Recently a colleague recommended a book, an academic history, and I went to amazon to look for it. They were charging $45 for the hardcover, $42.35 for the Kindle edition. I won’t mention the book, or the press, so no one is embarrassed, but I don’t have to–this is an increasingly common phenomenon. It took […]
Hello, fellow historians and the history-minded! I made a longish post about digital publishing and peer review, and now I have to put up or shut up. I want to want to conduct a research project equal in “mass” to a journal article, and post it online as I go. I’ll have to rethink the […]
Who is not ambivalent about peer review? On the one hand, it establishes a basic, reliable level of quality in argument and in evidence. On the other, it grinds everything down to a bland sameness. Peer review assures professional standards are met, and also enforces orthodoxy. Anonymous peer review prevents intimidation: anonymous peer review allows […]
As digital technology expands, our whole relationship to presenting evidence will have to change. Other disciplines roll their eyes at historians for having too many examples. A lit scholar might read a historical article and think “he had me at five: the forty five examples that followed didn’t accomplish a damn thing.” And even history […]
