Odds & Ends
Friday, May 16, 2008
Return of the Spielberg Guy
I really, really, don't want to be typecast as the guy who's always banging on about Spielberg... but it's going to be a difficult couple of weeks on that front. Obviously Indiana Jones is one of those things that I'm just compelled to write about, just as I am always compelled to write about new Star Wars. So obviously there will be material here covering Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the next week or so. However, the Spielberg-centrism increases, as my review of two Spielberg-related books has just gone up at Senses of Cinema; you can read it here. The books they asked me to review were Lester Freidman's Citizen Spielberg and Andrew M. Gordon's Empire of Dreams; I liked Friedman's but thought Gordon's was made somewhat silly by its over-enthusiastic adoption of various dubious theoretical models. The article therefore ended up becoming something of a sequel to my previous complaint about silly theory, Is Film Theory Bullshit? I was glad to be able to discuss the books in some sort of wider context though.
As an aside - and here I am starting to speak mainly to any academic or uni student readers I might have - I used the review as a chance to try out Zotero and its associated Word plugins ahead of hopefully using them in my Masters. Count me as very impressed. Zotero is a plug-in for Firefox; you use it to gather, store and annotate research sources into a reference database, and then use the Word plug-in to have it automatically manage your citations. The beauty of it is that it can automatically capture the details of each source out of online resources such as Amazon or library catalogues. I've never got deeply into EndNote, so I can't do a detailed comparison, but I was very taken by the kinds of things Zotero can do, and the ease with which it did it (I was wary of the learning curve with EndNote). I've been doing some Masters research since writing the review and it has been seamlessly grabbing information from academic search indices; it also has very nifty website capturing, storage and cataloging capabilities. If you regularly do research on the web, or write anything that uses formal referencing, I suggest you have a look at it. ![]() Labels: book reviews, research, spielberg, theory |
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