New and Noteworthy

New Books
Two recent books explore insomnia from a cultural and personal standpoint. Gayle Green's memoir Insomniac (University of California Press) and Eluned Summers-Bremmer's Insomnia: A Cultural History (Reaktion). You can read an interesting review of both books here.

Open Education

Another lifetime or two ago, Lisa Spiro and I were partners in coding and editing electronic texts for the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center. Now Lisa is the Director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University's Fondren Library, and has her finger on the pulse of digital scholarship in the humanities. In her gracious review of this website, Lisa points out that Imagining Sleep falls into the category of "Open Education." I am pleased to embrace this term. Imagining Sleep is a university-level course without the university. It is open and available to anyone with an internet connection. Will open source culture, interest in transparency, and proliferation of multimedia technology one day revolutionize the way people educate themselves? I certainly hope so.

New Logo and Site Design!

My SysAdmin/Producer/Better Half designed a new banner for ImaginingSleep.com, based on a 1910 French painting called "Lune triste [Sad Moon]."  I have been unable to discover the identity of the author.  The words on the sleeping woman's arm read "chérie dort [darling sleeps]." 

Expand Your Sleep Vocabulary! 

A.W.A.D. does a week of words related to sleep

And the first word is SOMNILOQUY!

(Click on the word to read more about its etymology and usage.)

Somniloquy: The act or habit of talking while asleep.

Diurnation: The habit of sleeping or being dormant during the day.

Soporose: Sleepy; in an unusally deep sleep.

Hypnopompic : Pertaining to the semiconscious state before waking.

Lychnobite: One who works at night and sleeps during the day.