By Ryan Cordell. It’s hard to believe, but our spring semester is already finished. I’m likely grading students’ final projects as you read this. So here’s a (very quick) list of worthwhile weekend reading.
Roopika Risam writes about “Rethinking Peer Review in the Age of Digital Humanities” for the journal Ada. While the focus is on the specific challenges of evaluating digital humanities work, Risam’s argument and recommendations apply across a range of fields.
Rethinking peer review in the age of digital academe is a task that goes beyond the question of medium or platform to a question of epistemology. That which we call “digital scholarship” is not simply print scholarship gone digital but raises questions of genre and gives rises to its own conventions. More...
Weekend Reading: School’s (Almost) Out For Summer Edition
Open Thread Wednesday: Breathe
By George Williams. For many of us, it’s the time of semester when everything seems to be piling up at once: committee reports, grading, planning for the summer, planning for the fall, book orders for upcoming classes, last-minute student advising, as well as all of the regular responsibilities that are a part of our personal lives. Here at ProfHacker, we’ve often encouraged our readers to remember to take a break. In this week’s open thread, we’d like to hear your best suggestions for how to go about doing just that. More...
And the Other Is a Jellyfish
By Geoffrey Pullum. Last week the British prime minister, the right honorable David Cameron, was trying to enjoy a quiet holiday on Lanzarote, the easternmost island of the Islas Canarias, ignoring the lurking press photographers constantly seeking to document his leisure activities. Unfortunately he also ignored the advice of locals about sea swimming, and had a painful encounter with an organism of the subphylum Medusozoa.
Cameron is not very popular in Britain. The right wing sees him as vastly too liberal (he pushed through the legalization of gay marriage!), and the leftists see him as just another Eton-educated posh boy siding with the bankers against the people. On the social media, the chatter rapidly sided with the jellyfish. And for me as a linguist the interest lay in the rhetorical structure of the way they crafted their witty remarks and jokes. More...
Writing and Manure
By William Germano. My last post was about Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a play that apparently isn’t done with me yet. You will remember that the mystery of Jack Worthing’s birth is revealed in that play’s final moments—Jack turns out to be Ernest Moncrieff, Algy’s elder brother. Happy ending, three marriages, curtain. All the play’s puzzles have been solved. More...
Yo Hablo HTML
By Rose Jacobs. We are nearly five months into Britain’s “Year of Code,” an effort to promote computer-coding skills among Britons young and old. The British media’s coverage spiked in February, when the campaign’s director admitted she couldn’t code a computer to save her life, but has ebbed since. More...
But
By Allan Metcalf. When I assign my freshmen to write about both sides of an issue, I tell them to pay special attention to the connective words they use. If you’re presenting the other side, you have to make clear that you aren’t suddenly changing your mind and going back on your own position. So you need to introduce the other side with words like “True,” “Admittedly,” “It could be argued that,” to signal clearly that this is somebody else’s position, not yours. More...
To Whomever It May Concern
By Ben Yagoda. I was gobsmacked the other day while watching an episode of the NBC series Crisis, which I would describe as my guilty pleasure except that I don’t feel especially guilty about it, and it’s not that pleasurable. Anyhow, the show is about bad guys who kidnap a school bus full of children of the rich and powerful, including the U.S. president’s son. A Secret Service agent and one kid, who you can tell is a genius because he’s a little chubby and has curly hair. More...
Who’s Looking for College-Educated Workers?
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “The Online College Labor Market”
Authors: Anthony P. Carnevale, Tamara Jayasundera, Dmitri Repnikov
Organization: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. More...
Historically Black Colleges Feel the Effects of the Recession
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “America’s Public HBCUs: A Four-State Comparison of Institutional Capacity and State Funding Priorities”
Authors: William Casey Boland and Marybeth Gasman
Organization: University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Minority-Serving Institutions. More...
Public Sees College as More Than Just Job Preparation, Report Says
By Karin Fischer. Rhetoric from policy makers may focus on the need to ensure that college graduates are competitive in the workplace, but students, faculty members, and others engaged in higher education take a more expansive view of the value of a degree, a new report from the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums Institute suggests. College, they said, shouldn’t be just about picking up job skills but should expose students to new ideas and diverse fields and should encourage critical thinking. More...
