Search results for tag #academicwriting
Long post [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
On a more uplifting note, my wife has a paper out in the latest issue of Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, titled Aquatic Birds and the Liminality of the Sea in Greco-Roman Mythology:In the Greco-Roman worldview, the sea forms a permeable boundary between the realms of humans, the gods, and the dead. This article demonstrates that seabirds embody the connective role of the sea in Greco-Roman mythology. Seabirds nest on land, feed by diving into water, and fly in the air. Therefore, these birds are imagined connecting the world of mortals with that of the dead and the gods, and they illustrate the transitions humans live through in their interactions with the gods and their experience of death.Here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/2/article/979701
A disclaimer: my wife has been running a project on birds in ancient mythology for many years, and I've been involved in it since 2018 or so (in other words I'm more than a bit biased here, for several reasons). For my part I've been using qualitative data analysis techniques like Formal Concept Analysis and Rough Set Theory to explore datasets she and her students have been creating using D'Arcy Thompson's Glossary of Greek Birds as a focal point. There's a page about the FCA analysis on the linked site.
I find it fascinating that some of the arguments about the role birds play in Greek myths become visible in such analyses. For instance, one of the things we've observed in the data is that the words/concepts "female" and "metamorphosis" appearing in a myth fragment are strongly associated with some form of "diving into the sea" also appearing (the metamorphoses in question often being death-related, and diving into the sea, as the above paper argues, represents death to the ancient Greeks).
#writing #AcademicPublishing #AcademicWriting #AncientGreece #GreekMythology #birds #death #FormalConceptAnalysis #FCA #RoughSetTheory #RST
I have to confess that another dimension of this is the piss poor state of publishing. I find APCs deeply offensive and don't want to face them, but I don't intend to sign away copyright to a predatory publisher either. Something like 12 of my papers are in the libgen database and I'm not keen to stuff a 13th into the blender (then again, good luck trying to make sense of this one with an LLM lol). As a graduate student I found publishing a challenging but exciting opportunity to communicate with peers. Now I find it to be an onerous chore of navigating smarmy vampiric middlemen to get at the valuable things they unjustly control (distribution channels mainly). I feel compelled to publish this one in conventional-ish channels because it's reporting on grant-funded work and I think it merits, and I'd like to have, an archival record.
Wah wah wah. Like I said, doom loop.
#motivation #writing #AcademicPublishing #AcademicWriting #TechnicalWriting
This is not really a call for advice--I have a thousand and one strategies, both my own and ones suggested to me by mentors and colleagues past--though I love to collect hot tips about how to write more effectively so I'm not opposed either. Mostly just venting because the other window is a blank page.
#motivation #writing #AcademicPublishing #AcademicWriting #TechnicalWriting
New on the blog: Oxford University Press is going all-in on surveillance capitalism https://ideophone.org/oxford-university-press-is-going-all-in-on-surveillance-capitalism/
In which I show that OUP doesn't trust authors with offprints of their own publicly funded work & thinks scholarly exchange is piracy while at the same time selling out to AI slop producer OpenAI #academicchatter #OxfordUniversityPress #OUP #academicwriting
Alt...
Piracy: primarily our concern is that if an author uploads it to their own website or to a university repository (as a great many people do, and which in all honesty we don’t really object to per se, though it is contractually disallowed), it’s then easily downloaded by any number of people and made widely available – and that is the issue.