Scholarly Communication

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

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our wealth of retrievable knowledge. In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age (University of Alabama Press, 2020), Nathan R. Johnson charts turning points where concepts of memory became durable in new computational technologies and modern memory infrastructures took hold. He works through both familiar and esoteric memory technologies—from the card catalog to the book cart to Zatocoding and keyword indexing—as he delineates histories of librarianship and information science and provides a working vocabulary for understanding rhetoric’s role in contemporary memory practices. This volume draws upon the twin concepts of memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê to illuminate the seemingly opaque wall of mundane algorithmic techniques that determine what is worth remembering and what should be forgotten. Each chapter highlights a conflict in the development of twentieth-century librarianship and its rapidly evolving competitor, the discipline of information science. As these two disciplines progressed, they contributed practical techniques and technologies for making sense of explosive scientific advancement in the wake of World War II. Taming postwar science became part and parcel of practices and information technologies that undergird uncountable modern communication systems, including search engines, algorithms, and databases for nearly every national clearinghouse of the twenty-first century. Nathan R. Johnson is assistant professor of Rhetoric at the University of South Florida. His work has appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Poroi, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce (they & she) on social and Gmail @rhetoriclee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Rachel Sagner Buurma (associate professor of English literature at Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (associate professor of English at the University of North Florida). We talk about there book The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and the great figures of English Studies--the professors and the students. Laura Heffernan : "There is this real sense right now that the ability to read carefully, to learn how to think critically, to learn how to write well, and to conceive of those things as part of a larger life is under threat for the majority of American students. And one of the things our book really tries to do is to recover just how many of those students have participated in the making of English Studies, a discipline which is now being taking away from students, essentially. And so, our intellectual histories need really now to incorporate the institutions where such majors in the humanities are under threat and show, in really material ways as we do, that those students at those schools helped to make some of the core concepts and methods in the humanities." 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

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 in an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: Ros Pyne’s path through higher education, how she found her way to her current job, her role at Bloomsbury Publishers, what Open Access [OA] is and is not, how OA can democratize knowledge, and what she’s hopeful about. Our guest is: Ros Pyne, who is the Global Director of Research and Open Access at Bloomsbury Publishers. She has worked in academic publishing since 2007, initially as an editor, and for the last eight years in roles focusing on open access. She has a particular interest in bringing open access to long-form scholarship and to the humanities, and is the co-author of several reports on open access books. She holds a degree in English from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in early modern English literature from King’s College London. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Open access at Bloomsbury Directory of Open Access Books OAPEN OA Books Toolkit (for anyone interested in learning more about what open access books are and how they work) Open Access Books Network (a free online network for people working on open access books or interested in getting involved) Open Access and the Humanities (a 2014 book by an open access expert Martin Paul Eve that’s still an excellent primer on this topic) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Getting to the Heart of Science Communication (Island Press, 2021), Dr. Faith Kearns unpacks science communication as so much more than the “sage from the stage” perspective. Dr. Kearns, through decades of experience and countless interviews, writes to further a conversation for best practices and necessary training for science communication practitioners. In this interview, we discuss the past, present, and future of science communication. We dig into Part II of the book, The Tools of Science Communication, which for those newer to the field or practice, might be shocked to hear has little to do with speaking. Instead, we talk about relating, listening, conflict, and trauma. While Dr. Kearns is clear this book is not intended to be a final word on the topic, it does force readers to think about how the sciences might adopt training from other fields. We finish our talk with an unanswered question – how do trained generalists fit into the expertise-focused world of science? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of William Tierney, University Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. We talk about his book Get Real: 49 Challenges Confronting Higher Education (SUNY, 2020), about what people really believe when it comes to higher education, and also about what people need to do when it comes to higher education. William Tierney : "Oftentimes the board and the administration and the faculty are in cahoots with one another, in the sense that the marker is only how to improve in the rankings. And you can see this when a teaching college becomes a state university, and then it will try to move away from teaching and move towards research. And a board member will feel good about that: 'Boy, I came in, and my institution was ranked 250th, and now it's a 100. We the board are doing a great job.' And what the administration will say is: 'I transformed the institution. We were 250, and now we're 100.' And the faculty will say, 'Yup, the students are better.' And all this impacts on writing centers like this: Writing centers are often seen as problems–––you know, that kids go to the writing center because they have a problem. Well, then, if we don't have writing centers, then we don't have students who have problems–––which is, of course, the exact wrong way to think about an essential skill that we need for the twenty-first century." 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

Listen to this interview of Brooke Rollins, Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University. We talk about lots of Greeks and about one Frenchman and (if you write) also about you. Brooke Rollins : "I think there is a way that practice in reading and writing–––that it lines up so nicely with physical training. You know, to run a marathon, you don't simply just run 26.2 miles every day to practise for that. There are things that gradually take you up to that, but it's persistent. It's over an extended period of time. Regularity in reading and writing is important. And I certainly feel like the contemporary university doesn't do enough of that with writing. There's first-year courses, and then the thinking is, 'Well, they've had that, they've passed that bar, and now they can move on to their fields and not worry about writing anymore. We've taken care of that.' But in fact, writing development is necessary along the whole course of study. That's why writing-in-the-discipline programs are so important." 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

Listen to this interview of Iain McGee (PhD, Cardiff University) a PhD student in the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of Bristol (UK), and an EAP teacher at Cardiff University. We talk about his book Understanding the Paragraph and Paragraphing (Equinox, 2018), the paragraph as a break in the text, about the paragraph as a unit of the text, and about the ¶. Iain McGee : "Often writing instruction in classroom environments is readerless in terms of the actual text and in terms of who will engage with it. Many writers in classrooms know that the only reader will be the teacher. But when it comes to writing for purposeful reasons, then we will be thinking of the reader, and the reader will have certain (as Michael Hoey puts it) textual colligation expectations, that means that the reader will be expecting paragraphs to flow in a certain way, will be expecting certain ways of organizing that text. And so, for the writer in that environment, the writer needs to be aware of those discourse-specific ways in which we communicate. One of the points I make in the book is that, Alexander Bain and his work in particular never really considered the reader and as such, made rather prescriptive, one-size-fits-all comments on what good paragraphing is. But in reality, the genre very much determines how we will go about writing our paragraphs, for example, how many sentences we might have, or the kinds of links between the paragraphs, for example, those links will be very different between reading an article in a newspaper and reading a journal article. And so, that sensitivity to genre is one of the focal points of my research, and I want to draw attention to the fact that we need to understand genres better so that we can make comments about the paragraph which are more intelligent, more specific, and more relevant to the actual readers of real genres and to the writers engaged with those genres." 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

Listen to this interview of Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck, University of London), Cameron Neylon (Curtin University), Daniel Paul O'Donnell (University of Lethbridge), Samuel Moore (Coventry University), Robert Gadie (University of the Arts London), Victoria Odeniyi (University College London), and Shahina Parvin (University of Lethbridge) about their book Reading Peer Review: PLOS One and Institutional Change in Academia, published this year by Cambridge University Press. The book is part of Cambridge UP's "Elements" series. It's also open access. We talk about excellence in higher education and about excellence in scientific research, and we talk about all the trouble that can bring. Martin Paul Eve : "Yeah, I think that's right that in scholarly communication, we're dealing less with language and more with discourse. And the most frustrating defenses of the humanities disciplines try to claim some exclusivity around language and expression and so on. And really, when you're dealing with extremely complicated scientific concepts, the way you express them does matter, and if there isn't clarity in your expression, it leads to poor communication. I mean, part of the challenge here is that the evolution of the research article in the sciences means that you're only ever really getting a description of what has been done. And so making the description as perspicacious as possible is a core part of that. Now the questions is: Since we have practices like open data, like replication studies that attempt to give more of an insight into the process, into what's going on–––Do they obviate that need for such careful language usage, given that you're exposing more of the process itself or does it remain as important as ever. I think it's probably the latter. But it's interesting to me that this need for precision has evolved, that it does play a role, and that reviewers nearly always comment upon it when they think it's lacking." 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

Listen to this interview of Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, editors of Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (published open access by MIT in 2020). We talk about a lot, and all of it, really, falls under the head "Ethics of Scholarly Communication." interviewer : "How did you conceive of a project of this diversity on the subject of open access and publishing?" Martin Paul Eve : "What's really interesting to me is that most academics think they know about scholarly publishing because they have all published. This is a bit like me saying that I'm an expert in how car engines work because I can drive. It doesn't equate to the same thing. And so what we really wanted to do was to put together a volume that did not really attempt forcibly to synthesize all of the propositions made under its roof, but rather to give a space for a debate to develop, a space for argument and conversation to flourish about the difficulties surrounding open access." --------------------- interviewer : "The book just tells all it has to tell from every perspective, and these disagreements, and agreements, make for the feel of a real discussion. I wonder what your basic view of scholarly communication was throughout the, surely, long editing process." Jonathan Gray : "Well, we thought of it like this: so if you look at work on the sociology of art––rather than looking at the artwork, you look at everything around that artwork which is required for it to be seen and appreciated as an artwork. You look at the supply chains involved in producing print and canvas, you look at the gallery workers, you look at ticket sales and so on. And I guess we were keen to kind of do a similar thing with this book, to perform a kind of inversion around scholarly communication and open access, and really situate it and re-world it in relation to all sorts of issues, communities, forms of labor, and infrastructures." 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

Listen to this interview of Ken Hyland, Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the University of East Anglia, UK. We talked about his book Second Language Writing (Cambridge UP, 2019), the importance of reflection to teaching, and about the importance of teaching to research, and about the importance of research to reflection. Interviewer : "I wonder whether second language writing isn't sometimes identifying itself too closely with language learning, and not–––well, it should be writing in a second language, shouldn't it? You know, put something up front which is what this is really about." Ken Hyland : "Yeah, I think that one thing that an emphasis on second language writing has given us is the recognition that writing is important. I don't think that there is a university anywhere now that doesn't have a writing center or at least an office where students can go and get consultation about their texts. Writing has been recognized as important, and also in native-English-speaking contexts as well, and in UK universities. And in fact, when we look at writing at advanced levels, like PhDs and writing for publication, language doesn't really come into it anymore. It's a rhetorical issue. And this crude native/nonnative polarization I think breaks down entirely. You know, it's counterproductive, because it demoralizes second-language writers who are trying to get their PhD or publish in journals, and it ignores the very real writing problems experienced by native English speakers, by L1s, you know. So, the L1s get ignored, in favor of the L2s, who get the courses, but everyone's unhappy because it's seen as a language issue rather than as a writing issue." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to John Thompson, Emeritus Professor, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, about his new book Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing (Polity, 2021). We discuss crowdfunding, audio books, distribution chains, social media, self-publishing, ebooks, Amazon, retail, and oh, also those things that are made of paper and glued together and have words printed in them. Interviewer: "One of the real eye-openers for me in the book was the distance, historically speaking, between readers and publishers. Now, as I think about it, and as I compare what a company like Amazon does to what traditional publishers do, well, I begin to notice that publishers are on the side of authors and content and that publishers have an obligation, even, on that side." John Thompson: "Yes, they have an obligation to authors. Publishers are good and professional at developing content. And if they're good publishers, they have a well thought-through and sophisticated marketing and publicity operation that helps to create visibility for books. But on this last point alone–––making books known to others–––the opportunity created by the digital revolution is not just that you make books visible by using traditional media like advertising in the newspaper, but that you are able to reach out directly to readers and consumers and make your books visible to them directly, in much the way that Amazon does when they send an email blast to an Amazon user that says, 'You might be interested in this book.' But why can't publishers do that themselves? Now, thanks to the digital revolution, the opportunity is created for publishers to develop relationships with readers, and to do so at scale. It simply wasn't possible, prior to the digital revolution and prior to the Internet. But now it is. And so that is a huge transformation that publishers are beginning to avail themselves of and which will, I think, continue to change the industry." 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

Today I talked to Helen Sword about Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard UP, 2017). We talk about what not enough people talk about when the subject is writing. interviewer : "You offer the advice of forming a writing group, because writing groups are, well, just all-around terrific for helping people write as they want to." Helen Sword : "Exactly, and well, so I try not to be didactic about just about anything having to do with writing––I'm much more about, 'Here's a range of possibilities. Make a considered decision here,' rather than, 'I'm going to tell you what to do.' But if I were to give one piece of advice concerning the social dimensions of writing, I would say, 'Really, really strongly consider belonging to some kind of writing group.' And I define a writing group as being two or more people who meet more than once to talk about any aspect of writing. So, if you have somebody you meet with for coffee once a month, one other person, and all you do is you sit there and complain about your supervisor and how you wish that they were more sympathetic to your writing––That's already a writing group. So, it doesn't have to be some big kind of formal thing. It's opening yourself up to the social dimensions of writing and particularly to the idea of having supporters in your corner, having some cheerleaders, having some people you can talk to about writing who are not there to criticize you––who are there to help you." 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

Listen to this interview of Gerd Bräuer, Head of the Schreibzentrum, the writing center, at Freiburg University of Education. We talk about the place of the internet in writing development, we talk about views on writing in German higher education and more widely in German society and culture, and we talk about Bert Brecht's journals. Tnterviewer: "What part does a person's biography play in their writing? And I mean the academic writing students do, or also, the academic writing we publish, and not just literature and memoir." Gerd Bräuer: "Well, in the writing process, there's something we call writer-based prose. And here the writer would really get the chance, from the institution and from the instructor, to pay attention to this first phase within the writing process, where the writer struggles with his or her own thoughts and ideas and also reconnects to what he or she has learned through the writing––or however else they've learned it––and the writer gets the chance to be always trying to figure out what to explore and how to explore it, before he or she starts to think about how to say it to a certain audience within a certain text genre. This writer-based prose is focused on immediate work with knowledge, with creating new knowledge. Peter Elbow, an American writing researcher that I admire greatly––he speaks about cooking, about letting your ideas boil and simmer, and then tasting to find out whether you like it and what to change. And all this I see as part of biographical work. You work on your biography as a learner, and that phenomenon, learning, is lifelong and includes everyone. So, with every single new writing assignment you get a learning chance. But of course, the institution or whoever assigns the writing would also have to provide the framework to make this learning happen." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Christopher Thaiss, author of Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century (Broadview Press 2019). We talk about the research article, about writing styles, and about the uses of rhetoric to scientists. Interviewer: "Too many students learning to write in the sciences lack helpful feedback on their writing, and this causes them to experience, quite personally, that disconnect we were talking about, between doing science and writing science." Christopher Thaiss: "Feedback is one of the things I return to again and again in the book. And in my teaching, I think that one of the ways that feedback is used––I think that the most effective way that feedback is used is not so much the feedback that I give students about their writing, although the students will always say, 'We love your feedback!' But what's really important is the feedback that they learn to give and get in peer response workshops. I'm very careful in designing peer response so that students feel that sense of responsibility to give good feedback to one another, but also how to ask for feedback on the work that they're doing themselves. I think that peer response is so important in the scientific context, but it is, you know, in any writing context, and so I really try to foreground that within the course. The way I talk about it in writing in STEM is actually in the context of how research is done and how scientific discoveries and advancements are made: It's through the process of peer review. And if we can teach students early on to become good readers and then careful, conscientious givers of feedback to one another, we have achieved so much in terms of their ability to become contributing members of the scientific community." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices