On scholarly traditions, quantitative assessments, and academic malpractices in Italy – and how someone disagreed (Isis, Vol. 110, n. S1, pp. 15-17 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/707594)

Semantic and syntactical judgments play a central role in the development of classification systems. Syndetic relationships are relationships between indexing terms, sometimes referred to as cross references. Due to the extensiveness of synonyms for different concepts in natural languages, subject indexing has historically focused on developing…[Read more]

The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant…[Read more]

Social organizations, institutions, governments, and bureaucracies are all manifestations of power distribution. Many contemporary theories on power are at least partly informed by notions that were introduced in General Systems Theory. Public libraries are open systems. In an average organization, a hierarchy divides tasks, sets rules, and…[Read more]

What Do You Mean?” was an undeniable bop of its era in which Justin Bieber explores the ambiguities of romantic communication. (I pinky promise this will soon make sense for scholarly communication librarians interested in artificial intelligence [AI].) When the single hit airwaves in 2015, there was a meta-debate over what Bieber meant to add t…[Read more]

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]

Poster presentation for 2019 United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association annual conference.

Just as dissertations are a requirement for most PhD programs, culminating recitals are a degree requirement for students in the University of Washington (UW) School of Music (SoM) Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Performance program.…[Read more]

Although conversations about information literacy have grown substantially since the ACRL Competency Standards (2000) and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016) were introduced, a significant amount of fuzzy concept use remains concerning certain information literacy ideas. Sometimes this fuzziness is the result of…[Read more]

Short review with episode highlights of the New York Times Music Popcast podcast. Written specifically for librarians with an interest in the similarities/disparities between popular digital media content models and scholarly digital media. This includes a short overview of the podcast, its general relation to scholarly communication, a highlight…[Read more]

Inspired by discussions at the 2017 Library Publishing Forum, An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing 1.0 was created by the members of the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing Task Force, with the assistance of many community members who served as peer reviewers and workshop participants, as well as the staff of the Educopia Institute.…[Read more]

The movement for open access publishing (OA) is often said to have its roots in the scientific disciplines, having been popularized by scientific publishers and formalized through a range of top‐down policy interventions. But there is an often‐neglected prehistory of OA that can be found in the early DIY publishers of the late 1980s and early 199…[Read more]

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]

Historic Nova Scotia is a digital humanities and public history project that aims to bring community histories to life online (https://historicnovascotia.ca/). This paper will explore how collaborative, digital-storytelling can help bridge the gap between heritage theory and practice. We will provide an overview of the project followed by specific…[Read more]

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]

The issue of sharing course material outside of the classroom is very much intertwined with academic integrity and information literacy issues. This chapter explores the key issues surrounding this topic. First, this chapter explores the ill-conceived notions that might exist around students’ perceptions that everything on the internet is free a…[Read more]

This paper explores the extent to which the ideals of ‘openness’ are being applied to physical knowledge resources and research spaces. The study investigates the relationship between academic library access policies and institutional positions on open access/open science publishing. Analysis of library access policies from twenty academic ins…[Read more]