Todd Carpenter, in a Scholarly Kitchen article, praises Esther Dyson’s phrase “garbage deletion”, by which she means the process of removing objects in a search and leaving only the good contents. “Good” here means appropriate …
Reading Time: 4minutesThe Praca do Comercio, Lisbon
I am on holiday in Portugal, and, like many tourists, I have an idle curiosity about the city of Lisbon and about the history of the country. Where better to begin than looking at a general …
What are libraries for? This question was prompted by being given a copy of The Library: A Fragile History (2021), by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, for Christmas (full disclosure: I asked …
I picked up a copy of this successful reference book in a charity shop for £3.50. It was the first edition, from 1983 and there have been at least two subsequent editions, but the concept and coverage are unlikely to have …
Reading Time: 5minutesA delivery robot: an example of innovation in practice (Image: Starship Technologies)
How do you communicate, or encourage, technical innovation in academic publishing? This is something the STM Association has been grappling with for years. Innovation is a good thing, but …
Metaphors help us make sense of things, that’s for sure. Without going deeply into Lakoff territory (he claims there are “good” and “bad” metaphors, for very idiosyncratic reasons), I found some of the metaphors …
Reading Time: 5minutesCreating new knowledge with AI: an illustration by Paul Cleverly of a tool based on text embedding that plots two variables against each other to enable new knowledge in geoscience to be generated.
The Biblia Pauperum, the “Bible of the Poor”, printed in the lower Rhine region or Low countries, c1460. An example of whole-page illustration, where the image, a woodcut, replaces the text entirely. Within a few years, integrated text and illustrations
Albrecht Pfister, Die Edelstein, thought to be the first illustrated book (1460s). The illustration is a woodcut. [illustration from the Stadtbibliothek Berlin, public domain]
Books about book history are usually triumphalist: how the printed word democratized knowledge, made learning possible, changed …
