Some implications of "digital" for scholarly writing and publishing

Category: digital publishing Page 1 of 6

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

Reading on screen is addling our brains

Reading Time: 4 minutes
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 …

Do standard article formats limit creativity?

Reading Time: 4 minutes
Notes 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 …

What’s wrong with Twitter?

Reading Time: 4 minutes
Social 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 …

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 …

Charleston Briefings: a new short book format

Reading Time: 5 minutes

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 …

The difference between an RFP and a restaurant menu

Reading Time: 3 minutes
Photo by Drahomír Posteby-Mach on Unsplash

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.

As Hyde points out, one obvious …

Along came Google … and what happened next

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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.…

Is the future of academic publishing an octopus?

Reading Time: 4 minutes
A 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, …

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