Scholarly Communication

Sally Wilson, VP of Publishing at Emerald opens up about the challenges publishers are facing in contending with the onset of the mass adoption of AI tools including ChatGPT, and its ramifications for scholarly publishing. She also talks about the potential positive use cases for ChatGPT for reducing inequality in publishing. In addition, Sally discusses the nature of mission-based publishing and leading the charge in tackling United Nations SDG goals in publishing.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation (Cornell UP, 2023) rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Through a constellation of three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—Annie Pfeifer examines the relationship between literary modernism and twentieth-century practices of collecting objects. From James's paper hoarding to Einstein's mania for African art and Benjamin's obsession with old Russian toys, she shows how these authors' literary techniques of compiling, gleaning, and reassembling constitute a modernist style of collecting which that reimagines the relationship between author and text, source and medium. Placing Benjamin and Einstein in surprising conversation with James sharpens the contours of collecting as aesthetic and political praxis underpinned by dangerous passions. An apt figure for modernity, the collector is caught between preservation and transformation, order and chaos, the past and the future.Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past. By despoiling and decontextualizing the work of others, these three authors engaged in a form of creative plunder that evokes collecting's long history in the spoils of war and conquest. As Pfeifer demonstrates, more than an archive or taxonomy, modernist collecting practices became a radical, creative endeavor—the artist as collector, the collector as artist.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. 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

Why is giving a presentation so stressful? Is your heart supposed to race? And how do you gain more confidence? This episode explores: How to feel more connected to your audience. Why feeling some “stage-fright” might be a good thing. What your audience needs from you. How to use tools to “break the ice” like asking your listeners a great question. A discussion of the article “How to Cope with Presentation Anxiety,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Dr. James M. Lang Our guest is: Dr. James M. Lang, who is the author of six books, writes a monthly column on teaching and learning for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and edits a series of books on teaching and learning in higher education for West Virginia University Press. A former Professor of English and Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, he stepped down from full-time academic work in 2021 to concentrate on his writing and teaching and public speaking. He has consulted with the United Nations on a multi-year project to develop teaching materials in ethics and integrity for high school and college faculty, and is the recipient of a 2016 Fulbright Specialist Grant, and the 2019 Paul Ziegler Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship. Jim and his wife formed the Lang Family Foundation, which provides grants to non-profit organizations dedicated to the alleviation of poverty and homelessness, support for the environment and the arts, and funding for libraries and public education. Recent grant recipients include the INTERFAITH HOSPITALITY NETWORK OF GREATER WORCESTER, a shelter for families with children; the WORCESTER PUBLIC LIBRARY FOUNDATION; and ABBY’S HOUSE, a shelter for women in need of support services.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Chronicle of Higher Education article "Should We Stop Grading Class Participation?" by James Lang “Distracted Minds: Why You Should Teach Like a Poet,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by James Lang Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, by James Lang Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes, by James Lang and Flower Darby The Academic Life podcast episode Archival Kismet: Lessons in Launching an Online Conference The Academic Life podcast episode Making the Most of Academic Conferences Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The internet has become a battleground. Although it was unlikely to live up to the hype and hopes of the 1990s, only the most skeptical cynics could have predicted the World Wide Web as we know it today: commercial, isolating, and full of, even fueled by, bias. This was not inevitable. The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom (U California Press, 2023) argues that much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it. Jessa Lingel uses the politics and debates of gentrification to diagnose the massive, systemic problems blighting our contemporary internet: erosions of privacy and individual ownership, small businesses wiped out by wealthy corporations, the ubiquitous paywall. But there are still steps we can take to reclaim the heady possibilities of the early internet. Lingel outlines actions that internet activists and everyday users can take to defend and secure more protections for the individual and to carve out more spaces of freedom for the people—not businesses—online.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. 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

For over twenty years, James W. Cortada has pioneered research into how information shapes society. In Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments and Businesses (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), he tells the story of how information evolved since the mid-nineteenth century. Cortada argues that information increased in quantity, became more specialized by discipline (e.g., mathematics, science, political science), and more organized. Information increased in volume due to a series of innovations, such as the electrification of communications and the development of computers, but also due to the organization of facts and knowledge by discipline, making it easier to manage and access. He looks at what major disciplines have done to shape the nature of modern information, devoting chapters to the most obvious ones. Cortada argues that understanding how some features of information evolved is useful for those who work in subjects that deal with their very construct and application, such as computer scientists and those exploring social media and, most recently, history. The Birth of Modern Facts builds on Cortada's prior books examining how information became a central feature of modern society, most notably as a sequel to All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870 (OUP, 2016) and Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (R&L, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"It is not only for science to give to publishing, but the time has come for publishing to start giving back to science." Tiffany Gasbarrini clarifies the difference between commercial and mission-driven publishers and how publishers who aren't bound by commercial interests alone can make brave ideological publishing decisions. She also makes a passionate case for why telling stories in science can make all the difference in the way we perceive and trust science as a community and society.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s book is: Engage in Public Scholarship: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication, by Dr. Alex D. Ketchum. Public scholarship—sharing research with audiences outside of academic settings—has become increasingly necessary to counter the rise of misinformation, fill gaps from cuts to traditional media, and increase the reach of important scholarship. Engaging in these efforts often comes with the risk of harassment and threats—especially for women, people of color, queer communities, and precariously employed workers. Engage in Public Scholarship provides guidance on translating research into inclusive public outreach while ensuring that such efforts are safer and more accessible. Dr. Ketchum discusses practices and planning for a range of educational activities from in-person and online events, conferences, and lectures to publishing and working with the media, social media activity, blogging, and podcasting. Using an intersectional feminist lens, this book offers a concise approach to challenges and benefits of feminist and accessible public scholarship.Our guest is: Dr. Alex Ketchum, who is the Faculty Lecturer of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University. She is the Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab. She is the author of Engage in Public Scholarship!: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication (Concordia University Press, 2022), and Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses (2022). Since 2019, Ketchum has organized the SSHRC-funded Disrupting Disruptions: The Feminist and Accessible Publishing and Communications Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series. She is also the founder of The Feminist Restaurant Project, and co-founder and editor of The Historical Cooking Project, and the former co-founder of Food, Feminism, and Fermentation. She is published in Feminist Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. Dr. Ketchum was named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2021, and is involved in feminist, food, and environmental politics. She has worked on organic farms in Ireland and France, and she founded Farm House in Middletown, Connecticut, a living community dedicated to food politics work.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: A Primer for Teaching Digital History: 10 Design Principles by Jennifer Guiliano Roopika Risam and Jennifer Guiliano, editors, Reviews in Digital Humanities This podcast episode on Hope for the Humanities PhD This podcast episode on new ways of launching an online conference This episode on exploring public-facing humanities at historic sites Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Elissa Redmiles, Faculty Member and Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems; Founder and Managing Researcher of Human Computing Associates; and Visiting Scholar at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. We talk about reaching people with your research.Elissa Redmiles : "And so, when I think about communicating to my own specific research community, I think about what is my call to action that I would like my fellow researchers to do. And maybe they won't do that, and they'll do something completely different. But still, I publish to let them know about a space and to let them know about the problems in that space and so perhaps better understand why I or we or other researchers think that those problems are meaningful and worth addressing. It's my hope always that this can serve as the motivation for the technical work that my readers will pick up from there and develop in their own research." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Michelle Chihara, Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Annie Berke, the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. We talked about book reviewing in the age of the Internet and LA literary culture.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Irene Van Rossum and Avi do a deep dive into how Open Access works (or doesn't work) in the context for book manuscripts in the Humanities. Listeners will get a better understanding of transformative agreements and why different countries have entirely different perspectives on the importance and primacy of Open Access.Irene also discusses important and creative OA initiatives such as 'Path to Open' which encourages libraries and publishers to work together to ensure that everyone can access research.Finally, we will discuss why metadata has become so critical and how authors can work with publishers to ensure maximum exposure for their research.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices