Scholarly Communication

The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India (MIT Press, 2022), written by Janaki Srinivasan and published by MIT Press in October 2022, examines how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender, and the implications of this for development. Information, says Srinivasan, has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice. In this study, she examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation. She presents three cases in India—the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, government information in information kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—to explore three uses of information to support goals of social change. Countering claims that information is naturally and universally empowering, Srinivasan shows how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender. Srinivasan draws on archival and ethnographic research to challenge the idea of information as objective and factual. Using the concept of an “information order,” she examines how the meaning and value of information reflect the social relations in which it is embedded. She asks why casting information as a tool of development and solution to poverty appeals to actors across the political spectrum. She also shows how the power to label some things information and others not is at least as significant as the capacity to subsequently produce, access, and leverage information. The more faith we place in what information can do, she cautions, the less attention we pay to its political lives and to the role of specific social structures, individual agency, and material form in the defining, production, and use of that information.Janaki Srinivasan is Associate Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, in Bangalore, India.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

The NBN would not exist but for the work of university presses. So every year we celebrate the efforts of our colleagues at UPs during "University Press Week," which happens to be November 14 to 18. This year I talked to Charles Watkinson, director of the University of Michigan Press and president of the Association of University Presses. We discussed what UPs do, what makes them different from other publishers, how UP books are priced, and the future of open access publishing. We also talked about how to make a career in UP publishing. The AUP has a wonderful resource that will answer all your questions about UPs here. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saronik Bosu talks about humanities work engaging diverse communities and publics, misconceptions about what the ‘public’ in public humanities might mean as well as the recent attention paid to it by academic departments. In a longer version of the conversation, some individual instances of various digital humanities and archival projects are discussed. Here he speaks mainly from the perspective of his own work as a humanities podcaster and creator of humanities programming.Saronik Bosu is a doctoral candidate at the Department of English, New York University. He researches literary rhetoric and economic thought in contexts of decolonization. He is co-host of this podcast and the 2022-23 NYU-Mellon Public Humanities Doctoral Fellow. His work has appeared on journals like Interventions and Movable Type, as well as Avidly and Post45. He also makes art and works together its integration with scholarship.Image: © 2022 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History (Wits UP, 2022) is an exploration of particular sources of evidence on southern Africa’s early history. It gathers recent ideas about archives and asks the question: “How do we know, or think we know, what happened in the times before European colonialism?”Historians use a wide range of source materials for this work. What are these materials? Where can we find them? Who made them? When? Why? What are the problems with using them? The essays by well-known historians, archaeologists and other researchers engage these questions from a range of perspectives and in illuminating ways. Written from personal experience, they capture how these researchers encountered their archives of knowledge beyond the textbook. The aim is to make us think critically about where ideas about the time before the colonial era originate and to encourage us to think about why people in South Africa often refer to this “deep history” when arguing about public affairs in the present. The essays will appeal to students, academics, educationists, teachers, archivists, and museum practitioners.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

You’re going to an academic conference—and maybe even presenting a project! Whether you are going virtually or in person, for the first time or the tenth, presenting or just attending, you want to feel prepared. Are you? This podcast episode explores: Why we need to go to academic conferences. Why it can be difficult to navigate them. How can you get the most of out of it. Our guest is: Dr. Thomas J. Tobin, who is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is an internationally recognized speaker and author on quality in technology-enhanced education. His latest book is Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers, written with Katie Linder and Kevin Kelly, from Stylus Publishing. You can find him on Twitter @ThomasJTobin and at his website, Thomasjtobin.com.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender and an introvert, who has presented in dozens of academic conference, and like many of our listeners, she is still learning how to make the most of an academic conference.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: The Chronicle of Higher Ed article “How to Make the Most Out of An Academic Conference” 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” This article on The Introverts’ Guide to Speaking Up Quiet: The Power of Introverts, by Susan Cain The Craft of Research, by Wayne Booth et al The Research Companion, by Petra Boynton The Art of Creative Research, by Philip Gerald Welcome to The Academic Life! We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish a project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. 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. DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Barbara Sarnecka, Professor of Cognitive Sciences and Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies for Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. We talk about putting your mind in print. She is the author of The Writing Workshop: Write More, Write Better, Be Happier in Academia.Barbara Sarnecka : "The more quantitative a person's field of study is, the more likely they are to say that they just don't think that writing is a big requirement in their field. And they'll say, 'Well, writing isn't very important. I'm a biologist.' They imagine that writing is somehow for people in the humanities, or it's for playwrights or novelists, or something like that. But whenever anyone fails to be productive as a scientist, it's because they're not writing. It's because they're not publishing manuscripts or they're not producing funding proposals that are getting funded. It's not because they don't have enough ideas for experiments, or because they didn't collect enough data, or because they didn't learn to analyze the data properly. Those things are all kind of trivially easy, and that's why we can subcontract them to graduate students or the statistical consulting center or somebody to do them for us. You can't get somebody else to think for you, and you can't get somebody else to write for you." Find about more about Barbara, including why she chose to self-publish, in this interview. Read the research on Barbara's writing-shop intervention here. Read the research on cascading mentorship here and here.  Contact Barbara's editor at michael.dylan.rogers@gmail.com Daniel Shea is committed to helping scientists write at their best. Contact me at daniel.shea@kit.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebel Book Club is an online and in-person book club. Each month, over 1,000 people get together to discuss a non-fiction book, occasionally with the author as a participant. For new members, use code: REBELREADERBen Keene is an entrepreneur, author, and food journalist.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is there a strategy to communicating your research online? This episode explores: What an academic communications strategist does. Why having a strategy to your online presence is important. Common misperceptions about communicating online. Lessons learned from an academic communications strategist. The benefits and challenges to being an academic entrepreneur. Our guest is: Jennifer van Alstyne (@HigherEdPR), a communications strategist for professors and researchers. At The Academic Designer LLC, Jennifer helps people share their work effectively in online spaces like websites and social media. The Social Academic blog shares advice about managing your online presence in Higher Education. Jennifer is a Peruvian-American poet with a BA in English from Monmouth University, an MFA in Writing & Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School, and an MA in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She lives in San Diego, California. Connect with Jennifer on Twitter and LinkedIn.Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner energized by facilitating meaningful conversations and educational experiences. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as student success and assessment planning. Dana is the author of From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses, (Rutgers UP).Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Social Media How To’s Articles about managing your personal website Successes and Setbacks of Social Media: Impact on Academic Life edited by Cheyenne Seymour (Wiley) Social Media for Academics by Mark Carrigan, 2nd edition (Sage) This NBN conversation on how social media has shaped contemporary society. This NBN conversation on theories and practices of social media communication. Welcome to The Academic Life! You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and 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. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores this question using a case study of British academia. The book combines a rich array of quantitative and qualitative analysis, demonstrating the transformation of working conditions, institutional contexts, and research areas since the introduction of a metrics and quantification regime during the 1980s. Highlighting the complexity and ambivalences of metrics and quantification, as well as the uneven distribution of positive and negative impacts, the book offers essential reading for every academic, irrespective of the nation or institution in which they work. It also will be important for those seeing to better understand the role of metrics and markets in contemporary life.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Sarah Huffman (Assistant Director of the Center for Communication Excellence) and Elena Cotos (Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics in the English Department and Director of the Center for Communication Excellence) and Kimberly Becker, (Lecturer in English) — all three at Iowa State University. We talk about how to ruin your or anyone's reading experience of research articles by showing you just how much is going on in the text besides research!Kimberley Becker : "Less experienced writers of research tend to think that academic writing is this objective and faceless entity, when in fact it's very much negotiating lots of different social relationships. Academic writing is really pulling together this whole rhetorical situation of the author and the audience and the purpose. I think students, for example, get so bogged down in the complexity of the content — I mean this is very high-level content they have — that they forget that the reader has needs."Read Preparing to Publish (Iowa State University Digital Press, 2022) here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices