Reference Texts

(updated 6 April 2002)
Various reference texts that didn't fit in anywhere else, but that I've found useful at one point or another and which I've used either professionally or, more often, for my personal use and to help me in my writing.
* Alt.culture An essential reference source. A guide to almost 1000 entries on modern culture--everything from MTV to MST3K to Frank Gehry.
A-Z of Horror Films 1895-1950 An excellent encyclopedia to horror films.
* Babelfish The excellent translation service; it's free, and although it handles only the major European languages that's still all I really need it for.
Black Belt Magazine Martial Arts Dictionary In case someone uses the phrase "pentjak-silat" and you don't know what it means.
Bloomsbury Research Centre 17,000 online entries from various reference works.
Breakthrough Books Linguafranca's fascinating set, updated monthly and compiled by respected scholars and authorities, of "breakthrough books in their field, those books that have defined a particular area of thought."
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable From the Bibliomania site. You know, of course--or you should know--about Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, one of those essential works no good reference library should be without. This is the hypertext version of it.
Catholic Encyclopedia I am of course not a Catholic, but I've found that having access to the Catholic Encyclopedia can be handy under the darndest circumstances.
Dharma Dictionary A "Tibetan-English-Dictionary of Buddhist Teaching and Practice."
* Dictionary.Com The good, basic, essential Internet dictionary. (Although sometimes there are connection problems, darn it.)
Dictionary of Difficult Words What it says.
* Economist Country Briefings "News, country profiles, forecasts, statistics, and more" on sixty countries, from the staff of the Economist.

Egyptian Hieroglyphs A guide to hieroglyphs, with a translator page--glyph to English letter, letter to glyph.
* The Egyptian's IDSC Library Oddly enough, the Egyptian government site, of all places, has produced this. Go figure. Atlases, maps, directories, dictionaries, news services, reference links, and abstracts.
Encarta Online Home The Encarta Encyclopedia, online. Without the depth that the real thing has, of course, but massively useful nonetheless.
Encyclopedia.com Articles from the Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Very useful, indeed.

Encyclopedias, Compendiums, Flags, Reference You might have difficulty connecting, but it's worth the attempt. A good array of links to encyclopedias and other reference sources. From the Stanford site.
Episteme Links An excellent source for information on philosophy and various philosophy resources on the 'Net.
* Footnotes to History "The nations you didn't learn about in high school geography." An excellent guide to historical and geographical obscurities and curiosities.
* Freetranslation A dandy free translation site, translating fewer languages but more text than Babelfish.
* General Research Links An enormous set of research links from the Marine Corps Intelligence Agency. I know, I know--I don't think of web research and the Marine Corps in the same line of thought, either. But surprisingly they do some very nice Web work.

The Gnosis Archive An archive & e-text library of writings on gnosis and the gnostics.
History of Mathematics A handy online guide to the history of math, made accessible for us liberal arts types.
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of MesoAmerica Not exactly thorough--each letter seems to average 3-4 entries--but the entries themselves are long, rather than short. A good start.
Infonation A quite useful database for current statistical information on various countries.
In Other Words: A Lexicon of the Humanities A glossary of "provisional definitions" of various humanities vocabulary terms.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy An online encyclopedia of philosophy. The terms in the encyclopedia are general, and lead to medium-length essays, but it's still worth a look.
The Jargon Dictionary A good reference work for jargon.
* Judaism 101 An excellent online encyclopedia/FAQ of Judaism.
NEW Lexicate Online Dictionary List A very nice assemblage of dictionaries.

* Librarians' Index to the Internet Librarians--we're what's for dinner! The worthy folks at Berkeley have put together a really incredible set of links to just about every subject you can think of. Between this and the My Virtual Reference Desk, below, you really won't have to go anywhere else to find whatever it is you're looking for.
* My Virtual Reference Desk - A One-Stop Site for All Things Internet< An amazing array of reference links on every subject imaginable. Even has a search engine. The page is, if anything, too busy, but it's still a cornucopia of information.

My Virtual Reference Desk - My Virtual Encyclopedia Another onliine encyclopedia.
An Onomastikon That's a dictionary of names, to you and me--where they come from and what they mean.

Peter Batke's Homepage Links to a number of different things, as well as some e-texts. When I get the chance I'll put each of the things on this page up and remove this link.
Philosophers Guide A neat-o guide to the great philosophers of history, with pictures of them and short biographies, descriptions of their philosophies and works, and links to them.
* Probert Encyclopedia Entries on...well, just about everything.
* Research Guides 24 good research links from the Marine Corps University Libraries. Again, you wouldn't think that the USMC would produce Web work of this quality--at least, I didn't--but they do very good work. Semper Fi, gentlemen.
* Research Institute for the Humanities This is the Chinese University of Hong Kong's very successful attempt at "meta-indicing humanities resources worldwide, and 2) develop texts, tools and pages covering various interests in the humanistic scholarship."
* Research-It! - Your one-stop reference desk Over two dozen search engines--everything from e-mail discussion groups to currency conversion to quotations.

Symbols.Com An online encyclopedia of graphic symbols, both their meaning and their history.
Strange and Unusual Dictionaries An assortment of odd dictionaries, some of which are actually useful.
* Systran Another good free online translation service, with more languages offered than Freetranslation.com.
The Word Detective The "online version of The Word Detective, a newspaper column answering reader's questions about words and language."
World Bibliographic Index A short, online version of the very useful book. Gives some information, but really only whets the appetite.
U.S. Gazetteer Handy. A search engine for locations in the US; enter the place name and get census data.
NEW * YourDictionary.com A very nice set of foreign language dictionaries.

 

 

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