I had complaints that it was difficult to find material on the site, so I am just changing the theme…
Still finding my way around a new theme – and guess am going to have to manually go through and change the image sizes!
Pride of Place @timeshighered
The British landscape and representations of it in art give rise to a happy patriotic glow in many people. Fred Inglis shares that fervour
Is it still possible to claim oneself, in polite academic company, to be a patriot? Both the present and the previous prime ministers have gestured, a bit apologetically but I think sincerely, towards such a frame of mind for themselves and even for their parties. Everyone is at pains to dissociate themselves, of course, from the more horrible forms of chauvinism as displayed by the British National Party, but a mild form of non-aggressive nationalism is common in Scotland and Wales, much qualified in the North by the failures and disgrace of the national banks. Explicit and boisterous patriotism is pretty well confined to sport, as witness all those cars flying the cross of St George during the recent Fifa World Cup.
Patriotism is not, absolutely not, a configuration of emotions and thoughts to be measured by attitude survey. It is too submarine and inarticulate in Britain to command a sufficient rhetoric for colloquial expression. Even at high-water moments of history – 1914, 1940 – patriotic language tended, as George Orwell pointed out 70 years ago, to commemorate defeats and to be undercut by the truculent bawdy of the marching songs as well as by brutal scepticism.
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Scrap the Census?! Why?!
Historians are queuing up to criticise “crazy and short-sighted” government plans to abolish the National Census after 2011, citing both their own research and wider concerns about the loss of cultural heritage.
Matt Houlbrook, tutorial Fellow in modern British history at Magdalen College, Oxford, is using census records to research the confidence trickster, journalist and royal biographer Netley Lucas.
The proposal risked wiping ordinary people from history, Dr Houlbrook said. “The idea of scrapping the National Census is crazy and short-sighted. It’s the demotic – almost democratic – qualities of the census that make it such an important source of information about even the most obscure and long-forgotten individuals.
“Its records provide us with the traces of everyman and everywoman in the past, rather than just the rich and the powerful. Scrapping the National Census risks silencing such voices for generations of family and academic historians to come.”
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Style Points @timeshighered
Few scholarly works can communicate with non-specialists, if they even attempt to. But academics in all fields may need to make their writing more accessible to satisfy demands for impact and interdisciplinarity. Matthew Reisz considers the obfuscatory malaise and how to beat it
It is widely agreed, by both insiders and outsiders, that something has gone wrong with much academic writing.
A great deal of it, says Anthony Haynes, the author of Writing Successful Academic Books and visiting professor at both Beijing Normal and Hiroshima universities, is ruined by “a kind of learned inability. No one is born writing sentences laden with adverbs.”
John Cornwell, director of the Science and Human Dimension Project based at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a journalist and written a number of best-selling books about the papacy. He is firmly committed to the value of academic rigour and believes that “there are aspects of academic work and publishing that aren’t for a wider readership, but still need to be done”. Yet he also believes that “much academic writing suffers from rigor mortis”.
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History Sucks Online
The plight of the “digital humanities” – the integration of technology into the humanities – was tackled in an unflinching speech at an international conference.
Melissa Terras, senior lecturer in electronic communication at University College London, described her keynote speech at the Digital Humanities Conference last week as “necessarily negative”, warning that, as a discipline, “our web presence … sucks”.
Reciting a story about the corpse of UCL’s spiritual father, Jeremy Bentham, being wheeled into senate meetings at the institution and listed in the minutes as “present, not voting”, she told delegates if the digital humanities did not improve its standing online, it too risked being “present, not voting” within the academy.
Writing in Code (@annmroz)
Librarians at one North American university have posted on the internet a guide to help students distinguish a scholarly journal from a popular one. Among the telltale signs of populist offerings are high production values – “slick, glossy, with colour pictures, photographs, and illustrations” – and writing that is “non-technical” and uses “simple vocabulary accessible to the majority of readers”; whereas textual material in a journal is described as “college level, in the specialized vocabulary of the discipline covered”.
That’s akin to saying that scholarly articles are written in code for those in the know; they are more exclusionary than inclusionary. There is a widespread belief that any work that is easily understood by a non-specialist must have been dumbed down. References and footnotes therefore swaddle the text like an intellectual security blanket and deter the curious reader.
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