(First paragraphs.) — The notion of “mental time” refers to the experience and awareness of time, including that of past, present, and future, and that of the passing of time. This experience and awareness of time raises a number of puzzling questions. How do we experience time? What exactly do we experience when we experience time? Do we actua…[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]

Claudia Ruitenberg’s recent work on democratic education has spurred an important debate.1 On the one hand, philosophers of educa-tion such as Amy Guttman and Dennis Thompson, and more recently Tomas Englund, draw from John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas to claim that democratic education should be rooted in deliberative competence, consensus pr…[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 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]

In this paper, we offer an analysis of the ​because ​X construction as non-elliptical structures. Beside English, Dutch, and German, similar constructions exist in a number of other languages as well. Furthermore, there are also constructions, albeit formally similar and diachronically related to ​because ​X, that are ellipses because they can be…[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]

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]

There is a traditional narrative within information studies regarding precision and recall measures. Precision and recall have been the most commonly used retrieval metrics and are the basis for more complicated and accurate information retrieval evaluations. Relevance, which is the criterion by which both recall and precision are judged, is…[Read more]

Completed in early 1944, Robert Desnos’s militant series of 25 poems in Contrée evokes memories of a lost peace and calls for the defeat of the German occupiers. Suggesting the desecration of the human body by the occupiers, Picasso cut his cubist–surrealist frontispiece etching of Dora Marr to produce severed heads and dismembered body part…[Read more]

Library and information center services are at risk during times of extensive budget reductions. Publicly funded institutions labeled as inessential or as auxiliary departments may lose the revenue necessary to maintain full staffing. Financial circumstances of recent years highlight the importance of strategic planning in library and information…[Read more]

A traditional expectation for publicly funded libraries is that they should be institutions where patron records are kept confidential and a standard of privacy is maintained. After the events of 911, methods increasing search and surveillance powers and reducing legal protections were drafted into law as the “Patriot Act”. Searching patron rec…[Read more]

In response to a lack of funding during the 2007–2009 recession, many library systems reduced or eliminated professional and library support positions. Traditional outcome measurements were not sufficient to convince tax-depleted legislatures to allocate more funds to libraries. In response to the crisis authors recommended cost-saving measures a…[Read more]

Book of Abstracts of the 5th ESTIDIA Conference – Hybrid Dialogues: Transcending Binary Thinking and Moving Away from Societal Polarizations

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]

THIS IS A PRE-PRINT, PLEASE CITE IT AS: Tresoldi, Tiago; Rzymski, Christoph; Forkel, Robert; Greenhill, Simon J.; List, Johann-Mattis; and Gray, Russell D. (2019) “Managing historical linguistic data for computational phylogenetics and computer-assisted language comparison (PRE-PRINT)”. Jena: Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Human His…[Read more]