LSE - Small Logo
LSE - Small Logo

Sierra Williams

April 12th, 2014

Impact Round-Up 12th April: Academese, #datadramas, and how not to think about the humanities.

1 comment

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Sierra Williams

April 12th, 2014

Impact Round-Up 12th April: Academese, #datadramas, and how not to think about the humanities.

1 comment

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Managing Editor Sierra Williams presents a round-up of popular stories from around the web on higher education, academic impact, and trends in scholarly communication.

What would happen if you lost all of your research data? by Julia Giddings at Digital Science explores such a situation faced by Billy Hinchen when his laptop with four years worth of research data was stolen. Hear his story here. But horror stories like this aside, there are many options out there to help make it easier to store and preserve research data. You can share your experiences with this at the hashtag #datadramas.

“Academese” and the Idioms of Crisis by Christopher Kark in Arcade weaves a magical response on the “turgid prose” of academia which incorporates reflections on Herodotus, postmodern apocalypse, and Haruki Murakami:

What I would like to suggest is that “academese”—what I designate as all discourse in the humanities and social sciences (which can occasionally be dense and even obscurantist)—taps into anxieties about language’s ability to signify in a world beset by self-generated “crises.” I say “designate” rather than “define” because academese is sufficiently variegated to resist any binding definition. Many beautiful works of non-fiction have come off university presses in recent years; so have many of the most grating. [read more…seriously read more]

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAImage credit: Nuremberg Chronicle, by Hartmann Schedel (Wikimedia, Public Domain)

The Bournemouth University Research Blog highlights a call for evidence: BIS Select Committee Inquiry into University-Business Collaboration. The closing date for this call is Wednesday 23 April so just a few weeks left to weigh-in on business-university collaboration in the UK.

How not to think about the humanities by David Palumbo-Liu:

My prediction will be that, given our deeply troubled and newly precarious world, there will be a huge resurgence in the humanities. Maybe in colleges, but certainly in newly revalued life styles. There is only so much tolerance the human spirit has for denying itself the benefits of reflecting on why and how we are alive and live together. [read more]

Why and how should you optimize academic articles for search engines? by Witold Kieńć at Open Science:

…some people are starting to consider the ways of making their research more visible on the net. This is a controversial issue and it can be interpreted as cheating or unfair competition, but in fact good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices is nothing of the kind. As you will see, academic SEO is just a set of a few tips that you should consider after finishing work on your book or paper, and which could help you to get views, downloads and citations. However, it will only work if the publication itself is good and interesting enough. Academic SEO does not substitute but supports the quality of content. [read more]

UK funder explains clamp-down on open access – Nature‘s Richard Van Noorden interviews Wellcome Trust’s Robert Kiley on UK efforts to push for wider open access compliance and how to address the inflation of hybrid publishers’ article processing fees:

If we can get the costs of the open-access market under control — make sure the hybrid model works as a functional market that is sensitive to price — that may encourage people to get to gold…I fear if we just accept 12 months or 24 months as an acceptable embargo then that transition will probably become almost a permanent state. [read more]

In honour of Graduate-Professional Student Appreciation Week in the US, Gabriela Montell at The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae blog has a no-nonsense piece on Making It Through Grad School: The Vitae Primer:

Buckle up, buttercup, and get ready for one heck of a ride. Katy Meyers, a guest poster on ProfHacker, says trying to get through your first year of grad school is a lot like trying to survive a zombie apocalypse: Taking care of yourself and staying fit helps, and it’s easier to survive as a group than it is to go it alone. [read more]

roller coasterImage credit: James Loesch (Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA)

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

About the author

Sierra Williams

Posted In: Academic communication | Open Access

1 Comments