ProfHacker

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Weekend Reading: School’s (Almost) Out For Summer Edition

By Ryan Cordell

April 25, 2014

It’s hard to believe, but our spring semester is already finished. I’m likely grading students’ final projects as you read this. So here’s a (very quick) list of worthwhile weekend reading.

Roopika Risam writes about “Rethinking Peer Review in the Age of Digital Humanities” for the journal Ada. While the focus is on the specific challenges of evaluating digital humanities work, Risam’s argument and recommendations apply across a range of fields.
Rethinking peer review in the age of digital academe is a task that goes beyond the question of medium or platform to a question of epistemology. That which we call “digital scholarship” is not simply print scholarship gone digital but raises questions of genre and gives rises to its own conventions.
Last week the Digital Public Library of America (something we’ve written about before) celebrated its first anniversary. Jennifer Howard wrote about the anniversary for the Chronicle.
The young digital library marked several developmental milestones this week: It added six major partners as content or service hubs, including the California Digital Library, the Connecticut Digital Archive, the U.S. Government Printing Office, Indiana Memory, the Montana Memory Project, and the J. Paul Getty Trust. The birthday announcement also included the news that the New York Public Library has now made more than a million of its digitized holdings accessible through the DPLA—a growth spurt of almost 20 percent.
Recently many scholars have grieved the sudden and premature loss of Adrianne Wadewitz. Among her many contributions, Andrianne was very active as a Wikipedia editor and educator, particularly focused on encouraging more women to edit Wikipedia, and she was one of the primary catalysts for recent “Edit-a-thon” events aimed at diversifying Wikipedia’s content. In honor of Adrianne’s legacy, a series of Wadewitz Tribute Edit-a-Thons will take place around the world during the month of May. Learn more about those events (or sign up to host one at your institution) at the link above.
Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz was an influential member of the Wikipedia community who died suddenly in April 2014. This loss has deeply affected Wikipedia and the academic world. Her work is recognized internationally as helping to encourage more women to contribute to Wikipedia to tackle the gender gap and systemic bias in its content. Wadewitz was one of the first academics to bring Wikipedia into the classroom as part of the Wikipedia Education Program, working with her students to improve Wikipedia instead of writing traditional term papers. At the time of her death, she was Mellon Digital Scholarship Fellow at Occidental College. She had over 50,000 edits and wrote numerous featured and good articles, including Mary Wollstonecraft.
At Inside Higher Ed Colleen Flaherty reports on a recent study about faculty workloads. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study suggests academics are being asked to do far more than they have time to do in a typical work week.
Professors work long days, on weekends, on and off campus, and largely alone. Responsible for a growing number of administrative tasks, they also do research more on their own time than during the traditional work week. The biggest chunk of their time is spent teaching.
In lighter news, this fantastic visualization uses Facebook data to map the baseball loyalties of Americans. If you zoom into the map, you can see the breakdown at a county-by-county level. Are you a typical fan for your area or an outlier? Now you can know for sure.
Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated has called the line running through Connecticut that separates Yankee fans and Red Sox fans the Munson-Nixon line. Mr. Rushin came up with the name — in honor of the late Yankee catcher Thurman Munson and the retired Red Sox right fielder Trot Nixon — in 2003, and he had to guess where the line ran: “north of New Haven but south of Hartford, running the breadth of central Connecticut.” We don’t have to guess anymore.

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It’s hard to believe, but our spring semester is already finished. I’m likely grading students’ final projects as you read this. So here’s a (very quick) list of worthwhile weekend reading.

Roopika Risam writes about “Rethinking Peer Review in the Age of Digital Humanities” for the journal Ada. While the focus is on the specific challenges of evaluating digital humanities work, Risam’s argument and recommendations apply across a range of fields.
Rethinking peer review in the age of digital academe is a task that goes beyond the question of medium or platform to a question of epistemology. That which we call “digital scholarship” is not simply print scholarship gone digital but raises questions of genre and gives rises to its own conventions.
Last week the Digital Public Library of America (something we’ve written about before) celebrated its first anniversary. Jennifer Howard wrote about the anniversary for the Chronicle.
The young digital library marked several developmental milestones this week: It added six major partners as content or service hubs, including the California Digital Library, the Connecticut Digital Archive, the U.S. Government Printing Office, Indiana Memory, the Montana Memory Project, and the J. Paul Getty Trust. The birthday announcement also included the news that the New York Public Library has now made more than a million of its digitized holdings accessible through the DPLA—a growth spurt of almost 20 percent.
Recently many scholars have grieved the sudden and premature loss of Adrianne Wadewitz. Among her many contributions, Andrianne was very active as a Wikipedia editor and educator, particularly focused on encouraging more women to edit Wikipedia, and she was one of the primary catalysts for recent “Edit-a-thon” events aimed at diversifying Wikipedia’s content. In honor of Adrianne’s legacy, a series of Wadewitz Tribute Edit-a-Thons will take place around the world during the month of May. Learn more about those events (or sign up to host one at your institution) at the link above.
Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz was an influential member of the Wikipedia community who died suddenly in April 2014. This loss has deeply affected Wikipedia and the academic world. Her work is recognized internationally as helping to encourage more women to contribute to Wikipedia to tackle the gender gap and systemic bias in its content. Wadewitz was one of the first academics to bring Wikipedia into the classroom as part of the Wikipedia Education Program, working with her students to improve Wikipedia instead of writing traditional term papers. At the time of her death, she was Mellon Digital Scholarship Fellow at Occidental College. She had over 50,000 edits and wrote numerous featured and good articles, including Mary Wollstonecraft.
At Inside Higher Ed Colleen Flaherty reports on a recent study about faculty workloads. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study suggests academics are being asked to do far more than they have time to do in a typical work week.
Professors work long days, on weekends, on and off campus, and largely alone. Responsible for a growing number of administrative tasks, they also do research more on their own time than during the traditional work week. The biggest chunk of their time is spent teaching.
In lighter news, this fantastic visualization uses Facebook data to map the baseball loyalties of Americans. If you zoom into the map, you can see the breakdown at a county-by-county level. Are you a typical fan for your area or an outlier? Now you can know for sure.
Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated has called the line running through Connecticut that separates Yankee fans and Red Sox fans the Munson-Nixon line. Mr. Rushin came up with the name — in honor of the late Yankee catcher Thurman Munson and the retired Red Sox right fielder Trot Nixon — in 2003, and he had to guess where the line ran: “north of New Haven but south of Hartford, running the breadth of central Connecticut.” We don’t have to guess anymore.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user beggs.]