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
Academic studies of reading appear to be influenced by romantic ideas about how we read print (Corot, Woman reading in the country, around 1868-70, Metropolitan Museum)
Where did this idea come from, and is it valid? It seems to me an …
Reading Time: 4minutesNotes and Queries, a journal first published 1849: fascinating, but decidedly quirky. It is still published today, but looks very different
Once upon a time, academic journals were a cornucopia of formats and styles. They were fascinating, as the above …
Reading Time: 4minutesSocial media in use on a train (Photo by Hugh Han on Unsplash)
An interesting, if far-fetched, post by Steve Fuller on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences site. Fuller’s post, “Aphorism and twitter”, makes a case for the beneficial …
Reading Time: 6minutesThe NASDAQ Composite Index, showing the share price performance of companies during the era of the dot-com bubble (Public Domain, from Wikipedia)
Back in the early days of the Internet, Paul Graham, then working for Yahoo, wrote a now-famous article, …
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 …
The Web is full of ideas for self-improvement: how to be more efficient, more productive, more successful. One tip for reading more effectively is to read only short books (I’m not joking – there is a website that tells you which …
An excellent post from Adam Hyde (February 2022) pointed out one of the limitations of the request-for-proposal (RFP) process, used when a purchaser wishes buy a large-scale software solution.
This is the story of a tragedy: a step forward for the academic community that was resisted and then blocked. It’s difficult to imagine, but Along Came Google (Princeton, 2021) is as gripping as any thriller – except for the conclusion.…
Reading Time: 4minutesA 17th-century coffee house (Wikipedia, public domain). Although Wikipedia claims it is an English coffee house, the caption clearly states Paris.
I have a lovely mental image of the Enlightenment in full swing. Inside a coffee house in Edinburgh, or Paris, …
