By Scott Jaschik. Many scientists today take it for granted that the research papers they want to read are available in English. But the dominance of English in scientific communication wasn't always so certain. Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (University of Chicago Press) explores the evolution of science and language. Read more...
By Carl Straumsheim. Academic, library and technology organizations are denouncing a new sharing and hosting policy adopted last month by publisher Elsevier, saying it undermines open-access policies at colleges and universities and prevents authors from sharing their work. Read more...
By Jeffrey R. Young. An education blog whose authors believe there’s too much hype around “personalized learning” technology has posted a series of video case studies about the trend, hoping to help get beyond overheated rhetoric. More...
By Casey Fabris. Though higher education is constantly changing, commencement ceremonies have largely stayed the same. A graduating student at Stanford Law School is trying to change that. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. Maybe John McWhorter is just being provocative in his post “Why Kim Kardashian Can’t Write Good.” Following up on his argument that texting and tweeting amount to “talking with your fingers,” he contends that we are at the dawn of a renewed oral society. We shouldn’t be so concerned, he says, that our students’ formal writing skills are slipping. Other primarily oral societies — the ancient Greeks, for instance — managed to think critically and develop persuasive arguments. More...
By Ben Yagoda. “What’s all this irony and pity?”
“What? Don’t you know about Irony and Pity?”
“No. Who got it up?”
“Everybody. They’re mad about it in New York.”
–Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
To paraphrase Philip Larkin, irony began in 1973, between Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Randy Newman’s fifth LP. More...
By Allan Metcalf. Nearly a century ago, in 1919, an association of these associations in the humanities and social sciences was formed, calling itself the American Council of Learned Societies. There were 13 original members, including the American Philosophical Society, the Archaeological Institute of America, and the American Historical Association; today there are 73, including such diverse groups as the African Studies Association, the American Society for Legal History, the American Folklore Society, the Society for Music Theory, the Dictionary Society of North America, and the Society for the History of Technology. More...
By Anne Curzan. Two Sundays ago, a graph in The New York Times Magazine caught my eye. The title was “Dear Reader: Are You Prone to Profanity?” The graph captured the results of an online study conducted by the newspaper’s research-and-analytics department in January. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. Noam Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance has been controversial in linguistics and psycholinguistics for 50 years. The proponents of generative grammar presuppose it and rely on it, and have tried explaining the distinction many times, often unsuccessfully. I recently came across a neat way to encapsulate it that comes not from a linguist but from a mathematical meteorologist. More...
By George Williams. Today being Global Accessibility Awareness Day, you might be interested in finding opportunities for learning more about the topic of accessibility in digital environments. If that’s the case, then you are in luck: later this summer, Erin Templeton and I will be teaching a workshop entitled Digital Accessibility: Designing and Adapting Projects For All Users at HILT (Humanities Intensive Learning & Teaching) 2015. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
