Oxford Bibliographies Online

A couple of questions, which I hope others will also find interesting:

1.  Have you used an Oxford Online Bibliography?  If so, what did you think of it?  I’ve just looked at the related ebook** one can get for the kindle; the one I have covers a lot of topics, but the bibliographical entries under each strike me as pretty scant.  The Standford Encyclopedia entries seem much more useful.  What do you think?

2.  Does your library have a subscription to them?  If so, do you have any sense of their usefulness in that form, as opposed to the things one can get through Amazon?  (As far as I can tell, my library doesn’t, but it has recently become very updated and supposedly user-friendly, and I really can’t tell anymore whether the absence of an entry means the corresponding absence of what I’m searching for.)

3.  Do you have any idea of how the representation of women looks generally  in the Oxford philosophy bibliographies?  There are a number of bibliographies in traditional philosophy.

**Here’s what Amazon tells us about the relation between the ebook and the online material:

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of social work find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study Philosophy. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit http://www.oxfordbibligraphies.com.This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of social work find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study Philosophy. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibligraphies.com.

This leads me to think the online material might be richer than that of the ebook I have, which itself may not be representative of the series.  Hence, the questions above.

How to tell people they sound racist (or sexist or ableist or…)

Some good advice.

H/T Feministe.

LEGO Stereotype Fail

In a new series of Lego figures, only 2 of the 16 are female. Bad news.

Even worse: those 2 are cheerleader and nurse (while the men get to be ninja’s, deep sea divers, spacemen, forestmen, magicians…). Talk about limiting imagination and aspiration early on.

It must be said, though, that the nurse sounds pretty awesome:

She can tape up a boo-boo, dash to the scene of an accident with a wheelchair or build a fully-functional MRI machine out of random spare pieces, all in a dizzying blur of motion

Recommended solution to the limited roles for the female figures: utilise the detachable heads.

Also: I’m confused about what Lego are doing with race. All the figures have yellow skin. In the mini figures series, it seems the only way to indicate any racial or ethnic identity is with costume and accessories (witness the ‘tribal hunter’).

Then in the other products, all the figures also appear to be yellow, except in the ‘Prince of Persia‘ set where the figures are light beige (and the Star Wars set, where one figure is blue). So is yellow supposed to indicate white skin? Or (false) racial neutrality? I thought maybe the makers were afraid of making figures with brown skin and getting it wrong. But then their duplo (pre-lego) series has a ‘world people set’ which obviously includes people of different races. So it seems all very confused.

Thanks to reader L for the tip off!