News release Public Information Office   SLU 10880   Hammond, LA 70402   phone: 985-549-2341   fax: 985-549-2061 publicinfo@selu.edu Spring 2004 news releases Public Information home News archive Contact: Christina Chapple Date: 4/14/05   Click on image for publication quality photo  BRITISH SCHOLAR TO LECTURE ON RUSKIN AT SOUTHEASTERN APRIL 28         HAMMOND – Roger Garside, head of the Ruskin Programme at the University of Lancaster in the United Kingdom, will present a guest lecture on "Counting the ‘Stones’: Ruskin and the Computer” on April 28 at Southeastern Louisiana University.        The free 2 p.m. presentation is scheduled for Sims Memorial Library and is sponsored by the Department of English, the College of Business and Technology, and the Lyceum Arts and Lectures Committee.        Ruskin’s “The Stones of Venice” was a key work of the 19th century for architectural history and aesthetics, economics, literary history, and cultural history,” said Southeastern English professor David Hanson. “Combining the approaches of travel guide, architecture primer, aesthetic treatise, historical narrative, and mythic journey, Ruskin used Venice’s ‘stones,’ -- its architecture -- to argue that a nation’s history and ethical character can be read in its architecture.”        In preparation for “Stones,” Ruskin undertook years of research, including -- most importantly -- his own detailed and very beautiful drawings of Venetian buildings.         “He produced numerous notebooks and other works on paper, which now provide vital records of Venetian Gothic and Renaissance architecture prior to damage caused by pollution and 19th-century ‘restoration,’” Hanson said. “The notebooks have never been published or adequately studied until the Ruskin Programme was initiated.”         The Ruskin Programme at Lancaster University is undertaking an electronic edition of these materials. Garside, senior lecturer in computing at Lancaster, is working with education historian Ian Bliss, and art historian Ray Haslam.        “Garside’s lecture on the Venice notebooks project should interest students and faculty in computer science, literature, art, economics, history, sociology, psychology – and. indeed, the many other subjects that engaged Ruskin , who was a gifted amateur geologist and botanist as well,” Hanson said.        “Many passages of ‘Stones’ are hypnotically beautiful and rhetorically powerful and have entered the canon of Victorian nonfictional prose,” he added.        Garside has authored several books and numerous articles on computing. His interests, in addition to Ruskin and art history, also include computational linguistics. He has contributed thoughtfully to the relationship between computing and the humanities.