Research is a continuous process of building new knowledge from the past. As an academic, you confirm, refute, and build upon prior knowledge. Then you share your results so that others may build upon them, thus continuing the process of research. Isaac Newton’s quote is apt: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Without the rigorous work of academics that came before, current research has no foundation to build on.
We in Owlstown want to honor and showcase the great academics of the past and their contributions to knowledge. We are starting a project where we create personal academic websites that feature academic pioneers from various fields. We’re calling this project Owlstown Pioneers. Each Owlstown Pioneer website will have the following:
- Publications: We will post at least 3 of the academic’s major publications. When possible, we will include the PDF files of the publications or links to webpages where they can be accessed.
- Projects: We will feature at least 3 of the major projects that the academic worked on. We will use descriptions from Wikipedia and other sources, so we will make sure to provide proper credit and link back to sources.
- Contact: This project is only for past academics, so you cannot contact them. However, we know the places where they primarily worked, so we will include that in the contact section. Some organizations and dedicated individuals maintain a profile of some academics on social media, so we will include links to those.
To start this project, we created websites for three academics: Albert Einstein, Jane Jacobs, and Alan Turing. We created these websites with Owlstown themes called Argyle, Blazer, and Corduroy, respectively. We designed these themes specifically for academic content to be easy to navigate and accessible on desktop computers and mobile devices.
When we create a new Owlstown Pioneer website, we will post them on this blog, Twitter, and the Owlstown Pioneers page.
