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 is a commonplace that the act of reading is a worthy use of your time. However nonsensical that idea might be (nobody expects to be praised for the number of journal articles they read), it’s …
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 …
Jan Ekels, Interior with young man reading, 1784 (Manchester City Art Gallery)
Karin Wulf, a well-known history academic, who effectively straddles the divide between academic and popular writing, revealed her methodology for appraising an academic work in an interesting post, a …
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 …
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 …
Reading Time: 4minutesVincenzo 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) …
