Jan Ekels, Interior with young man reading, 1784 (Manchester City Art Gallery)
Karin Wulf, a well-known history academic, who effectively straddles the divide between academic and popular writing, revealed her methodology for appraising an academic work in an interesting post, a …
I can’t resist a book that proposes to tell me about the history of reading. It is, to be fair, a challenging subject, covering thousands of years, and the entirety of the world. So, before immersing myself in the details of …
Reading Time: 3minutesPhoto by Ugur Akdemir on Unsplash
I had high hopes for a post entitled “How books influence digital culture”. It’s an interesting topic; but the post itself (on the Good E-Reader platform) is a disservice to books. Moreover, it’s barely literate, …
If you ask Google “What is the ugliest language in the world?” it will give you an answer (Kannada, according to Google, at least until 2021, when there was a minor scandal in the Indian …
Reading Time: 3minutesImage by Jonny Glos at Unsplash
A remarkable comment (“Open excess: remove open access burden from REF”) on the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) claims that open access is a burden on higher education. The comment, by three research managers at …
Daniel Russell was for over ten years the head of search at Google, so a book by him about search raises considerable expectations. His book is written for the common reader, I accept, but it was a bit of a shock …
Photo from Wikipedia, by Vmenkov – Own work (CC BY-SA 3.0)
There was an excellent presentation at this year’s UKSG Conference on scholarly society publishers, followed by a preprint article on Zenodo. The survey, by Rob Johnson and Elle Malcolmson …
