Iowa State is raising awareness of individual rights by hosting a First Amendment Day (I am crossing my fingers that Iowa State follows Duke's lead, and hands out free "free speech? fine by me" t-shirts).

And an M.A. student at the University of Kentucky has defied overwhelming odds to produce a dissertation in English that actually makes an important and original contribution to knowledge (one that may turn out to be of use as efforts to recover and restore Iraq's looted heritage begin). You go girl!

What's with the Daily Texan? It's hard to find anything on Iraqi artistic baubles in it.

It's really great to know that there a few people still interested in actual scholarship. Linda Cantara and her thesis director, Kevin Kiernan, deserve a great deal of credit. It's really remarkable to be able to do the substantative literary research and at the same time to develop new technologies to support that research.

Technically-oriented people may be interested in the title of one of Cantara's presentations:

"Mary of Egypt in Old English: Building an SGML-DTD for Encoding an Old English Glossary"

SGML is the ancestor and close cousin of HTML, the basis for the world wide web. Interesting how things come together sometimes...

Re Linda Cantara's UK thesis, try this link:
http://www.uky.edu/PR/News/cantara_thesis.htm

How the Monks Saved Civilization, Part II: The Digital Age.

This really does look impressive.