Asian Antiquities

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Nana Lou

The Bovine County Fairy Tale Festival is underway. Our weekly Around The World workshops are a place to learn more about a culture and to build your creative digital muscles. Participate in a workshop anytime or dip your digital toes into all nine!

Week 7: Asian Antiquities & Fanfic Fantasy

Asian Fairy Tales

Fanfic Assignments

RESOURCES:

Chinese Fairy Tales

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29939/29939-h/29939-h.htm
or: http://www.worldoftales.com/Chinese_fairy_book.html

The fairy tales and legends of olden China have in common with the “Thousand and One Nights” an oriental glow and glitter of precious stones and gold and multicolored silks, an oriental wealth of fantastic and supernatural action. And yet they strike an exotic note distinct in itself. The seventy-three stories here presented after original sources, embracing “Nursery Fairy Tales,” “Legends of the Gods,” “Tales of Saints and Magicians,” “Nature and Animal Tales,” “Ghost Stories,” “Historic Fairy Tales,” and “Literary Fairy Tales,” probably represent the most comprehensive and varied collection of oriental fairy tales ever made available for American readers. There is no child who will not enjoy their novel color, their fantastic beauty, their infinite variety of subject.

Yet, like the “Arabian Nights,” they will amply repay the attention of the older reader as well. Some are exquisitely poetic, such as “The Flower-Elves,” “The Lady of the Moon” or “The Herd Boy and the Weaving Maiden”; others like “How Three Heroes Came By Their Deaths Because Of Two Peaches,” carry us back dramatically and powerfully to the Chinese age of Chivalry. The summits of fantasy are scaled in the quasi-religious dramas of “The Ape Sun Wu Kung” and “Notscha,” or the weird sorceries unfolded in “The Kindly Magician.” Delightful ghost stories, with happy endings, such as “A Night on the Battlefield” and “The Ghost Who Was Foiled,” are paralleled with such idyllic love-tales as that of “Rose of Evening,” or such Lilliputian fancies as “The King of the Ants” and “The Little Hunting Dog.” It is quite safe to say that these Chinese fairy tales will give equal pleasure to the old as well as the young. They have been retold simply, with no changes in style or expression beyond such details of presentation which differences between oriental and occidental viewpoints at times compel. It is the writer’s hope that others may take as much pleasure in reading them as he did in their translation.

Fredrick H. Martens – 1921

http://bs.dayabook.com/home/chinese-fairy-tales-chinese-fairy-tales

This little volume of Chinese fairy tales has been written by Dr. Herbert A. Giles, Professor of Chinese in the University of Cambridge, formerly British Consul at Ningpo China, and for twenty-six years resident in that country. It is intended as a companion to the Japanese fairy tales published in the same series.

It is very interesting to compare the tales in the two volumes. They are equally quaint and delightful, but the national spirit of the Chinese is very different from that of the Japanese, both being reflected in the stories in a thoroughly characteristic manner.

A. L. G.

Japanese Fairy Tales

http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/72/japanese-fairy-tales/ NOTE: Audio recordings included for each tale:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4018/4018-h/4018-h.htm

This week’s digital skills workshop: What is Art?

To assist festival-goers in further developing their digital literacy skills and establishing a personal digital identity, each week we highlight a different topic being sponsored by the Bank of DS106 Assignment with volunteer support from the Open DS106 community. This week we offer “What is Art?”.

DS106 Fanfic Assignments

Rather than specifying “assignments” everyone is encouraged to learn more about the topic, What is Art?, by visiting the Open DS106 Syllabus and choosing something to create from an array of Fanfic based digital projects. Each project links to examples of work completed by others. They also include links to tutorials that can help you learn how to complete the work. By tagging your web related posts (either on the Burgeron Family blog or a personal blog) with both FanficAssignments and FanficAssignments#### your work will be added to the list of examples. I found these tips for writing up ds106 Assignments in a blog post most helpful.

NOTE ==>: As of this posting there are only10 Fanfic Assignments listed. I know the #burgeron106 family and #prisoner106 village residents would provide a great service to future #DS106 ers by creating a few new assignments.

The Burgeron family blog is always available for posting. (If you need editor access or help let us know.) Or you can post to your own personal blog. Let us know there’s something new with a tweet tagged with #burgeron106 and posting a quick note at our DS106 Google+ Community.

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT….

We invite you to visit any or all of the Around the World workshops being held this year at the Bovine County Fairy Tale Festival.

Icelandic Imagery

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Nana Lou

Week 3: Icelandic Imagery & Visual Storytelling

Icelandic Fairy Tales

Visual Assignments

RESOURCES:

http://oaks.nvg.org/iceland-tales.html
https://archive.org/details/icelandicfairyta00halliala
http://oaks.nvg.org/icelandic-proverbs.html
http://luxeadventuretraveler.com/tales-iceland-elves-and-trolls/
- The majority of Icelanders believe in, or at least refuse to the deny the existence of elves, trolls, and other hidden beings. Cut off from the rest of the world for centuries, Icelanders developed a rich storytelling tradition and stories about elves and hidden people are still part of their heritage today.
“The folk-stories of Iceland“: (PDF) Pg21 has a nice section explaining the different types of fairy tale stories. Overall this document is good reading for an academic understanding all types of folk-tales. The table of contents are shown at the end of this post.

This week’s digital skills workshop: Telling Stories in Photos

DS106 Visual Assignments

Rather than specifying “assignments” everyone is encouraged to learn more about the topic, Telling Stories In Photos, by visiting the Open DS106 Syllabus and choosing something to create from an array of visual based digital projects. Each project links to examples of work completed by others. They also include links to tutorials that can help you learn how to complete the work. By tagging your web related posts (either on the Burgeron Family blog or a personal blog) with both VisualAssignments and Visual Assignments#### your work will be added to the list of examples. I found these tips for writing up ds106 Assignments in a blog post most helpful.

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT….

Icelandic tales tell of enigmatic elves and other beings – some horrible, some milder. Many folktale motifs of Norwegian folklore may be found too. The somewhat darker tone of Icelandic tales presumably reflects Icelandic ways of life earlier. Folktales illustrate, explain, warn and entertain. Ghosts and fairies pop up to such ends, as do trolls and giants.

As it is, strange tales can instil respect for nature and creatures, or imagined spirits of many sorts. Values can be passed on to children to show them some ways of their ancestors. [Source: http://oaks.nvg.org/icalesin.html]

Image: https://pixabay.com/en/dwarfs-imp-dwarf-garden-gnome-49804/

We invite you to visit any or all of the Around the World workshops being held this year at the Bovine County Fairy Tale Festival.

“A fairy tale, or wonder tale, is a kind of folktale or fable. In these stories we meet witches and queens, giants and elves, princes, dragons, talking animals, ogres, princesses, and sometimes even fairies. Marvelous and magical things happen to characters in fairy tales.” [Source]

TOC for the Folk-stories of Iceland: http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Text%20Series/Folk-stories.pdf

The Celts Cometh

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Nana Lou

Week 2: The Celts Cometh & Designing Destiny

Celtic Fairy Tales

Design Assignments

Resources:

“This anthology of Celtic folklore tales by Joseph Jacobs is one of the best of the crop. It includes some great tales such as “Munachar and Manachar”, the “Brewery of Eggshells”, and “Fair, Brown and Trembling”. Jacobs also includes an extensive Notes and References section if you want to follow up on each tale.”

Scottish:

“This is a collection of Scottish folklore which will appeal to all ages. There are animal tales, stories of the fairies of Scotland including Brownies, Bogles, Kelpies, Mermaids and others, and tales of Witches and of Giants. While many of the themes are similar to other European folk-tales, this collection emphasizes specifically Scottish aspects of the stories.”

Irish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Fairy_Tales
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/ift/
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry – [1888] “This is an anthology of Irish folklore, edited by W. B. Yeats. Many of these stories are from books which are archived at this site; some are from books which have yet to be converted to etext or now-rare source material. He selected many of the best (and often funniest) tales from other writers such as Lady Wilde, Croker, Lover, Hyde, and Carelton. Yeats wrote introductory material and notes to many of these stories.”
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Irish Fairy Tales, by James Stephens

This week’s digital skills workshop: It’s All By Design

DS106 Design Assignments

Rather than specifying “assignments” everyone is encouraged to learn more about the topic, Design, by visiting the Open DS106 Syllabus and choosing something to create from an array of digital design projects. Each project links to examples of work completed by others. They also include links to tutorials that can help you learn how to complete the work. By tagging your web related posts (either on the Burgeron Family blog or a personal blog) with both DesignAssignments and DesignAssignments#### your work will be added to the list of examples. We found these tips for writing up ds106 Assignments in a blog post most helpful.

Extra Extra Read All About It….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_nations

Celtic folk-tales, while more numerous, are also the oldest of the tales of modern European races. They include (1) fairy tales properly so-called–i.e., tales or anecdotes about fairies, hobgoblins, &c., told as natural occurrences; (2) hero-tales, stories of adventure told of national or mythical heroes; (3) folk-tales proper, describing marvellous adventures of otherwise unknown heroes, in which there is a defined plot and supernatural characters (speaking animals, giants, dwarfs, &c.); and finally (4) drolls, comic anecdotes of feats of stupidity or cunning. (reference source)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_nations

Happenings in Holland

Posted on July 2, 2015 by Nana Lou

Week 1: Netherlands Nostalgia & Working The Web

Dutch Fairy Tales

Web Assignments

DUTCH FAIRY TALES

The Around The World workshops at the Annual Bovine County Fairy Tale Festival are in full swing with continued learning, reading, storytelling, writing, creating art, and much more. We were encouraged to visit Holland this week and try our hand at working with the web. My research into Dutch fairy tales began a few weeks back when Professor Ryker T. Stork arrived at the Burgeron place. If you look close at our website banner you can see that he’s taken up residence atop my shed in the large nest that Cousin Ron made for him- as I learned is common in the stork world through reading Dutch fairy tales like “Why The Stork Loves Holland”. The “why storks deliver babies” thing was an interesting aside.

Speaking of “aside”, my confusion and curiosity about the whole Netherlands/Holland/Dutch nomenclature had me searching the web trying to wrap my ol’ brain around it. Cousin Ron offered to help me out by pointing me to short video on YouTube that claimed to be able to teach me everything I needed to know to be able to know the difference between Holland & The Netherlands in only 4 minutes. I’m not sure if it helped or made matters worse. I’m leaning more towards the “worse”. 🙂

WEB ASSIGNMENT: “Email! Email! Read All About It!”

For a Web Assignment I took a trip to the Bank of DS106 Assignments to see what piqued my interest. I decided WebAssignments1644, “Email! Email! Read All About It!” was something I wanted to invest in. As directed, I opened an account at Vertical Response. It was a painless process that went smoothly, and it’s FREE for small newsletter distributions like what we have here in Bovine County and the Fairy Tale Festival.

The user interface to create the newsletter and e-mail distribution list were straightforward. There are templates with somewhat limited formatting choices, but that actually made it easier. (I saw an option for using your own HTML code, but I haven’t followed up on that yet.) I could go in and make an adequate newsletter very quickly. Seeing in-app previews for both laptop and mobile devices was a real bonus. Sending draft copies to myself helped me to fine-tune the layout and links. I always like to test things out on myself before subjecting my friends and family to my projects.

I chose a few posts from our blog that I felt would provide an introduction or update to what we were up to and that a reader would be drawn in by the image. The color selection of the outside margins was an unexpected detail that bothered me for quite awhile until I finally settled on a golden color that went with the banner color scheme. (See image at end of post.)

Once the formatting was finished I could send it to my e-mail list. There is a fantastic stats page that lets you see who actually opened the e-mail and who clicked on what. I mean, it gives you e-mail address detail, not just aggregated numbers. It then suggests that I resend it the newsletter to the e-mail addresses that didn’t open it the first time. As you can see below, I had a disappointing 50% hit rate for my first newsletter. 😦

VerticalResponse_Stats

As noted in the assignment directions, there’s no easy way that I could find even, to embed a copy of the newsletter into our blog. And after much trial and error I found that I could hover over the “View Online” link at the top of the e-mail newsletter, then right-click to “copy address”. I’m hoping this turns out to be a successful workaround to provide a link to the online version of the newsletter. I haven’t tested it on anyone else yet though. Let me know what happens for you.

http://bit.ly/1UmmJT0

I wanted to have an actual embedded newsletter with active links in my post here. Simply copying the newsletter didn’t work well. I then settled for recreating an image of the newsletter, so at least you could see what I’d created. I pulled up a preview copy of the newsletter, using the Grab app on my iMac I capture the image in three parts. I then opened and combined the layers in Photoshop to produce the image below.

I briefly considered recreating the live links with a recently discovered feature the “Slice Tool” in Photoshop that allows you to create hyperlinks on an image. The effort to add that fine-detail wasn’t worth it this time around. Maybe with my next project….

Holland Works The Web

Posted on June 29, 2015 by Nana Lou

Week 1: Netherlands Nostalgia & Working The Web

Dutch Fairy Tales

Web Assignments

My heart nearly gave out a few weeks back as a stork flew in, out-of-the-blue. I thought he was delivering a baby for ol’ Nanalou. But no… nothing like that. It was Professor Ryker Teunis Stork, world renowned scholar of Dutch Fairy Tales and Proverbs from the University of Amsterdam. On the invitation of Cousin Ron he had flown in to spend his sabbatical teaching Dutch Folklore workshops at our Bovine County Fairy Tale Festival. After meeting Professor Ryker I was so excited to learn more about the Dutch culture that I jumped right into losing myself in the Google, entering new search terms and following link after link.

Here are a few the family might be interested in.

This week’s digital skills workshop: Working The Web

DS106 Web Assignments

Rather than specifying “assignments” everyone is encouraged to learn more about the topic, Telling Stories Within the Web, by visiting the Open DS106 Syllabus and choosing something to create from an array of web based digital projects. Each project links to examples of work completed by others. They also include links to tutorials that can help you learn how to complete the work. By tagging your web related posts (either on the Burgeron Family blog or a personal blog) with both WebAssignments and WebAssignments#### your work will be added to the list of examples. I found these tips for writing up ds106 Assignments in a blog post most helpful.

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT…

Did you know due to the maritime and economic power of this area of provinces in the 17th century, the Netherlands became known worldwide as Holland. To make matters even more confusing the inhabitants of the Netherlands are called Dutch and their country, the former County of Holland, roughly consists of the two Dutch provinces of North Holland and South Holland. You can learn more about the Netherlands with a visit yourself to Wikipedia. I’d also recommend checking out the World Atlas for a quick history lesson.