius XII Memorial Library
Saint Louis University

ST. LOUIS — As e-mail, text messaging and blogging become increasingly part of our everyday lives, Saint Louis University is launching a new center to focus on the work of a scholar who practically predicted the age of the Internet.

Funded through a $1 million University initiative, the Walter J. Ong, S.J., Center for Language and Culture honors the work of Ong (1912-2003), an internationally renowned scholar who spent his nearly 50-year career teaching and researching at SLU.

“The founding of this new center is especially important considering Ong’s pioneering theories of change in language and human communication, which have become more relevant today than ever before,” said Sara van den Berg, Ph.D., chair of the English department and director of the center. “Technology is changing the way we communicate and relate to each other, and the center will give scholars a place to study this rapid revolution.” [Read more.]

Just so it’s clear, the Ong Center itself did not get any where near $1 million dollars from Saint Louis University, but it has been funded by SLU and by ICF Foundation. I mention this on the off chance that someone looking for a new favorite charity reads the $1 million number and thinks the Center’s rolling in money.

We’ve added four new audio files to the Walter J. Ong Collection’s digital holdings. They are:

• Catholic Education and Man’s Future on Earth. The Sounds of Learning Series. Lecture CL-718. Audiotape. Omaha: Opinion Institute, 1960. (Time: 28:15, 25.8 MB.)
• The Christian and Technological Society. The Sounds of Learning Series. Lecture CL-718. Audiotape. Omaha: Opinion Institute, 1960. (Time: 26:19, 24 MB.)
• The End of the Age of Literacy. The Sounds of Learning Series. Lecture CL-718. Audiotape. Omaha: Opinion Institute, 1960. (Time: 30:46, 28.1 MB.)
• Oral History: Remembering Alice Toklas, John and Simone Brown, and Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. With Claude N. Pavur, S.J. Recorded 10 May 1981. (Time: 15:37, 14.3 MB.)

All together, that makes eight audio files, or over 5 1/2 hours of audio.

Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive has been reborn here as Notes from the Walter J. Ong Collection. The move is intended to give this blog official status and to join it with the soon-to-come Walter J. Ong Collection web site. I still need to do a few things such as write an “About Notes from the Walter J. Ong Collection” page.

With the CCCC acceptance letter earlier this week, I can now say that my plans for a series of confernece sessions celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word is really going to be a series. I’ll get a web page up with abstracts at some point, but here’s the info for both the MLA 2006 and CCCC 2007 sessions: (more…)

For what it’s worth, my Computers and Writing 2006 proposal, “Ong’s Digital Turn: Published and Unpublished Writings after Orality and Literacy,” has been accepted. Among other things, I’ll be talking about Ong’s unfinished 40,000 word manuscript Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization and the unpublished essay “Time, Digitization, and Dali’s Memory.”

Archives | computers and writing | C&W2006 | Walter Ong | Walter J Ong | Walter J Ong Archives

On Jan. 31, I finished moving out of the office I’d moved into this past summer. I always knew the office was going to be temporary, but I hoped I’d be there a few more months. The good news is that there’s real space for me again in the St. Louis Room, and it’s actually better than my old work area. The move itself took place to make room for the newly established Digital Resources Librarian, whom I’ve sense met, and we’ve already begun discussing some potential digitization projects for the collection. As I think I’ve mentioned here before, I’m really interested in digitizing and putting up on the Web Ong’s 1950-1953 “Route Book,” which he kept during his dissertation research travels, and the 180 or so slides that go with it. I’d like to provide both scans and an edited transcription of the route book, and display the images with the relevant sections of text. This would, ideally, serve as the backbone of a much larger project that pulls together correspondence, lectures, notes, and other materials from the time period. There’s some really cool connections that I’d like to see explored. While I can do the scanning and coding and will probably do some of both, having someone to handle the technical aspects of the project means I can focus on what I’m being paid for: knowing and contextualizing the material. And the fact that I could focus on that makes the project much more likely to happen sooner rather than latter.

Archives | Walter Ong | Walter J Ong | Walter J Ong Archives

Robert K. Logan, author of The Fifth Language: Learning a Living in the Computer Age, The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age, and The Alphabet Effect, is currently working on Understanding New Media: Extensions of Marshall McLuhan:

A new study is being made of the social impacts and history of the “new media” is a project called Understanding New Media: Extensions of Marshall McLuhan. The impact of the “new media” on the media McLuhan studied in Understanding Media: Extension of Man like radio, TV and the movies as well as the impact of “new media” themselves like the Internet, the World Wide Web, Blogs, Cell Phones, I-pods, etc.

drafts of chapters 1 and 7 are available for download as MS Word docs at http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~logan/.

Cross posted to Machina Memorialis.

Marshall McLuhan | media ecology

First was The Iliad and Troy. Then came Beowulf and Sutton Hoo. Now, The Odyssey and Odysseus’ Ithaca. According to a Sept. 27, 2005 article in the Madera Tribune, Odysseus’ tomb and his Ithaca was on the Island of Kefalonia rather than the modern day islet that bears its name.

POROS, Island of Kefalonia, Greece - The tomb of Odysseus has been found, and the location of his legendary capital city of Ithaca discovered here on this large island across a one-mile channel from the bone-dry islet that modern maps call Ithaca.

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9/26 Update: Talking with my boss today, I learned that Jack Foley had sent us this material back in August 2003. At that time my boss knew they’d be hiring someone to process the collection, so he put it aside and forgotten to pass it on when I was started the job almost a year later. When I posted this last week, I saw the August 28 date on the accompanying letter and didn’t pay attention to the year. The show was broadcast on March 10, 2004 and is available as both streaming audio or .mp3 download.

I learned today that Jack Foley will have a radio show tribute to Fr. Ong broadcast on November 5 at 3:30-4:00 p.m. PST on the Berkeley, CA station KPFA-FM as part of his weekly “Cover to Cover with Jack Foley” show. It may be broadcast via streaming audio at that time, and after the show it should be archived at http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?show=106.

Foley also recently published an article on Fr. Ong, “Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003): In Memoriam” in the online magazine Alsop Review.