The fine details of this map are worth close attention. The design, layout, judicious employment of spot colour, inscriptions, inclusions and exclusions are carefully modulated to provide rich material for ruminative viewing. This folio does, after all, present the sacred omphalos of the world, a space layered with ancient meanings and caught up…[Read more]

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship seeks scholarly submissions on the technical, theoretical, cultural, and historical aspects of comics studies that gives vitality to the form and challenges readers’ assumptions about it. This document is the full call for papers published on 30th October 2019 on the journal web site.

This essay situates the file-sharing website AAARG (primarily used to share academic texts in the humanities) in the context of the economics of the contemporary academy. Contingent employment prevents access to research libraries, while reduced library budgets and the exploitative practices of publishing conglomerates such as Elsevier limit…[Read more]

Published 5/4/2016: A deconstruction of distant reading and a close reading of Jorge Luis Borges’ “On Rigor in Science.” The undecidability of the political and conceptual borders of the story challenges the possibility of any absolutist and orientalist cartographic project (such as Moretti’s literary mapmaking). Implications for the digital…[Read more]

This essay deconstructs Jane Bennett’s and Erwin Schrödinger’s theories of life to demonstrate the untenability of defining life on the basis of either identity (relation to self) or difference (relation to other). Because the living thing is undecidably self and other, its traditional bond to the self-relation of teleology is untenable. Yet reli…[Read more]

This article treats late ancient rabbinic texts (ca. 1st-early 3rd cents. CE), reading them as biology, and following their ideas about the limits and possibilities of reproductive and species variation. I read sources from the tractates of Niddah, Kil’ayim, and Bekhorot, in the Mishnah and Toseta, as expressions of a science of generation, or a b…[Read more]

A description and history of two rare table-top presses at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, used there to print specimen labels between around 1850 and 1970.

Introduction to the book Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society

One of Anton Pannekoek’s main scientific projects was to provide a representation of the appearance of the Milky Way – an object he believed to be an optical illusion. This paper elucidates how Pannekoek thought the Milky Way appearance was formed by a combination of human psychology and physiology, and why he attributed such significance to it.…[Read more]

This is a ‘study of a choir’; the author joined the choir for three months and participated in every aspect, from rehearsals, dinners, a meeting to a gig. They chatted to the members, sang with them and talked to the choir leader and manager about everything from the ethos of the choir, to whether meat was served often enough at dinner. It was the…[Read more]

What actions should the Massachusetts Office for Refugees and Immigrants (ORI) undertake to ensure proper follow-up for identified physical and mental health issues among Muslim refugees?

Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), prominent astronomer and world-renowned socialist theorist, stood at the nexus of the revolutions in politics, science and the arts of the early twentieth century. His astronomy was uniquely visual and highly innovative, while his politics were radical. Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society collects…[Read more]

Cure Ribelli è una pubblicazione che nasce dalle attività di ricerca e disseminazione svolte da WeMake nell’ambito del progetto Digital Social Innovation for Europe, un programma supportato dalla Commissione Europea che punta a rafforzare la rete di organizzazioni che propongono l’utilizzo delle tecnologie con una prospettiva mirata all’i…[Read more]

The publication Rebelling with Care is the result of the research and dissemination activities carried out by WeMake within the framework of DSI for Europe, a project supported by the European Commission to reinforce the network of organizations using technologies to make a positive impact on society. The DSI paradigm revolves around key concepts…[Read more]

This study of Leibniz’s philosophical views on mathematics starts from the rank he assigned to them in the encyclopedia of knowledge. Mathematics, in many Leibnitian writings, is proposed to other disciplines as an example to follow: they are an essential component of the new, at the same time encyclopaedic and demonstrative knowledge he is…[Read more]

Leibniz was undoubtedly a many-sided man, and a polymathic mind, if ever there was one. The concept of analysis is notoriously, for its part, a polycephalous monster, and nearly all its meanings are spread through Leibniz’s works, in juridical, scientific, mathematical, or philosophical contexts, under different conditions and with different p…[Read more]

The article processing charge (APC) is the specter haunting the open access movement. Advocates for open access (OA) face plenty of other obstacles, including tolled journal prestige, researcher inertia, and the life-draining embrace of the publishing oligopolists. But the APC—the fee many publishers charge authors to publish—is a homegrown pro…[Read more]