Scholarly Communication

In In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton University Press, 2022), Jeff Deutsch, the director of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, aims to make the case for the value of spaces devoted to books and the value of the time spent browsing their stacks. It is a defense of serious bookstores, but more importantly, it is a paean to the spaces that support them; the experience of readers as they engage with the books, the stacks, and each other; and the particular community created by the presence of such an institution. Drawing on his lifelong experience as a bookseller and his particular experience at Sem Co-op, Deutsch aims, in a series of brief essays, to consider how concepts like space, time, abundance, measure, community, and reverence find expression in a good bookstore, and to show some ways in which the importance of the bookstore is both urgent and enduring. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Joe Esposito, Senior Partner of Clarke & Esposito. We talk about the space between academic research and consumer markets, and we travel in space to the metaverse! Joe Esposito : "The thing that's at issue when a field of study begins publishing more in journals and less in books is another aspect of the audience. If you're a scientist, you write short articles because this is what gets you tenure, this is what gets you a promotion, this is what allows you to go to grants-making bodies and get money to hire postdoctoral students and to build out your laboratory. So the aspect of audience I'm talking about here is broader than just your fellow experts in your field — it's broader than just the readers of your communications, because it includes, too, the business model that these communications are placed into. There is money in articles in the sciences. There is very little money in books in the sciences. But switch over to history, anthropology, literary criticism, and the whole situation gets turned on its head. There the tenure promotion committees are looking for books, preferably published with a university press. So, when we talk about questions like where the book is going, where text is going, or whether digital or print, we can't escape the fact that all these things live within an environment of people pursuing their own personal interests, which itself has a economic basis as well." Clarke & Esposito have an excellent newsletter on scholarly communication and publishing. You can read and subscribe here. Joe is also a regular contributor to The Scholarly Kitchen, which you can read and subscribe to here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Daniel Bolnick, Editor in Chief of The American Naturalist and Professor of evolution and ecology at the University of Connecticut. We talk about the role of research journals today and we talk about the location of research journals in the big endeavor that is called science. Daniel Bolnick : "Ultimately, research articles are technical. Articles have to deal with the mathematics or with the details of the physiology or the neurobiology that they're dealing with. But the authors can create a wrapper around that technical core that makes it digestible. I like to think of it as when you're taking a medicine. You have the actual pharmacological content that you're delivering to your body, but you can wrap it in something that makes it easier to swallow and hopefully that conveys the medicinal effect at just the time and in just the right dosage. And so, I think the same thing is true of the research article. You can have a deeply technical content, but if it's bracketed, bookended by a very clear exposition of 'What is it that we don't know right now?' Okay, and: 'Here's what I've done, and here's how it resolves that thing that we didn't know or the thing that we suspected but now know to be true.' And that can all be conveyed in a very accessible language ideally." Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Hilary Glasman-Deal, teacher of STEMM communication at the Centre for Academic English, Imperial College London, and author ofScience Research Writing For Native and Non-Native Speakers of English (World Scientific Publishing Europe, 2020). We talk about researching, reading, and writing. Hilary Glasman-Deal : "One of the things I'm very often saying, particularly with early-career researchers, is this: 'Look, your reading is clearly effective, because you understand your field, okay, and you're an expert in your field. But your writing is operating at a different location from your reading. And what you need to be doing is bringing the two closer together so that they are, in a sense, a mirror image of each other, so that you're using your reading to feed your writing. You're using the reading as a bridge into the writing, rather than assuming that the two can exist in separate orbits.'" Visit the Centre for Academic English here. Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Stephen Heard, Professor of Biology at the University of New Brunswick. We talk about his book The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career, 2nd ed. (Princeton UP, 2022), we talk about writing when it's a verb, we talk about writing when it's a choice, and we talk about writing when it's the science. Stephen Heard : "Especially for early-career scientists there's a risk of their writing entering into a positive feedback loop with the writing as it is in the literature. And really, we do this to them, we professors and instructors. We say, 'Next week, you're going to hand in a lab report. Write out this experiment you did,' and we say, quote, 'and write like the scientific literature,' unquote. Well, that's a horrible thing to tell anyone to do, because unfortunately, much of our literature isn't particularly well written. We love our acronyms, we love really long noun phrases, we love the passive voice, and so on. And so, people who don't make conscious choices and just sort of model what they're writing on what's already out there — I think they sort of get locked into some of those bad decisions, like the five-noun noun phrase. So being aware of what you're doing, thinking about the language you're using, and being willing to use the language to its fullest — that's not an invitation to write your own Finnegans Wake — but it is an invitation to think carefully about the way of constructing your point that will resonate best with the reader." Readers may be interested in Heard's webpage for the book. Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Norris, The New Yorker's Comma Queen and best-selling author of Between You & Me, has had a lifelong love affair with words. In Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen (Norton, 2020), she delivers a delightful paean to the art of self-expression through accounts of her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, and reveals the surprising ways in which Greek helped form English. Greek to Me is filled with Norris's memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine--and more than a few Greek men. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Christophe Bernard, Director of Research at INSERM and Editor-in-Chief of eNeuro. We talk about the review process, about education in the sciences, and again a little bit more about education in the sciences. Christophe Bernard : "Science is everything that a scientist does. But for many people, science is only the bench work — to them, that's what a scientist really does. And the publishing part — well, that's just something that others do. Even the review process, for too many people, is just not fully integrated into the work that scientists are doing. But there should not be a barrier between doing science and reviewing science. It should be the same world — a continuity between the two. Now, in institutions, they focus all their efforts on teaching people how to do science. But doing science also is knowing how to review a paper. Perhaps you know, but there is a crisis in the reviewing process. Many authors have commented on being mistreated by reviewers, and although there'll be many reasons why that happens, the main reason is that we are not taught how to review a paper. And this just leads to frustration, or worse, because when you're an author and you submit a paper and you receive comments which are aggressive and do not make sense and are just plain unhelpful, then you start to distrust the system." Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, cofounders of Retraction Watch. We talk about lots of things, retracting very few. Ivan Oransky : "Accountability in science certainly does not come down to only retracting papers, because there are just lots of issues. And by the way, just to remind everyone, science is very much a human endeavor. It doesn't exist outside of humans doing the science. I mean, facts exist, and there is truth out there, and we'd very much appear to be getting close and closer to it — that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the actual process, like, how do we learn these things. How — as this podcast more generally looks at — how does knowledge get known. Basically, epistemology. But that requires human beings. It requires human beings interpreting, talking and listening, collaborating, and so that's one part of science that is really critical. Therefore, of course, the issue of accountability is multifactorial." The Retraction Watch database is here. You might also be interested in this article: "Repeat Offenders: When Scientific Fraudsters Slip Through the Cracks." You can learn more about retraction here. Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hear from Catherine Cocks, assistant director and editor-in-chief at Michigan State University Press talk about her attempt to replicate the success of the Scholarly Kitchen blog in the humanities with the 'Feeding the Elephant' forum, her work to make university publishers more accessible to authors through ASK UP and publishing on the Great Lakes at Michigan State! Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Pascal Patrick Matzler, Associate Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile. We talk about his book Mentoring and Co-Writing for Research Publication Purposes: Interaction and Text Development in Doctoral Supervision (Routledge, 2021), mentorship in STEM — we talk about writing in STEM. Pascal Matzler : "For me, perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the years that I spent with these three supervisors and three doctoral students was just seeing how scientific knowledge is gained, how it is reproduced, and how new scientists are born — so, just seeing how these students became scientists who are capable of reasoning and arguing as members of their fields, and also seeing how they even developed this notion, because that's maybe the one key point of my book: that the student walks into a meeting with a graph or a chart, and the student is convinced that this graph or chart contains the truth, and so all they need to do is send that graph or that chart to a journal and there will be a round of applause for the new knowledge. And the supervisor, slowly and carefully, over many months, will explain to the student, 'No, that's not how it works. First you have to verbalize this chart, verbalize what you see on it. Then you have to verbalize what you think it means, whatever you're seeing on the chart, and also why you think it means this. And then you have to convince your readers that it actually means this. And this process is going to be terribly challenging, because your readers are going to disagree with that. And some people's careers might be ruined by your interpretation. So we're going to have to do this very slowly and very carefully — and, we might even be wrong! We have to deal with that, as well.' So there's this slow and gradual awakening of the rhetorical persona in the doctoral student over the course of writing a first research article." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it take to become a digitally agile scholar? This manual explains how academics can comfortably navigate the digital world of today and tomorrow. It foregrounds three key domains of digital agility: getting involved in research, education and (community) service, mobilising (digital) skills on various levels, and acting in multiple roles, both individually and interlinked with others. After an introduction that outlines the foundations of the three-dimensional framework, the chapters focus on different roles and skills associated with evolving as a digital scholar. There is the author, who writes highly specialised texts for expert peers; the storyteller, who crafts accessible narratives to a broader audience in the form of blogs or podcasts; the creator, who uses graphics, audio, and video to motivate audiences to delve deeper into the material; the integrator, who develops and curates multimedia artefacts, disseminating them through channels such as websites, webinars, and open source repositories; and finally the networker, who actively triggers interaction via social media applications and online learning communities. Additionally, the final chapters offer a blueprint for the future digital scholar as a professional learner and as a change agent who is open to and actively pursues innovation. Informed by the authors' broad and diverse personal experience, Evolving as a Digital Scholar: Teaching and Researching in a Digital World (Leuven UP, 2021) offers insight, inspiration, and practical advice. It equips a broad readership with the skills and the mindset to harness new digital developments and navigate the ever-evolving digital age. It will inspire academic teachers and researchers with different backgrounds and levels of knowledge that wish to enhance their digital academic profile. Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and Project Muse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can libraries be radical positive change agents in their communities? R. David Lenkes offers a guide for librarians who see their profession as a chance to make a positive difference in their communities —librarians who recognize that it is no longer enough to stand behind a desk waiting to serve. Lankes reminds libraries and librarians of their mission: to improve society by facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. In this book, he provides tools, arguments, resources, and ideas for fulfilling this mission. Librarians will be prepared to become radical positive change agents in their communities, and other readers will learn to understand libraries in a new way. The libraries of Ferguson, Missouri, famously became positive change agents in August 2014 when they opened their doors when schools were closed because of civil unrest after the shooting of an unarmed teen by police. Working with other local organizations, they provided children and their parents a space for learning, lunch, and peace. But other libraries serve other communities—students, faculty, scholars, law firms—in other ways. All libraries are about community. In The New Librarianship Field Guide (MIT Press, 2016), Lankes addresses the mission of libraries and explains what constitutes a library. He offers practical advice for librarian training; provides teaching notes for each chapter; and answers “Frequently Argued Questions” about the new librarianship. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hear Dr. Rosina Lippi-Green talk about some of her shocking findings on language discrimination and bias on campus. Lippi-Green and Avi discuss her book English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the US (Routledge, 2011) and what the academic community can do to be more inclusive of scholars with different levels of English. We also discuss Rosina's transition from researcher to popular novelist. Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Nigel Caplan, Associate Professor at the English Language Institute, University of Delaware. We talk generically. Nigel Caplan : "And this sort of brings us to an important point about knowledge and expertise in a discipline. The great genre scholar Doreen Starke-Meyerring said that academic writing tends to be transparent to experts in the discipline, and they forget how opaque it is to novices. So, if you study engineering, biology, philosophy, whatever it is, and you're immersed in that world all the time, it's very easy to believe that that is the only way of writing, because that's the only type of writing you have done for decades. And it quickly becomes, 'Well, that's obviously good writing.' And the idea is, 'Anything else is bad writing.' But experts don't realize what we see as English teachers, especially as teachers in English for Academic Purposes, where we work with students across the disciplines — what we see is that each discipline does have its own way of creating knowledge and communicating that knowledge. But that can be very opaque to a novice. And I think what novices need are the tools to crack open that opacity, and what experts need is a little reminder now and then that good writing is actually not transparent. It is highly contextual, it is something that needs to be learned, it is not natural in any sense. It is not automatically good writing just because you like it and it works in your field." Visit the Michigan Series in English for Academic and Professional Purposes here. Visit and join the Consortium on Graduate Communication here. Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tune in to hear Prof. Talya Miron Shatz, author of Your Life Depends on It: What You Can Do to Make Better Choices About Your Health (Basic Books, 2021) discuss her surprising decision to publish her book with a non-academic publisher and how her writing and revision were driven by her desire to get her book into thousands of homes around the world. Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Ayelet Baram-Tsabari. We talk about the accessibility of science using Google to scholars and students in languages beyond English and how scholars can de-jargonize their research to ensure increase their reach. Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Melinda Baldwin about her book Making 'Nature': The History of a Scientific Journal (U Chicago Press, 2015). Melinda is AIP Endowed Professor in History of Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland. We talk about Nature, naturally. Melinda Baldwin : "Yes, I think it will be surprising to many scientists today that Nature has really been thoroughly shaped by the journal's contributors and readership, and certainly to the people who view Nature's editorial staff as these all-powerful gatekeepers of scientific success. But, I love the list you just gave of all the people who are involved in making a journal — the referees, the editors, the authors, the readers, the publishing executives — because that can really be one of the things that we lose sight of when discussing modern scholarly communication: The professional advancement of scientists is so heavily dependent on being published in these peer-reviewed journals, and according to where a scientist works, things like tenure, promotion, and even just getting hired can depend heavily on getting into a particular type of journal, a prestigious journal that rejects many submissions. And so it can seem like the power to shape scholarly communication is only in the hands of the editors and in the hands of the anonymous referees who review papers. But looking at the history of scientific publication, you really see a story where a lot more figures are influential in shaping the way that the scientific journal has developed. And you see that, of course, with Nature, where it was definitely contributors' needs and interests that drove some significant changes in the format and the audience of the journal." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021), Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project -- not as linear, bound and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality. Our conversation highlights the performative nature of publishing, the possibilities and limitations of open access, balancing experimentation with fixity, and how publishing practices are intertwined with neoliberalism, scholarly identity, technology, and culture. In addition, we discuss the different forms that this work has manifested as, including the digital open access version on PubPub, as well a call for researchers, publishers, and institutions to make room for more experimentation in their academic performances. Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely over-caffeinated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a series of talks and essays in 1937, H. G. Wells proselytized for what he called a World Brain, as manifested in a World Encyclopedia--a repository of scientifically established knowledge--that would spread enlightenment around the world and lead to world peace. Wells, known to readers today as the author of The War of the Worlds and other science fiction classics, was imagining something like a predigital Wikipedia. The World Encyclopedia would provide a summary of verified reality (in about forty volumes); it would be widely available, free of copyright, and utilize the latest technology. Of course, as Bruce Sterling points out in the foreword to this new edition of Wells's work, the World Brain didn't happen; the internet did. And yet, Wells anticipated aspects of the internet, envisioning the World Brain as a technical system of networked knowledge (in Sterling's words, a hypothetical super-gadget). Wells's optimism about the power of information might strike readers today as naïvely utopian, but possibly also inspirational. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One pervasive stereotype about mathematics is that it is objective, unbiased, or otherwise exempt from the influence of human passions. James Wynn and G. Mitchell Reyes's edited collection will be a revelation even to mathematics professionals who don't take this strict view. The essays in Arguing with Numbers: The Intersections of Rhetoric and Mathematics (The Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) explore the interplays between rhetoric and mathematics that have shaped scholarly and popular culture through to the present day. Opening the collection are both an historical sketch of scholarship at the intersection of these disciplines, from their division in ancient Greece to their hesitant reunion since the mid-twentieth century, and also a taxonomy of modern research into three distinct approaches, which we review in our discussion. The remaining essays use these approaches to probe the impact of mathematical rhetoric on the sciences (including Hantaro Nakaoka's analogical "Saturnian" model of atomic spectra), on cultural norms and institutions (including the influence of David X. Li's Gaussian copula on the behavior of financial markets), and on relations between mathematics professionals and the lay public. This last part contains a chapter on the legacy of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics that highlights the importance to mathematics professionals of understanding the rhetorical dimensions of our discipline. Bookending our discussion, Drs. Wynn and Reyes related the story of their edited collection, which makes the point that a cross-disciplinary exchange is needed to help both disciplines better understand their connections to each other and more responsibly manage those connections. Their suggestions will resonate with mathematicians interested in challenging narratives of objectivity, in diversifying our ranks, and in developing responsible rules and principles for the use of social and personal data. The analytical tools demonstrated in this book abet this effort. Suggested companion works: Trust in Numbers, Theodore Porter Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad James Wynn is Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement and Evolution by the Numbers: The Origins of Mathematical Argument in Biology. G. Mitchell Reyes is Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Lewis and Clark College. He is author of Stranger Relations: Mathematics, Rhetoric, and the Translative Force of Mathematical Discourse (in press with Penn State University Press) and coeditor of Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age. Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children's drawings--the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident. In The Library: A Rich and Fragile History (Basic Books, 2021), historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world's great collections, trace the rise and fall of literary tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanors committed in pursuit of rare manuscripts. In doing so, they reveal that while collections themselves are fragile, often falling into ruin within a few decades, the idea of the library has been remarkably resilient as each generation makes--and remakes--the institution anew. Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Library is essential reading for booklovers, collectors, and anyone who has ever gotten blissfully lost in the stacks. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Humanist Reason: A History, an Argument, a Plan (Columbia UP, 2021), Eric Hayot develops the concept of “humanist reason” to understand the nature and purpose of humanist intellectual work and lays out a serious of principles that undergird this core idea. Rather than appealing to familiar ethical or moral rationales for the importance of the humanities, Humanist Reason lays out a new vision that moves beyond traditional disciplines to demonstrate what the humanities can tell us about our world. Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University, where he is also Director of the Center for Humanities and Information. His books include Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quell (U of Michigan P), The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford UP), On Literary Worlds (Oxford UP), The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (Columbia UP), and, most recently, Humanist Reason (Columbia UP), published in 2021. He edited and co-edited numerous books and in 2018 he published with Lea Pao a translation of Peter Janich’s What is Information? (U of Minnesota P). Bryant Scott is a professor in the Liberal Arts department at Texas A & M University at Qatar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of William Germano, Professor of English at Cooper Union, New York, We talk about his new book On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts (U Chicago Press, 2021), about writers, and about readers and about text — everyone involved in the revision process. William Germano : "There an almost endless number of things one can say about revision because it is so crucial and yet so underdiscussed. In recent years, there have been a couple of events, or conversations, that have appeared, with other writers, and in particular writers who work on fiction, who have been addressing the enigma of revision. I'm so happy that revision is kind of (I hope) getting its due. Maybe this is revision's moment!" Watch Daniel Shea edit your science here. Write Daniel at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Comedian Robin Ince quickly abandoned science at school, bored by a fog of dull lessons and intimidated by the barrage of equations. But, twenty years later, he fell in love and he now presents one of the world's most popular science podcasts. Every year he meets hundreds of the world's greatest thinkers. In this erudite and witty book, Robin reveals why scientific wonder isn't just for the professionals. Filled with interviews featuring astronauts, comedians, teachers, quantum physicists, neuroscientists and more - as well as charting Robin's own journey with science - The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific Curiosity (Atlantic Books, 2021) explores why many wrongly think of the discipline as distant and difficult. From the glorious appeal of the stars above to why scientific curiosity can encourage much needed intellectual humility, this optimistic and profound book will leave you filled with a thirst for intellectual adventure. John Weston teaches academic communication at Tampere University, Finland. His work focuses on the sociolinguistics of knowledge, and creative writing and wellbeing. Twitter: @johnwphd. Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Mike Palmquist, Professor of English (with a focus on rhetoric and composition) and also University Distinguished Teaching Scholar. We have a conversation. Mike Palmquist : "We tend to think, 'Oh, writing. Just learn how to put your sentences together. Learn how to develop a nice paragraph. Learn the rules of grammar.' And somehow that's supposed to transfer magically into another discipline. But in fact, the kinds of debate and discourse and discussion and reporting and inquiry that go on in a particular discipline are highly conditioned by the knowledge they share, by the things they think are important — by the conversations, in a sense, that are going on in that discipline. You really have to learn it. Otherwise, you'll just be writing about stuff but won't quite know how to connect it to what everybody else is researching and publishing on." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the New Books Network, we love university presses. So we're happy to tell you about University Press Week, the annual celebration of UPs and their important work. Today I talked to Lisa Bayer, the director of the University of Georgia Press and the president of the Association of University Presses. We discuss a lot of things--open access, business models, libraries, peer review, careers in UP publishing--all knit together by a theme, that being how UPs keep up with everything that is going on, scholarly-communications-wise. Enjoy. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Bradley Alger, Professor Emeritus of Physiology at University of Maryland School of Medicine and author of Defense of the Scientific Hypothesis: From Reproducibility Crisis to Big Data (Oxford UP, 2019). We talk about definitions of words and about explanations of the world. Bradley Alger : "I don't care how brilliant your data are, but if you don't succeed in explaining them clearly and laying them out and making them accessible to other people, you're really going to be penalizing yourself, at least as a scientist. And the idea of the hypothesis as a story structure, as helping to organize a narrative, as helping to lead a reader (even your competitors) through your reasoning is, I think, unparalleled. It's funny, I've talked to some scientists who say they don't use hypotheses because they want to tell a story — my view is, that's getting it backwards. The hypothesis has got almost a built-in narrative. We start from a problem, there is a proposed solution, we extract predictions from it, and that can lead us through the entire paper." Watch the scientific hypothesis at here. Meet the scientific hypothesis at here. Watch Daniel edit your science here. Write Daniel at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Aliyah Kovner, science writer and also host of the podcast A Day in the Half-Life. We talk about who science communication reaches: peers, other experts, non-experts, you, me, everyone. Aliyah Kovner : "That's definitely a thing not talked about enough, that is: often the audience for science communication is the scientists themselves, who want to learn about other fields. And even brilliant people with PhDs don't know the lingo for a different field. So, any scientist really actually has to appreciate the fact that most people are going to be outsiders to their research, but that doesn't mean that these people aren't terribly interested in the research and really willing to dive in and learn. But for whoever's not inside your close area of research, you're going to have to step back and think about how to communicate your work to people who might not know, but who definitely care." Listen to A Day in the Half-Life. Watch Daniel Shea edit your science here. Write Daniel at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Jari Saramäki, author of How to Write a Scientific Paper: An Academic Self-Help Guide for PhD Students (2018) and professor of computational science at Aalto University, Finland. We talk about how hard soft skills are. Jari Saramäki : "Yes, I think that there is something to a kind of immersion approach to learning. Because you can learn a lot by observing, by imitating, by looking at things and asking questions. But this is something you need to decide to do. So, you can read a paper so that you just read and try to get the science out of it. Or, you can start reading it as if you wanted to write a similar paper, so that you look at its structure, the shape of its sentences, and so on. You try, basically, to absorb all this information that's in the writing. But you need to know that there is this method of reading. So, yes, as teachers, we should maybe be trying to point this out to students: 'Next time when you read a paper, forget about the science, and try instead to look at the sentences and the paragraphs. Write like a one-sentence summary of each paragraph, and then observe in your sentences how the whole paper has been structured.' So, yeah, we should definitely encourage our students to do more of this kind of immersive learning." Watch Daniel Shea edit your science here. Write Daniel at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Avi Staiman, who is CEO, founder, and director of Academic Language Experts. We talk about how complex and how simple editing is. Avi Staiman : "Let me give you an example of where the editing is not about the vocabulary available or the construction of the sentences. Japanese. Japanese academic writing tends to be two things. Number one, it's very repetitive, and this is done to place emphasis on key ideas, which is not something that you see in English writing as much. And secondly, in a lot of Japanese texts, the writing is suggestive. So, if in a typical article in English the author will write, 'We have found X, Y, and Z,' in Japanese they may write something along the lines of 'Our humble suggestion is the following...' That might come across to an English reader as a lack of confidence. The reviewer might say, 'They don't actually know.' But of course, that's not it, because in Japanese academic culture there's a level of humility that's a value there, which for good or for bad, does not exist in English academic culture. So, then, we face this question: Either we render it in a way which the English reviewer will appreciate and understand and know what to do with but at the same time betray the source text, or we honor the source text but maybe reduce the chances that the scholar is going to get accepted because it's nonstandard. So, these are really difficult questions. I think the answer is simple, and that is, really, open lines of communication with the author and laying out these issues. Which is why, when I speak to prospective clients, I tell them that getting the right academic translator or right academic editor is about a lot more than their knowledge of the language. That's the basis. But they need to understand what academic writing is, they need to understand the specific field, and they also need to understand the cultural nuances and differences between different countries and different fields." The next event on the Publication Success Interview Series. You find all this at Academic Language Experts. Read about the experiences of multilingual scholars in English-language publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Hilary Glasman-Deal and Andrew Northern, teachers of STEMM communication at the Centre for Academic English, Imperial College London. We talk about what's so special about scientists: their communication! Hilary Glasman-Deal : "You know, if I left this work for just one year, it would be the devil-of-a-job to get back in because the communication norms in each field and even the language itself changes so fast that you've got to go like the wind in order to keep up to date. I mean, let's be honest, we're all a little bit lazy. We'd like to have material that we can fall back on, last year's material for this year's course. But because we can't do that, because we are at the mercy of whatever research articles we are faced with by our students and by faculty, there's no escape for us. That graft has to be done. And it's that graft that gives us the credibility for scientists to trust us in the first place. Without that, you just don't have a starting point. You've got to be absolutely on point in terms of understanding what's currently being published in their fields, what the recent changes are — I mean, Andrew and I sit back to back in an office, in a large office, and sometimes he'll shout across and he'll say, 'Look, can you see this journal has started putting a strapline under the title!' And we all crowd around and say, 'Okay, which other journals are doing that? How's that connected to what's inside the research article? Is it a new sentence? Is it a rewrite of a sentence? What sentence are they using?' You start from that. You start from doing that hard work. And then you're, in a sense, entitled to sit down with authors and they'll trust you to work with them on a piece of writing." Visit the Centre for Academic English here. Find an example of STEMM editing here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Book workshops produce great books, but too few scholars have access to the resources needed to organize and execute one, especially scholars at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Asian American and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. The 2021 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Seattle, launched a new initiative, The Minority-Serving Institution Virtual Book Workshop Project, to provide book workshops for scholars (tenured, untenured, VAP, term appointments) at Minority-Serving Institutions. In the podcast, the co-directors of the Project discuss the importance of supporting MSI faculty, how to successfully apply, and what other authors, editors, and administrators can do to make this project a success. Niambi M. Carter, Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard University, published American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship (Oxford 2019) and listeners may remember her New Books in Political Science podcast. Heath Brown, Associate Professor of Public Policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice City University of New York (and former host of New Books Political Science), published Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State (Columbia 2021) and Lilly Goren interviewed him for NBPS. Minority-Serving Institution Virtual Book Workshop | Deadline: January 14, 2022 | Apply Now! Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Josh Schimel and Karl Ritz, Editors-in-Chief of Soil Biology and Biochemistry. We talk about the people who all scientists are, and we demonstrate why all that matters to your next submission. Karl Ritz : "It is definitely important that authors take seriously matters of text presentation and formatting. And one of the reasons, perhaps, people don't understand as to why it matters, as to why we need things in a specific format and following certain rules — the reason is that there are rules here that form the framework, and you can stick your creativity on top of that. Because if there's a consistency and coherence in the fonts and in the spacing and in the headings and in the structure of the manuscript — this makes the process for the editors and the reviewers considerably more straightforward, because then they know what they're dealing with in terms of the actual process part of the procedure versus the creative and the intellectual part of it. And if we have to mess around dealing with unusual formats or unusual colors or just a general lack of attention to formatting, then it just distracts us from being able to get to the nub of what needs to be assessed here in the manuscript." Daniel hosts Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Michelle Caswell about her new book Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021). What is the place of archives in our society? In archival studies, an answer to this question often presents an idea of linear, progressive temporality. A common trope goes: We learn history to have a better future. That is why history, and archives as a site of historical evidence, is important. In her thoughtful, groundbreaking work, a feminist archival studies scholar Caswell challenges the white imaginary of linear, progressive time embedded in our conception of archives. Pointing out how community archives from different ethnic communities across the US present cyclical temporalities where oppressions repeat, Caswell emphasizes the importance of activating the archives for their liberatory potential in the present. Over a year has passed since the murder of George Floyd and the beginning of the global pandemic that has highlighted not only structural inequality, but also an ongoing material and symbolic annihilation of Black Americans. As Michelle Caswell argues in her book, imagining liberatory memory work is an urgent project that needs to happen in the now. In the introduction, Caswell begins with the question of the liberatory potential of community archives. Chapter 1 outlines the cyclical conception of time in critique of chronoviolence of white, dominant linear temporality. In chapter 2, Caswell draws from four focus groups to show how different ethnic groups use community archives to address repetitive oppressions by constructing corollary records. Chapter 3 focuses on her work with the South Asian American Digital Archives (SAADA) and the road to discovering the importance of liberatory activation. In Chapter 4, Caswell pushes back against the idea of archivists as passive technicians and repositions them as liberatory memory workers. In the conclusion, Liberation Now! Caswell emphasizes the need to disrupt the dominant narrative on future by embracing the joy of advocacy in the present. Urgent Archives will be an excellent resource for anyone who is interested in critically re-evaluating archives in academia and beyond. In the interview, Caswell recommends following two readings to the listeners: SAADA. Our Stories: An Introduction to South Asian America. Philadelphia: SAADA, 2021. "The Chronopolitics of Racial Time," Time & Society, Special Issue: The Social Life of Time, 29, no. 2 (May 2020): 297-317. Michelle Caswell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Elena Cotos, Director of the Center for Communication Excellence at the Graduate College (Iowa State University) and also Associate Professor in the English Department (Iowa State University). We talk about the needs of both students and faculty for training in scholarly communication, and we talk about one excellent way that those needs are being met, the Center for Communication Excellence. Elena Cotos : "When I'd begun, as a student, to write academic texts, you know, initially I'd thought it was my English that was to blame, but then I discovered I just didn't know the genre. Because, when I started, I wasn't really thinking about how a genre has certain conventions that are accepted by the disciplinary community and that are expected by the readership in a field—and not only in just a field, but across fields, because conventions are also cross-disciplinary. And this is what I discovered through my research. This is what I uncovered when I looked at multiple disciplines and saw that really they do share communicative goals, and that really they do use very similar sets of rhetorical strategies when they build their scientific arguments. So, I was a bit mistaken to think that the problem was my English, because it's really more about genre knowledge than about English-language proficiency." Danie Sheal hosts Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can one approach religion as both an academic researcher and a spiritual practitioner? Join us for this wide ranging talk with Dr. Albion Butters, historian of religion and a specialist in Tibetan Buddhism. The first half of the conversation focuses on the Finnish Oriental Society (Suomen Itämainen Seura) and academic publishing through the digital journal Studia Orientalia Electronica, edited by Dr. Butters. In the second half of the episode, Dr. Butters shares his experiences and insights on studying and teaching Buddhism, first in the USA and India, and now in Finland. Dr. Butters is also currently an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Turku. Klaus Karttunen's History of the Finnish Oriental Society (in Finnish) (Vuosisata Aasiaa ja Afrikkaa. Suomen Itämainen Seura 1917-2017). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Google announced that it planned to digitize books to make the world's knowledge accessible to all, questions were raised about the roles and responsibilities of libraries, the rights of authors and publishers, and whether a powerful corporation should be the conveyor of such a fundamental public good. Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization (Princeton University Press, 2021) traces the history of Google's book digitization project and its implications for us today. In this conversation, we hear from Roger Schonfeld about, not just the history of book digitization, but the dynamic and intricate relationships amongst libraries, publishers, and technology corporations. In addition, we talk about the ongoing conversations and community-lead projects that hint at what the future of book and scholarship digitization could look like. Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely over-caffeinated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and author of The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020). We talk about yesterday today. Jonathan Zimmerman : "Look, I don't think anyone questions that some of the best teaching they do is in their responses to student drafts and student papers. And, I think this restates the obvious, but: That is highly individuated, right? I mean, unlike a collective exercise, this is targeted directly at the student, and at what she or he has to say, and at different strengths or weaknesses in the way they're presenting what they have to say. But look, here's the important context, teaching through writing takes a great deal of time and effort. There's no way to do it on the cheap. And the bigger the university gets, the more costly everything becomes and the less likely it is that we're going to engage in the practices I'm describing—they're too expensive—they're too labor-intensive. You've probably heard the name Richard Arum. Well, he wrote, together with Josipa Roksa, the book Academically Adrift, the first sociological study of how much people are learning at college, and what they found, unsurprisingly, is that a lot of people are not learning very much. Now, there are many reasons for that, but one of them actually has to do exactly with this point of teaching through writing. One of the reasons is how little writing is actually assigned or evaluated. So again, what does this tell you? I think it tells you how little we value a process such as learning through writing. Would it cost more to teach like this? Of course it would! Things of value exert costs. And if you're not willing to pay the costs, you don't value it." Daniel hosts Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Joshua Schimel, Professor of soil ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded (Oxford UP, 2011). We talk about how writing is research, and about how the Vietnam War was really just one big fat rejected manuscript. Joshua Schimel : "One of the challenges, I think, we have in science is that all the way up through university, we're being taught scientific knowledge. But that isn't really science. That's the product of science. Science is the process of learning new things. And there's this wonderful book, Ignorance: How it drives science, by Stuart Firestein, and the book is elegant in that idea of reminding people that science is about ignorance. Science is about what we don't know and how to figure it out. And so, for example, in a good Introduction to an article, you're not just trying to tell people everything we know about a field, you're trying either to identify the gap in what we know or, as the most important papers do, to locate the error in what we do know: 'We've been thinking about things this one way, but we've been wrong in some part of that thinking.' That's going to really engage the experts." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum (Routledge, 2021) provides the first interdisciplinary study of the digital documentation of artefacts and archives in contemporary museums, while also exploring the implications of polyphonic, relational thinking on collections documentation. Drawing on case studies from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the book provides a critical examination of the history of collections management and documentation since the introduction of computers to museums in the 1960s, demonstrating how technology has contributed to the disconnection of distributed collections knowledge. Jones also highlights how separate documentation systems have developed, managed by distinct, increasingly professionalised staff, impacting our ability to understand and use what we find in museums and their ever-expanding online collections. Exploring this legacy allows us to rethink current practice, focusing less on individual objects and more on the rich stories and interconnected resources that lie at the heart of the contemporary, plural, participatory ‘relational museum.’ Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum is essential reading for those who wish to better understand the institutional silos found in museums, and the changes required to make museum knowledge more accessible. The book is a particularly important addition to the fields of museum studies, archival science, information management, and the history of cultural heritage technologies. Mike Jones is an archivist, historian, and collections consultant with more than 12 years of experience working with the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) on digital, archival, and public history projects. His interdisciplinary research explores the history of collections-based knowledge, and the ways in which contemporary technologies can help us to develop and maintain relationships within and between archives, collections, disciplines, and communities. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: how Megan became an archivist, the unusual collections she works with, why archives can be intimidating, how historians and archivists work together, and archival etiquette tips for new researchers. Our guest is: Megan Hahn Fraser, who has worked as the Assistant Curator of Manuscripts at The New-York Historical Society, the Library Director at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, Co-Head of Collection Management at UCLA Library Special Collections in Los Angeles, and the Vice President and Marcus A. McCorison Librarian at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. Currently, she is working for the Research Institute for Contemporary Outlaws, a private collection of 20th century counter-culture materials based in Los Angeles. She received her Master of Information and Library Science (with a concentration in archives management) degree from Pratt Institute in 2000, and has an undergraduate degree in history from New York University. While at UCLA in 2014, Megan founded the Los Angeles Punk Rock Archive Collective, a group of archivists and others focused on acquiring collections from musicians, artists, and fans of the punk rock scene in Southern California. She has presented at the Society of American Archivists annual conference, the South by Southwest Festival, the L.A. as Subject Archives Bazaar, and the Legion of Steel Metalfest and Conference. She can be found on Twitter @mmhfraser, talking about archives, justice, and The Clash. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-producer of the Academic Life podcasts, and a historian of women and gender. She has a small garden. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: UCLA Library Special Collections Punk archive Research Institute for Contemporary Outlaws on Instagram For more information on how reliance on contingent labor is detrimental to the responsible stewardship of archives American Historical Association open letter to National Archives and Records Administration and retraction Society of American Archivists (SAA) Responds to the American Historical Association Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman (2010) Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World by Christopher de Hamel (2017) Standing in their own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution by Judith L. Van Buskirk (2017) Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall by James Polchin (2019) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Beyond Conversation: Collaboration and the Production of Writing (Utah State UP, 2021), William Duffy revives the topic and connects it to the growing interest in collaboration within digital and materialist rhetoric to demonstrate that not only do the theory, pedagogy, and practice of collaboration need more study but there is also much to be learned from the doing of collaboration. Our conversation focuses on the processes that remain elusive during a collaborative project (and thus are difficult to teach in a classroom or recognized by the academic ecosystem), the risky accounts that live alongside collaborations, and a few ideas to think about and apply the next time you collaborate. Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) is an acquisition editor for an open scholarship publishing platform, a freelance science writer, and loves baking bread. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is Open Access Publishing and why is it important? Listen in as Raj Balkaran interviews Dominik A. Haas on his Fair Open Access Publishing in South Asian Studies (FOASAS) initiative which maintains a list of relevant publishers, journals, book series and other publication media. The list is available here. If you know of any other FOA publishers, journals etc. with an emphasis on Indological / South Asia-related research, or have feedback about the list, feel free to contact Dominik directly at [email protected] Dominik A. Haas, BA MA, is a DOC Fellow, Austrian Academy of Sciences and a PhD Candidate, University of Vienna Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: what a book proposal is and isn’t, why you have to write one, the importance of seeking the right “fit” for your manuscript, how to pitch a quirky book, the difference between a book’s topic and its argument, how to summarize your project in just one sentence, and a discussion of The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors (Princeton UP, 2021) Our guest is: Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer, an experienced developmental editor and publishing consultant for academic authors. She is the author of The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors. You have to write a book proposal to get published, but most scholars receive no training on how to do so, and you may have never even seen a proposal before you’re expected to produce your own. The Book Proposal Book cuts through the mystery and guides you step by step through the process of crafting a compelling proposal and pitching it to university presses and other academic publishers. Whether you’re hoping to publish your first book or you’re a seasoned author with an unfinished proposal languishing on your hard drive, The Book Proposal Book provides honest, empathetic, and invaluable advice on how to overcome common sticking points and get your book published. It also shows why a well-conceived proposal can help lead to an outstanding book. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-producer of the Academic Life podcasts, and a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors, by Laura Portwood-Stacer Dr. Portwood-Stacer’s Manuscript and Editing Workshops Dr. Portwood-Stacer’s website Handbook for Academic Authors, by Beth Luey Writing and Publishing Your Book: A Guide for Experts in Every Field, by Melody Herr From Dissertation to Book, by William Germano The Chicago Manual of Style: The Essential Guide for Writers, Editors, and Publishers Story Craft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction, by Jack Hart The Business of Being a Writer, by Jane Friedman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Helen Sword, writing champion, brings us into the word gym. Or maybe kitchen. Either way, The Writer's Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (U Chicago Press, 2016) is a short, sharp introduction to great writing based around 5 principles: --use active verbs whenever possible; --favour concrete language over vague abstractions; --avoid long strings of prepositional phrases; --employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence; --reduce your dependence on four pernicious “waste words”: it, this, that, and there. There are examples of the good - William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr., John McPhee, A. S. Byatt, Richard Dawkins, Alison Gopnik, and well, the bad. But you can fix the bad - really Dr Sword's point. Dr Helen Sword received her doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton University and has lived since 2001 in New Zealand, where she is a Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland and runs a private writing consultancy, WriteSpace Limited. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Peter Kaufman, Program Manager in Strategic Initiatives and Resource Development at MIT Open Learning and author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge (Seven Stories Press, 2021). We talk about us. All of us. Peter Kaufman : "Well, I'd say this about how to bring about the change my book calls for. Take a broad look at our knowledge institutions. Define them as broadly as we can, so obviously the universities, but there are museums, there are libraries, there are archives, there are public broadcasting institutions, there are historical societies–––and just figure out ways for all of these institutions, which have so many stakeholders, so many members, so many funders, so many visitors and readers and people who absorb things emanating from these institutions–––figure out ways for all these institutions to publish more, to publish more on to the Web, because (as someone put it) 'The truth is paywalled but the lies are free.' And you know, if these knowledge institutions can band together, can commit in principle and practice to publishing more, to linking to each others' content, to citing and sourcing each others' work, then we'll be a much stronger world, we'll be a much stronger society, and we'll be a little bit better equipped the next time that the gladiators from the Monsterverse manage to gain access to the most powerful offices in the land." Daniel heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Alex Csiszar, professor in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University and author of The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (U Chicago Press, 2018). We talk about the British, the French, and the Germans. No joke. Alex Csiszar : "There's this myth out there about what makes a scientist a scientist. It's that they're highly skeptical of everything. They don't believe a claim until they see it with their own eyes. But anybody who spends any kind of time in the scientific process knows this is ridiculous. Most everything that everybody believes in the sciences is stuff that they've been given to believe through reading papers, through education, through being told by their colleagues, through textbooks–––almost everything anybody in the sciences believes has come to them through trust. And the formats and genres through which a lot of that stuff comes to one's eyes matter a lot for generating that trust. Though, maybe one of the lessons of the book is that the formats and genres might matter a little less than you might at first think because there are other means, perhaps more important means, through which individuals come to trust a particular claim––and personal contacts matter a lot here. But clearly what is being discussed in a lot of the debates that I follow in this book are the means through which such trust can be established, guaranteed." Daniel heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After a turbulent political revolt against the military superpower of the early modern world, the tiny Dutch Republic managed to situate itself as the dominant printing and book trading power of the European market. The so-called Dutch Golden Age has long captured the attention of art historians, but for every one painting produced by the Dutch during the seventeenth century, at least 100 books were printed. In The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale UP, 2019), Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen present the untold story of how a group of family-owned businesses transformed the economics of printing and selling and conquered the European communications economy. This printing revolution helped to turn their pluralistic population into a highly literate and engaged society. Andrew Pettegree (@APettegree) is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of over a dozen books in the fields of Reformation history and the history of communication including Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge University Press, 2005), The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010), The Invention of News (Yale University Press, 2014), and Brand Luther: 1517, Print and the Making of the Reformation (Penguin, 2015). Arthur der Weduwen (@A_der_Weduwen) is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews and Deputy Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He researches and writes on the history of the Dutch Republic, books, news, libraries and early modern politics. He is the author of Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., Brill, 2017), and two books on early newspaper advertising in the Netherlands (both Brill, 2020). His latest project is The Library, A Fragile History, co-written with Andrew Pettegree and published by Profile in 2021. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Terry McGlynn, author of The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching (U Chicago Press, 2020). McGlynn is also a professor of biology at California State University Dominguez Hills and research associate in the Department of Entomology in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. We talk about learning, actually. Terry McGlynn : “If you’re giving students a writing assignment, like an experimental protocol, and they’re supposed to write about what they did in the lab or in the field, and it’s a cookbook project, you know, where the students don’t design the methods themselves and they're just doing what they were told to do and they're writing that down–––well, then the students are just jumping through a hoop and there's no ownership. That just gets you following through the prescribed steps, and in each of those steps, you just need to know, 'Oh, I just need to write a sentence where I've said This is where I did this,' and you write that sentence. And so, I think you can get through the whole assignment without thinking about the grand reason why you're doing it, right? Because the grand reason why you're doing it is because you need to turn it in and get your grade. And so all the little decisions you're making when you're doing the writing assignment–––all those decisions are all based on a micro level of, 'Okay, this next sentence, and that next sentence,' rather than if you had more control over what you're writing or if you had a bigger set of questions–––basically, if you knew why you're doing this assignment, you know like, what is the purpose of the assignment other than to turn it in and to get a grade–––because then that would be the purpose which is behind all those other small decisions, the purpose that guides you toward some destination." McGlynn's blog is here. Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We live in a networked world. Online social networking platforms and the World Wide Web have changed how society thinks about connectivity. Because of the technological nature of such networks, their study has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields. But arts and humanities scholars are increasingly using the same kinds of visual and quantitative analysis to shed light on aspects of culture and society hitherto concealed. Written by Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian Ahnert, Nicole Coleman, and Scott Weingart, The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities (Cambridge UP, 2021) contends that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic barriers, uniting diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our world. Moreover, we are at a moment in time when it is crucial that arts and humanities scholars join the critique of how large-scale network data and advanced network analysis are being harnessed for the purposes of power, surveillance, and commercial gain. Ruth Ahnert is Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities, Queen Mary University of London. Sebastian Ahnert is University Lecturer, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge. Nicole Coleman is Digital Research Architect, Stanford University Libraries. Scott Weingart is Director of the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Notre Dame. Katie McDonough is Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices