Some implications of "digital" for scholarly writing and publishing

Category: reading

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 …

Has digital publishing ruined our ability to read?

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Two of the oldest myths about reading are:

  1. We would be better people if we read more (for example here, here and here – but I could find hundreds of examples)
  2. We have only

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?

Reading Time: 3 minutes
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 …

Is Reading Unnatural?

Reading Time: 4 minutes
Vincenzo Foppa, Young Cicero reading (Wallace Collection)

Behind this talk (by Jeffrey Johnson, author of several books on UX design) was one great idea: that reading is unnatural. What Johnson meant by this seeming paradox is simply: any infant (unless handicapped) …

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