Some implications of "digital" for scholarly writing and publishing

Category: digital humanities Page 1 of 2

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 Scholarly Workflow in the Digital Age

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I expected great things from this book, published in the Charleston Briefings series. Digital scholarship has been around for enough time to assess how things have changed since the era of print; Google Scholar has existed since 2004, which means over …

What makes a book or article significant?

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Cover of the paperback edition of Nudge (2021,”final” edition)

The traditional measure of academic significance, invented way back in the 1960s, is the citation index. If a paper is cited, then it has significance for other researchers. If we count the …

How the Academy captured literary reviews

Reading Time: 3 minutes

An earlier post looked at who reads scholarly book reviews, and pointed out how difficult it is to access them outside an academic institution. For John Gross, in his The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1966), this would …

What is digital reading?

Reading Time: 4 minutes
A humble SD card that holds 512GB – enough digital reading for years to come

This week Scholarly Kitchen contains yet another post that emphasises what we lose when we read digitally, by an author, Karin Wulf, an academic historian, whose …

Blending humanities and data science

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Any report with 25 authors must be taken seriously. Or perhaps promises to be fairly dull, since 25 people are unlikely to agree on much that is really innovative. So it wasn’t with huge expectations that I started reading this paper, …

Do literary scholars understand AI? Using AI tools to establish authorship

Reading Time: 2 minutes
Hamlet, Second Quarto edition

A long-running exchange of letters in the TLS (most recently May 22 2020) makes it clear that literary scholars have become aware of the use of AI tools to indicate authorship. This technique, always controversial, is …

Are e-books a failure?

Reading Time: 5 minutes
The Amazon Kindle e-book reader (CC BY-SA 3.0)

It wasn’t just me saying it – no less a figure than Arnaud Nourry, head of Hachette, said it in a 2018 interview: “The e-book is a stupid product. It is exactly …

Is there such a thing as Digital Humanities? 

Reading Time: 2 minutes

At this year’s ALPSP annual conference (Windsor, October 2018), there was an entertaining session called “What’s New in Digital Humanities”. Of the three speakers, one was by Peter Berkery, the Director of the Association of University Presses, one by an academic, …

Perhaps academic publishing needs two cultures

Reading Time: 3 minutes 

Academic publishing is all about science, and specifically life science. This was clear from a presentation at Academic Publishing in Europe, in Berlin, last week. Caroline Edwards, a literature lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, argued for a specific …

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