In all the complex cultural history of the islands of Britain and Ireland the idea of the coast as a significant representative space is critical. For many important artists coastal space has figured as a site from which to braid ideas of empire, nation, region, and archipelago. They have been drawn to the coast as a zone of geographical uncertainty in which the self-definitions of the nation founder; they have been drawn to it as a peripheral space of vestigial wildness, of island retreats and experimental living; as a network of diverse localities richly endowed with distinctive forms of cultural heritage; and as a dynamically interconnected ecosystem, which is at the same time the historic site of significant developments in fieldwork and natural science.

I spent my adolescence around maps of places that didn’t exist. An older cousin read The Lord of the Rings over the course of a hot summer when I was nine, and I watched in fascination as he traced the Fellowship’s progress across the foldout map that came with the book in those days. This, I decided, had to be what grown-up reading looked like.

"Liberty," "secularism," "security," "people," "identity" . . . Politicians like words that slam or clash. But what precise meaning do they give them? At the dawn of a high-risk election year, and in the context of the rise of the National Front and increased terrorist threat, it is imperative to clarify the meaning of the words of the political debate.

For the first time, a scientific analysis decodes the logic of the discourse of the politicians who are competing for the 2017 presidential election - Marine Le Pen, François Fillon, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Supplanted - François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy, Alain Juppé. At the crossroads of an ancient world and a new world, the ability of politicians to read the contemporary world and to verbalize it is scrutinized.

The author sifts over 1,300 texts - 2.5 million words - written or spoken from 2014 to 2016 to decrypt keywords, fetish words, and taboo words, and to map the positions of each and the reconfiguration of the political landscape.

This semantic, stylistic, and rhetorical inquiry reveals that behind the surface of small sentences is the profound structure of a political worldview. What do they say ? Who is "left" and "right" at this time of elastic political concepts? Are the "populisms" on both sides really the same? And what are the dead angles of these seasoned orators, who handle both silences and unspoken words, as well as slogans and soundbites?

More than ever, the battle of ideas will pass through the battle of words. And the one who imposes his own sense of "secularism" or "Republic" will have won an ideological victory, even beyond the electoral results.

Professor of literature at Stanford University and associate researcher at the Cevipof at Sciences Po, Cécile Alduy is the author of Le Seuil de Marine Le Pen: Decryption of the new frontistic discourse (2015).

Reading, writing, and discussion are the most common—and, most would agree, the most valuable—components of a university-level humanities seminar. In humanities courses, all three activities can be conducted with a variety of digital and analog tools. Digital texts can create novel opportunities for teaching and learning, particularly when students’ reading activity is made visible to other members of the course. In this paper, we introduce Lacuna, a web-based software platform which hosts digital course materials to be read and annotated socially. At Stanford, Lacuna has been collaboratively and iteratively designed to support the practices of critical reading and dialogue in humanities courses. After introducing the features of the platform in terms of these practices, we present a case study of an undergraduate comparative literature seminar, which, to date, represents the most intentional and highly integrated use of Lacuna. Drawing on ethnographic methods, we describe how the course instructors relied on the platform’s affordances to integrate students’ online activity into course planning and seminar discussions and activities. We also explore students’ experience of social annotation and social reading.

In our case study, we find that student annotations and writing on Lacuna give instructors more insight into students’ perspectives on texts and course materials. The visibility of shared annotations encourages students to take on a more active role as peer instructors and peer learners. Our paper closes with a discussion of the new responsibilities, workflows, and demands on self-reflection introduced by these altered relationships between course participants. We consider the benefits and challenges encountered in using Lacuna, which are likely to be shared by individuals using other learning technologies with similar goals and features. We also consider future directions for the enhancement of teaching and learning through the use of social reading and digital annotation.

On January 13, 2016 for the first time in its history the European Union launched an investigation against one of its full member states, i.e. Poland. The dispute is about new Polish laws that allegedly disempower the national constitutional court and the public media thus breaching EU democracy standards. The newly elected Polish government in charge since November 2015 denies this and calls its “reforms” legitimate, even necessary to achieve a government better capable of acting in order to renew the economy and the political and social system. The dispute reaches far beyond Poland and questions the state and perspectives of integration of the Central Eastern European (CEE) nations into the EU. It is both effect and motor of the current pluri-­‐dimensional European crisis.

In essence, the EU-­‐Poland dispute is the outcome of the combination of the specific problems of governance in the Central Eastern European (CEE) nations with a superficial institutionalism of the EU that long neglected the area’s developmental issues. Poland’s democracy problems show that new attention of the EU to its CEE member states is needed which were for many years ignored because of other concerns such as the economic and financial crises since 2007 and the subsequent debt crisis since 2012, latest because of the threat of a “Brexit”, of Britain leaving the EU. In order to save the European integration project, it will be crucial for the credibility and acceptance of the EU to help the CEE nations to reform their socio-­‐economic systems. The case of Poland is the chance for a debate about how the EU and its CEE member states can cooperate better instead of arguing. This debate will be an important pillar of the ongoing overall discussion about the future of the European Union in the coming years.