Scholarly Communication

In the library profession, and in the world as a whole, the experiences of trans and gender diverse people often go unnoticed, hidden, and ignored. Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries (Library Juice Press, 2021) is entirely written and edited by trans and gender diverse people involved in the field: its fifty-seven authors include workers from academic and public libraries, special collections and archives, and more; LIS students; and a few people who have left the library profession completely.Editors Kalani Adolpho, Stephen G. Krueger, and Krista McCracken share in this interview how this book is not intended to be the definitive guide to trans and gender diverse experiences in libraries, but instead to start the conversation. This project hopes to help trans and gender diverse people in libraries realize that they are not alone, and that their experiences are worth sharing.This book also demonstrates some of the reality in a field that loves to think of itself as inclusive. From physical spaces to policies to interpersonal ignorance and bigotry, the experiences recounted in this book demonstrate that the library profession continues to fail its trans and gender diverse members over and over again. You cannot read these chapters and claim that Safe Zone stickers and “libraries are for everyone” signs have done the job. You cannot assume that everything is fine in your workplace because nobody has spoken out. You can no longer pretend that trans and gender diverse people don’t exist.Find the table of contents for Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries as well as open access chapters online here. Learn about the Trans and Gender Diverse LIS network here.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Niko Pfund joins the podcast to discuss the value of scientific content for building out Large Language Models and some of the challenges around tracking the quality and ownership of aggregated content from unknown sources. We also discuss potential avenues for collaboration between Generative AI companies and scholarly publishers.Niko Pfund is Academic Publisher at Oxford University Press and President of Oxford’s US office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton UP, 2022), Jeff Deutsch--the director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world--pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. He considers how qualities like space, time, abundance, and community find expression in a good bookstore. Along the way, he also predicts--perhaps audaciously--a future in which the bookstore not only endures, but realizes its highest aspirations.In exploring why good bookstores matter, Deutsch draws on his lifelong experience as a bookseller, but also his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew. This spiritual and cultural heritage instilled in him a reverence for reading, not as a means to a living, but as an essential part of a meaningful life. Central among Deutsch's arguments for the necessity of bookstores is the incalculable value of browsing--since, when we are deep in the act of looking at the shelves, we move through space as though we are inside the mind itself, immersed in self-reflection.In the age of one-click shopping, this is no ordinary defense of bookstores, but rather an urgent account of why they are essential places of discovery, refuge, and fulfillment that enrich the communities that are lucky enough to have them.Jeff Deutsch is the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which in 2019 he helped incorporate as the first not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling. He lives in Chicago.Recommended Books: Lewis Hyde, The Gift Leon Forrest, Divine Days Toya Wolf, Last Summer on State Street Pierre Hadot, Don’t forget to Live W.B. Yates, “Words for Music, Perhaps” Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Rachael Cayley, Associate Professor in the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Toronto, Canada. Rachael also blogs. Her Explorations of Style is a wide-ranging discussion of topics associated with graduate writing. In our interview, we talk about mindset and drafting and revision and structure and writing, writing, writing — basically, all the great stuff in Thriving As a Graduate Writer: Principles, Strategies, and Practices for Effective Academic Writing (U Michigan Press, 2023) for you, the graduate writer!Rachael Cayley : "You should have an Introduction, and I believe strongly that you should write the Introduction first. But you shouldn't polish an Introduction first. A student of mine — after I'd explained this — said that it sounded like making an IKEA table. So, you don't want to tighten the first leg of the table too much before you've started tightening the other legs, because you need all the connections in place first before you can flip the thing over and have a stable structure. Well, it's the same with an Introduction: you tighten a little bit here, and you move to the next part and tighten there, and so on, gradually round and round that part of your text, until you've got something solid." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bianca Vienni-Baptista, Isabel Fletcher, and Catherine Lyall's Foundations of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Research (Bristol University Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking reader designed to lower the barriers to interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in research. Edited by experienced researchers from a range of different fields whose work grows out of the SHAPE-ID consortium, it paves the way for future scholarship and effective research collaborations across disciplines. For more on the SHAPE-ID project, including the toolkit and annotated bibliography referenced in this podcast episode, visit https://www.shapeid.eu.Chapters in this book offer extracts from key academic texts on topics such as the design, funding, evaluation and communication of research, providing a thorough grounding for newcomers to the field as well as experienced practitioners. Content included highlights examples of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary triumphs as well as challenges. Each chapter concludes with a commentary provided by practitioners from diverse backgrounds, many of whom are themselves developing new approaches to inter- and transdisciplinarity; these commentaries serve to model the types of dialogue this book hopes to inspire. This is a much-needed primer that improves our understanding of the characteristics of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, unlocking their exciting potential in research and teaching within and beyond academia.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Does listening to an audio book count as reading? Can audio books help democratize education? Will more academic presses be creating audio versions of their books? Princeton University Press audio books editor Danielle D’Orlando joins us to share about the exciting future of audio books for academia.More about PUP Audio: In 2018, the Princeton University Press team launched the first university press audiobook program, Princeton Audio. Four years and almost a thousand hours of published audiobooks later, they published their hundredth audiobook. Along the way, they have had the privilege of learning from their trusted partners in audio, from authors and agents to narrators, producers, proof-listeners, directors, and engineers. Their hundredth audio production is “only the tip of the iceberg”, which also includes co-publications with other publishers, audiobooks produced by partners new and old including Audible, Recorded Books, Blackstone, University Press Audio and many others.More about our guest: Danielle D’Orlando is the Curator of Audio at Princeton University Press, home to the first in-house university press audiobook division: Princeton Audio. She spent much of her career at Yale University Press where she spearheaded their audio program, including the development of Yale Press Audio. She has an M.S. in Publishing and lives in Connecticut with her spouse, two children, and, as featured in today’s episode, her 10-year-old dog, Lacey.More about our host: Dr. Christina Gessler holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. She is a freelance book editor, and has served as content director and producer of the Academic Life podcast since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of the New Books Network.Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Becoming the Writer You Already Are, by Michelle Boyd The Grant Writing Guide, by Betty S. Lai The Book Proposal Book, by Laura Portwood-Stacer Writing with Pleasure, by Helen Sword How To Impress an Acquisitions Editor The libro playlist of African-American studies audio books for AP students Listeners may be interested in these Academic Life episodes: This conversation on revising your dissertation for press submission This conversation on determining if you need a developmental editor This discussion of the top ten things to fix in your manuscript before submitting it This conversation on university press submissions and the peer review process This conversation on marketing your scholarly book This conversation about how to write a book proposal This conversation explaining open-access publishing This discussion about doing archival research This conversation about Where Research Begins Welcome to the Academic Life! Join us here to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Missed any of the 150+ Academic Life episodes? You can find them all archived here. And check back soon: we’re in the studio preparing more episodes for your academic journey—and beyond! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Aaron Clauset, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder and in the BioFrontiers Institute. Aaron is also External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. We talk about what the science of science can contribute to your career in research.Aaron Clauset : "In science, having good ideas is, in the end, the most important part. You can go a long way, in terms of surviving in the ecosystem of scientific research, on the basis of having really good ideas. Because those ideas can help you get to a good, resource-rich institutional environment. Your ideas can help you cultivate a rich, productive collaboration network that will enable you to be successful over time. For example, a paper that I wrote, looking at the composition and size of collaboration networks and how, once you control for differences between men and women in the way they construct and maintain these different kinds of collaboration networks, productivity differences and impact differences essentially go away. I mean, that's kind of fascinating — that the social network that underlies science ends up being the thing that creates many of the disparities that we superficially see in the ecosystem of scientific research." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Nicolas Christin, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, jointly appointed in the School of Computer Science and in the department of Engineering and Public Policy. We talk about the luck it takes to succeed in research, and of course too about the initiative shown by successful researchers to seize that luck.Nicolas Christin : "You will get a pretty good understanding of where some research idea has come from if you read the Introduction of the paper very carefully. Because the Introduction will typically start with either a sort of case study, 'Alright, so, x does y and this is what happened to them, and so, yeah, we need to fix that problem' or the Introduction will tell you how the paper inscribes itself in a larger body of work but without going through all the related work, as in, 'Yeah, we are different from A, B, and C in this and that way' but instead like 'Yeah, this is what the state-of-the-art is and this is what we are bringing to the table.' And as you read this, you can back-track it all and then see what the initial spark was, what the key motivation for that whole line of research was. Because in some cases, when you do this careful reading, say, ten years after the fact, you know, when you return to the seminal papers in your field, there you may realize or you may find out that the initial idea came from a case study or from a problem that actually was not a problem at all, because really the thing just became famous because it was applied to a different context. And that is, of course, completely fine. In fact, it tells you something about the serendipity or the randomness of what sticks and what doesn't." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this lively and far-reaching text, Nick Witham (University College London) tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history.For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner - writers who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history.Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. Not just a matter of writing style, popular accessibility was also a product of an author's frame of mind, the editor's skill, and the publisher's marketing acumen, among other factors. Rooted in extensive archival work, Popularizing the Past persuasively demonstrates the cross-influences of popular history writing and American popular culture.James West is a historian of race, media and business in the modern United States and Black diaspora. Author of "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (Illinois, 2020), "A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago" (Illinois, 2022), "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (Massachusetts, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Yuval Yarom, Professor of Computer Science at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. We talk about how authors interpret the data and the facts, and we talk, too, about how readers interpret the authors' words about those data and facts.Yuval Yarom: "I like to think that the question whether the Title is boring or not does not affect me, just like I like to think that advertising does not affect me. But, I'm probably wrong on both counts. I do try to read papers based on whether they're related to what I do. But still, papers that are easier to read, or to be precise, that are easier to interpret — these papers are likelier to affect me positively: I'm paying attention. These are the papers that make it easier to relate, easier to understand, easier to see exactly what the authors mean by what they write. And so, the net effect is, everyone has an easier time working with the findings of those authors." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices