Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Keeping an Eagle-Eye on the U.S. Supreme Court
Kenneth Jost has been watching the U.S. Supreme Court for decades, and producing annual yearbook looking at the term just passed. We asked him to reflect on his career and his subject. In this interview, originally posted in February, he predicted that “the fight over any Trump nominee would be a no-holds-barred battle.”
Nick Seaver on Dissecting the Algorithmic Organism
When discussing the nexus of computer science and social science, the transaction is usually in one direction – what can computer scientists do for social scientists. But a recent paper from Tufts University anthropologist Nick Seaver reverses that flow, using the tool of ethnography to interrogate the tools of engineering.
Divining What a ‘Digital Truth Serum’ Can Reveal to Us
The underlying conceit of economist and data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s work, whether in his new book, on the op-ed pages of the New York Times or in the classroom, or on campus, is that people’s search activity on a search engine reveals much more about them than do surveys, polls, or other social media
Storify is Dead. Responsible Data Stewardship Must Live
Storify is dead The service, which let you take social media content like Twitter and Facebook posts and aggregate them together into stories, announced that they’ll be shutting down and deleting all content as of March 16th, 2018. It’s not as bad as some platform shutdowns – there is notice and at least you can export your own content (one story at a time) – but it’s still a reminder of how vulnerable user-generated content can be online.
The Anthropological Roots of Ursula Le Guin
A connection can be made in between Ursula Le Guin’s fiction and her father’s groundbreaking work in anthropology. His ideas – which had a profound influence on his daughter’s writing – stemmed from an important development in the discipline of anthropology, one that viewed human culture as something that wasn’t ingrained, and had to be taught and learned.
Cry from Publons: Let’s End Reviewer Fraud
Peer review has become a major editorial challenge for publishers worldwide, but options do exist to help tackle fraudulent peer reviewers. In this post from the Publons blog, some options for what publishers can do are examined.
Survey Asks About Sci-Hub, ResearchGate, Video Discovery
Since 2004, Renew Publishing Consultants has surveyed researchers, students, teachers, lecturers, professors, journalists, managers, clinicians, medics, librarians, government officials, and engineers, working across all sectors and in all regions to learn about the uptake of academic content.
Analyzing a Canadian Approach to Assessing Impact
Efforts to assess scholarly impacts must account for the great diversity of scholarly work and ensure that researchers themselves play a leading role in selecting those indicators that best suit their work. Peter Severinson reports on work published by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Canada that hopes will provide guidance to university administrators, public servants, and other members of the research community undertaking the demanding work of impact assessment.
