Scholarly Communication

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Why Dr. Marshall Poe left a tenured professorship to create the New Books Network How his own experience with dyslexia inspired his book-talk podcasts, Why he wouldn’t want to go back to being a professor now, Common misconceptions—plus some good advice—about starting a podcast The NBN’s role in democratizing education and in supporting academic presses. Our guest is: Dr. Marshall Poe, who is a historian, writer, podcaster, and editor. He is the founder and editor of the New Books Network, an online collection of podcast interviews with a wide range of nonfiction authors which began as a single channel in 2007 and has since grown into an archived audio library containing thousands of NBN episodes. He has taught Russian, European, Eurasian, and world history at universities including Harvard, Columbia, University of Iowa, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Poe has also authored and edited of a number of books for children and adults. He lives in Northampton, MA.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator of the Academic Life.Listeners to this episode might also be interested in: A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet, by Marshall Poe Articles by Marshall Poe in the Atlantic The Grinnell College History Department The Grinnell College podcast channel on the NBN  The Russian and Eurasian Studies channel on the NBN  You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about 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

Listen to this interview of Julia Molinari, lecturer in professional academic communication at The Open University (UK) and independent researcher. We talk her book What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022) and about the things people use academic writing for.Julia Molinari : "We need to ensure that teachers of academic writing have access to scholarship and can do the research that they need to do in order to sensitize themselves to the different ways of conceiving of writing. Because I see scholarship very much as a lever to the change that needs to happen in higher education. Scholarship means, for the teacher of EAP, knowing what has been written about academic writing and knowing that there isn't just one standard form, there isn't just one template that says, 'This is academic. This is not academic.' So, enabling practitioners to do research, to do the scholarship — this is something that requires an institutional commitment: people need to have time built into their contracts, they need to be literally paid to do the scholarship, to be aware of what's at stake when it comes to academic writing."The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Should academic scholars trust machine translation for the publication of their academic articles? In this episode, Avi Staiman and Prof. Ana Guerberof Arenas discuss the evolution of machine translation and the most recent developments in machine translation technology. Ana shares her insight on the potential pitfalls of relying on machine translation for unpublished manuscripts. She also shares the results of her recent study on the advantages of human translation for creative and literary texts.Ana Guerberof Arenas is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at University of Groningen. Her project (CREAMT) looks at the impact of MT on translation creativity and the reader's experience in the context of literary texts. Ana is also a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Multimodal Technologies at University of Surrey (UK) where she is a member of the Centre for Translation Studies. She has worked more than twenty years in the translation/localization industry in roles that ranged from translator to operations manager. She has authored refereed articles and book chapters on MT post-editing productivity, quality and experience; pre-editing and post-editing; reading comprehension of MT output; translator training and creativity, and reading experience with different translation modalities.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ADST has the world’s largest collection of U.S. diplomatic oral history. They have over 2,500 oral histories at ADST.orgSusan Rockwell Johnson is the president of ADST since November 2016. She is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service (retired) with over three decades of distinguished service in a broad range of bilateral and multilateral assignments in and out of the State Department.Margery B. Thompson directs ADST’s book-related programs, advises diplomats and others on editing and publishing matters, and coordinates the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series. Before joining ADST in 1995, she was director of publications and editor at the Georgetown University Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) from 1980 to 1994.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Sean Guillory. Sean did something pretty remarkable (and hard): He started a successful academic podcast. It's called the SRB Podcast and deals with Russian and Eurasian affairs. In the interview, Sean explains how he did it, how he does it, and his current project, a wonderful narrative podcast called Teddy Goes to the USSR. I highly recommend you subscribe to the SRB Podcast and Teddy Goes to the USSR. You can follow Sean on Twitter here: @seansrussiablog. Sean Guillory is the Digital Scholarship Curator at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.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

Founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies, the American Historical Association provides leadership for the discipline and promotes the critical role of historical thinking in public life. The Association defends academic freedom, develops professional standards, supports innovative scholarship and teaching, and helps to sustain and enhance the work of historians. As the largest membership association of professional historians in the world (over 11,500 members), the AHA serves historians in a wide variety of professions and represents every historical era and geographical area. James Grossman is Executive Director of the American Historical Association. He was previously Vice President for Research and Education at the Newberry Library, and has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Diego.James H. Sweet is Vilas-Jartz Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught since 2004. He is a historian of Africa and the African diaspora, with a particular focus on the cultures and politics of enslaved Africans in the Americas.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Roslyn Petelin, Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, Australia. We talk about her book How Writing Works: A Field Guide to Effective Writing (Routledge, 2021) writing well and knowing why.Roslyn Petelin : "My book caters for all kinds of writers: student writers, creative writers, technical writers, journalistic writers, corporate writers, all of whom need to be able to write well, write successfully, for either personal or corporate credibility."Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Dave Harris, a writing coach who uses principles from design to help authors develop writing practices. We talk about his book, Literature Review and Research Design: A Guide to Effective Research Practice (Routledge, 2019), and the ongoing conversation that is research.Dave Harris : "And one of the important elements of thinking of your research as a conversation with your community of scholars is that the gaps in the literature are, to some extent, the things that others have left unsaid. So, we're in this conversation, and one person mentions an idea and they mention three factors of that idea, and there's a fourth factor that they didn't mention — well, that's your gap in the literature, and you jump in and you say, 'Well, we also want to talk about this fourth factor.'"Clear your thoughts with Dave!Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Zen Faulkes, instructor at the School of Interdisciplinary Science, McMaster University, Canada. We talk about his book Better Posters: Plan, Design and Present an Academic Poster (Pelagic Publishing, 2021) and efficiency.Zen Faulkes : "Any time that you're very early on in a project, you'll have tendency (as I call it) to democratize data. You want to have all the data be important. You think everything's important when you're just at the start of a project. But when you've been at the project longer, when you've had the time to sit with the data and with your questions and the ideas — then you start realizing, 'Of all the stuff I've done, this part right here, this is the thing that is really the key result. This is going to be the thing that other people are going to be the most interested in.' And so I think that this is a skill: being able to figure out, What are the most critical things in terms of what I think the project is about, and what are most likely going to be the things that are critical for other people — what's going to be most valuable for other members of my research community."See more posters here!Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The American Association of Geographers (AAG) is a non-profit scientific and educational society aimed at advancing the understanding, study, and importance of geography and related fields. Its headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. The organization was founded on December 29, 1904, in Philadelphia. As of 2020, the association has more than 10,000 members, from nearly 100 countries.Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder and President of the AAG. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices