Thinking about Digital Publishing

Some implications of "digital" for scholarly writing and publishing

Search Solutions 2023: it’s RAGtime!

Reading Time: 5 minutes
Creating new knowledge with AI: an illustration by Paul Cleverly of a tool based on text embedding that plots two variables against each other to enable new knowledge in geoscience to be generated.

The last twelve months, up to November 2023, …

More about the Failure of the Book

Reading Time: 3 minutes
The Biblia Pauperum, the “Bible of the Poor”, printed in the lower Rhine region or Low countries, c1460. An example of whole-page illustration, where the image, a woodcut, replaces the text entirely. Within a few years, integrated text and illustrations

The Failure of the Book

Reading Time: 3 minutes
Albrecht Pfister, Die Edelstein, thought to be the first illustrated book (1460s). The illustration is a woodcut.  [illustration from the Stadtbibliothek Berlin, public domain]

Books about book history are usually triumphalist: how the printed word democratized knowledge, made learning possible, changed …

The Charleston Conference 2023

Reading Time: 4 minutes
The Gaillard Centre, where most of the Charleston Conference events took place. Sadly, this is the most inauthentic building in the whole of Charleston. Constructed 1975, it looks feeble compared to the magnificent municipal and private neoclassical buildings a few blocks

How to use Generative AI – a free webinar

Reading Time: < 1 minute
Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

I’m giving a free Zoom webinar tomorrow (2 November) at 6pm UK time on how to evaluate Generative AI tools for scholarly texts. The talk is part of the MAL education series. I don’t claim …

Chronology of Open Access

Reading Time: 3 minutes
The public footpath: free to access, for everyone, without payment (Photo by Matt Ashby on Unsplash)

I’ve always found that to get a clearer idea of a subject that has developed over time, it’s a worthwhile exercise to identify the key …

A dating site for government research

Reading Time: 3 minutes
Photo by Woody Kelly on Unsplash

Everything ends happily … the idea of a dating site that matches researchers, funders, and policy makers is a great one. So I was excited to try out the new  UK Government-funded Areas of Research

Can you use generative AI for academic article review?

Reading Time: 6 minutes
Photo by Marcel Strauß on Unsplash

I am no expert on the use of generative AI; all I can claim is that I learn by trying it out. Here, for better or worse, is one small lesson I learned inadvertently by …

How to use ChatGPT and generative AI tools

Reading Time: 5 minutes
Banks of servers (Photo by İsmail Enes Ayhan on Unsplash)

Are we getting any closer to learning how to use generative AI tools? The debate seems to be moving in the right direction, on the basis of a recent exchange …

The value of lurking

Reading Time: 3 minutes
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

A recent post by Gina Sipley on the excellent Impact of Social Sciences blog laments the decline of Twitter since it was acquired by Elon Musk, and talks about the value of lurking. It’s certainly …

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