The first page of the Geneva Bible, 1560 edition – with annotations
The literature review is one of the core components of the scholarly lifecycle. To begin your research, you see what has been said and done. Life being short, you …
It’s undeniable that some conferences have a special atmosphere. The location of the Fiesole Retreat, this year in Fiesole itself, at the European University Institute just outside Florence, is undoubtedly special. Most of the conference took place at the European University …
John Burns-Murdoch, in the Financial Times, is the latest to make this claim (“Have humans passed peak brain power?”, FT, 14 March 2025). “Evidence is mounting that … the average person’s ability to reason and solve …
You don’t need telling that there is a multiplicity of views on AI in scholarly publishing. The annual NEC Publishing Conference (London, 5 November 2024) was no exception. Among the many statements about AI …
Reading Time: 3minutesPhoto by Ugur Akdemir on Unsplash
I had high hopes for a post entitled “How books influence digital culture”. It’s an interesting topic; but the post itself (on the Good E-Reader platform) is a disservice to books. Moreover, it’s barely literate, …
Reading Time: 5minutesHow one university got three different results to the question “how many OA articles did we publish in 2022?” Graphic by Ben Rawlins of University of Kentucky. The “sources” are three different aggregation services, Dimensions, Web of Science, and Taylor and …
This lengthy report (some 20,000 words) is quite a challenge to review. It was created out of interviews with some 49 major figures in the scholarly landscape, all of them from the anglophone Western scholarly region, a mixture of commercial publishers, …
Reading Time: 4minutesThe Praca do Comercio, Lisbon
I am on holiday in Portugal, and, like many tourists, I have an idle curiosity about the city of Lisbon and about the history of the country. Where better to begin than looking at a general …
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 …
