The Lectern Project is a central source for information relating to scholarly lectures, talks, and presentations in Toronto, ON. For more information and our mandate, click here
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Sunday, September 5, 2010
There is a community of intellectuals, academics, and thinkers here in Toronto, Canada; however it is often fractured across the artificial lines of discipline, institution, and status. For those unaffiliated scholars, it can be difficult to enter this community to simply hear about various projects and events.
The Lectern is an organization commited to the development and support of scholarly presentations from local, regional, national, and international academics, thinkers, researchers, and intellectuals in the Toronto, Ontario community. While many interesting events are taking place in the greater Toronto area, the existing channels of communication and promotion are often interpersonal and exclusive, thus restricting audiences and limiting discussions. As a starting point, this website will provide opportunities for organizers to promote upcoming events.
While we acknowledge that gallery openings, concerts, and readings are of interest to the intellectual community, they are outside the scope of this website. Our focus, vaguely defined, is on events with a podium, lectern, or panel; where respected experts in their own fields are invited to present and provoke ideas, research, and contribute to academic discourse.
There is a particular focus on the humanities at this point; but this boundary is by no means dogmatically defended. We invite other scholars from other disciplines to participate.
The events listed on this website are submitted by various individuals or organizations, and everyone is encouraged to contact us at info@lectern.ca to let us know about an event. We are also dedicated to supporting graduate symposiums, conferences, and lectures.
If you have information on an upcoming event, please email event@lectern.ca with the relevant details. An online email form is also available. We invite information from individuals and organizations.
The Lectern is a project undertaken by Jeffrey Matt. I am a former graduate of the York University Masters in Art History program. At this early stage, work on this website is completed in my own personal time, and I appreciate your patience when working out any problems that you may encounter. Future plans include a searchable archive of past events (by institution, topic, speaker, etc); a listing of reading groups in an around Toronto; and an email service. At present, most of my energy is focused on load testing, efficient code, and working with the University departments to have them include there listings on this site. If you have any suggestions, comments, or criticisms, please let me know.
This website is committed to ensuring accessibility for all members of the community. The technologies employed throughout this site ensure compatibility with screen readers (for the visually impaired) and are standards compliant. These include Cascading Style Sheets, and code that meets the World Wide Web Consortium's XHTML 1.0 Strict criteria. This site is driven using the MySQL database system and parsed using PHP 4. The Lectern is an advocate for open technologies, and is willing to share it's own code with anyone interested in undertaking a similar project.
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