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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Reading Time: 4minutesA 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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
