Scholarly Communication

The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first century The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton UP, 2021) provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian's craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries. Zachary Schrag begins by explaining how to ask good questions and then guides readers step-by-step through all phases of historical research, from narrowing a topic and locating sources to taking notes, crafting a narrative, and connecting one's work to existing scholarship. He shows how researchers extract knowledge from the widest range of sources, such as government documents, newspapers, unpublished manuscripts, images, interviews, and datasets. He demonstrates how to use archives and libraries, read sources critically, present claims supported by evidence, tell compelling stories, and much more. Featuring a wealth of examples that illustrate the methods used by seasoned experts, The Princeton Guide to Historical Research reveals that, however varied the subject matter and sources, historians share basic tools in the quest to understand people and the choices they made. Zachary M. Schrag is professor of history at George Mason University and the author of Ethical Imperialism and The Great Society Subway. His teaching website is historyprofessor.org. He lives in Arlington, Virginia. Twitter @zacharyschragCaleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professor Sarah Willen talks about her part in creating the Pandemic Journaling Project and how that has morphed into a series of visual exhibitions that emphasis how we all can work to create new histories, shape archives, and reclaim our own creativity and power.Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"The Partially Examined Life" is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it." In this interview, I chat with PEL host, Wes Alwan, about creating one of the longest-running philosophy podcasts. Wes discusses the personal value he's gotten from participating in publically-available debates and discussions. We also talk about the relevance of philosophy today and how to deal with controversial subjects.Wes Alwan (wes@partiallyexaminedlife.com) also co-hosts the literature and film podcast Subtext, and has a Substack newsletter at wesalwan.com. In graduate school, he focused on ancient philosophy, Kant, and Nietzsche. For his undergraduate degree he attended a small "great books" school in Annapolis, Maryland called St. John's college.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the feeling of archival kismet? And how can we reimagine the format of academic conferences to better support scholars? This episode explores: The complex feelings of finding unexpected things in an archive. Why using conference presentations as openings for scholarly conversations is important. How Dr. Thompson founded an online conference during the pandemic, and her future plans for Archival Kismet. What can make online conferences more inclusive and inexpensive. Tips for feeling comfortable presenting online, even when things go wrong. Our guest is: Dr. Courtney Thompson, who is an associate history professor at Mississippi State University, and the founder of Archival Kismet online conferences. Her research and teaching interests are centered in the history of nineteenth-century American medicine; medical humanities; history of the mind and body; history of women, gender, and sexuality; feminist science studies; history of emotions; visual culture; science and crime; psychiatry and mental illness.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: The Archival Kismet Conference page This podcast on making the most of an academic conference This podcast on getting started on your research The Chronicle of Higher Ed article “How to Make the Most of a Virtual Conference” The Chronicle of Higher Ed article “How To Cope With Presentation Anxiety” The Research Companion: A Practical Guide, by Petra Boynton The Art of Creative Research, by Philip Gerald How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History of History, by Marshall Poe Where Research Begins, by Thomas Mullaney and Christopher Rea Welcome to The Academic Life! On the Academic Life channel we embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Find us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A close reading of Wikipedia's article on the Egyptian Revolution reveals the complexity inherent in establishing the facts of events as they occur and are relayed to audiences near and far.Wikipedia bills itself as an encyclopedia built on neutrality, authority, and crowd-sourced consensus. Platforms like Google and digital assistants like Siri distribute Wikipedia's facts widely, further burnishing its veneer of impartiality. But as Heather Ford demonstrates in Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2022), the facts that appear on Wikipedia are often the result of protracted power struggles over how data are created and used, how history is written and by whom, and the very definition of facts in a digital age.In Writing the Revolution, Ford looks critically at how the Wikipedia article about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution evolved over the course of a decade, both shaping and being shaped by the Revolution as it happened. When data are published in real time, they are subject to an intense battle over their meaning across multiple fronts. Ford answers key questions about how Wikipedia's so-called consensus is arrived at; who has the power to write dominant histories and which knowledges are actively rejected; how these battles play out across the chains of circulation in which data travel; and whether history is now written by algorithms.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. 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

Becoming the Writer You Already Are (Sage, 2022) helps scholars uncover their unique writing process and design a writing practice that fits how they work. Author Michelle R. Boyd introduces the Writing Metaphor as a reflective tool that can help you understand and overcome your writing fears: going from "stuck" to "unstuck" by drawing on skills you already have at your fingertips. She also offers an experimental approach to trying out any new writing strategy, so you can easily fill out the parts of your writing process that need developing. The book is ideal for dissertation writing seminars, graduate students struggling with the transition from coursework to dissertation work, scholars who are supporting or participating in writing groups, and marginalized scholars whose writing struggles have prompted them to internalize the bias that others have about their ability to do exemplary research.Michelle R. Boyd is the founder of the InkWell Academic Writing Retreats.Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Remaking of Archival Values by Victoria Hoyle (Routledge, October 2022) posits that archival theory and practice are fields in flux, and that recent critical archival discourse that addresses neoliberalism, racism, and the legacies of colonialism and patriarchy represents a disruption not only to established principles but also to the values that underpin them.Using critical discourse analysis and comparing theory and practice from the UK and the Anglophone world, Hoyle explores the challenges faced by scholars, institutions, organizations, and practitioners in embedding new values. She demonstrates how persistent underlying discursive structures about archives have manifested from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Qualitative and participatory research in the UK shows how conceptions of archival value arise, are expressed, and become authorized in practice at international, national, and local levels. Considering what might be learnt from similar debates in public history and cultural heritage studies, the book asks if and how dominant epistemologies of the archive can be dismantled amidst systems of power that resist change.As Hoyle reflects in this interview, “I call the book The Remaking of Archival Values and I talk throughout about how my own archival values have been remade, but I don’t mean by that that we arrive at a new set of archival values. But rather: that we acknowledge that this process of remaking is fundamental to our practice, and that we enter this position of suspension in order to continue that process of remaking perpetually rather than expecting some kind of end point.”The Remaking of Archival Values is relevant to researchers and students in the field of archival and information studies, as well as practitioners who work with archives around the world. It will also speak to the interests of those working in the fields of cultural heritage, archaeology, museum studies, public history, and gender and race studies.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. 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

Listen to this interview of David Lindsay, emeritus professor of the University of Western Australia. We talk about his book Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words (CSIRO Publishing, 2020) and how your hypothesis can save the communication of your research.David Lindsay : "It's quite unfortunate that we're training our undergraduates in science this way. I mean, undergraduates know that when they write something, for example, a protocol to be graded—undergraduates know that their professors are seeking to find out whether the student knows something about the subject. So, as long as there's any semblance at all in the text that the student knows something about the subject, well, then the professor ticks a box and marks the student accordingly. This just encourages undergraduates to dump knowledge, to be writing any sort of rubbish just so long as something substantial-like bubbles out of it that seems to suggest that they have a reasonable understanding of the subject. But when these same undergrads get to the point of writing this way for scientific publication, well, then it all comes crashing down, because they can't just throw information together and hope that reviewers or editors will say, 'Oh, yeah, I think I can see what you mean. You know stuff.'" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dealing with the colonial archive entails acknowledging the inability to know everything, accounting for the archive’s limited and incomplete condition. Dealing with the colonial archive is not merely about stories of the past but also about the history of the present, and how it is interrupted by the past. — Irene Hilden, in conversation with New Books Network.With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive: Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive's Acoustic Legacies (Leuven University Press, 2022) presents a historical ethnography of a metropolitan institution that participated in the production and preservation of colonial structures of power and knowledge.This book examines sound objects and listening practices that render the coloniality of knowledge fragile and inconsistent, revealing the absent presences of colonial subjects who are given little or no place in established national narratives and collective memories. Based on research at the Berlin Sound Archive (Lautarchiv), which consists of an extensive collection of sound recordings compiled for scientific purposes in the first half of the 20th century, Irene Hilden engages with the archive by focusing on recordings produced under colonial conditions.This publication is available as a free ebook at OAPEN Library, JSTOR, Project Muse, and Open Research Library.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. 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

Scholarship is frequently imagined as a solitary pursuit, done mostly in archives or with books. This CHI Salon will feature scholars pursuing alternatives to this model and who regularly publish scholarship that emerges out of community activism, who co-write or co-edit books, and who actively seek out and create new models of authorship and research. Amherst Presidential Scholar Karma Chávez (UT-Austin) and Amherst College Press authors Megan Jeanette Myers (Iowa State) and Edward Paulino (John Jay) discuss their past publication experiences and the opportunities and challenges of collaborative scholarship.This panel is in honor of Open Access Week 2022 (Oct. 24-30).Participants:Karma Chávez is Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor in the Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas-Austin. The author of The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (Washington, 2021), Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Illinois, 2013), and the book of interviews Palestine on the Air (Illinois, 2019), Chavez has also co-edited four volumes: Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation (with Eithne Luibhéid, U of Illinois Press), Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (with the Feminist Editorial Collective: other members are: Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Aren Z. Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Mishuana Goeman, and Amber Jamilla Musser, NYU Press), Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies (with Cindy L. Griffin, SUNY Press) and Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (Penn State University Press).Megan Jeanette Myers is associate professor of Spanish at Iowa State University where she co-directs the Languages and Cultures for Professions program. She is also a Faculty Fellow for Active Learning and Engagement at Iowa State’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. Myers is the author of Mapping Hispaniola: Third Space in Dominican and Haitian Literature (UVA, 2019), co-editor of the multimodal and multivocal anthology, The Border of Lights Reader: Bearing Witness to Genocide in the Dominican Republic (ACP, 2021), and just returned from a Fulbright Fellowship in the Dominican Republic. Edward Paulino is associate professor of Global History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Paulino is the author of Dividing Hispaniola: The Dominican Republic’s Border Campaign against Haiti, 1930-1961 (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) and co-editor of The Border of Lights Reader: Bearing Witness to Genocide in the Dominican Republic (ACP, 2021). His scholarly articles and chapters have appeared widely and his research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation, and the New York State Archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices