I’ve been reflecting on a few recent articles and meetings lately that have focused on problems in scholarly communication. In particular, I’m thinking about Micah Vandegrift’s recent post on Open Knowledge where he suggests that open knowledge is about “creating a new academic value system for/as a public good.” This…

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a project to topic model the American Journal of Science between 1819 (its first year of publication) and 1922; this journal, during much of the 19th century, was the only specialized scientific journal in the United STates. I can release…

One of my first posts when I launched this blog asked the question, why don’t alchemists share? Another scholar I mentioned in that post, Pamela Long, has discussed the issue of authorship and secrecy. She has also written about the separation and mixing of two kinds of practice, artisinal (or…

Lately it seems that many articles have been coming through my news-feed about the failure of scholars to communicate their research to the public. Some of these articles have even taken a historical viewpoint in order to propose solutions. Still others propose communicating historical scholarship as a way to contextualize…

I was reading the recent Distillations magazine from the Chemical Heritage Foundation and saw an article on Information Overload. It reminded me of the post I wrote a while ago on big data in the 19th century, along with multiple posts about the American Chemical Society and Libraries in the…

As I was thinking recently about the idea of whether research needs to be “pure,” I’ve begun to draw some rather tenuous connections to another project I’m working on about Theophilus Wylie and his role as scholar and librarian in the nineteenth century. Andrew Abbott and in Chaos of Disciplines…

In doing some reading about professionalization, and some research on the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, one of the forbears of the American Chemical Society), I came across the presidential address of J. Lawrence Smith, a chemist and president of AAAS in 1873. The discussion covers several…

There has been a great deal of furor over the recent Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) article on the digital humanities. This post is not a response to that article since there have been many responses, articles, and commentaries that are better than what I would be able to…

Recently, I was reading an article entitled “Big data problems we face today can be traced to the social ordering practices of the 19th century.” It led me to think a bit about this history of scholarly communication project which I think is very related to the larger issues they’re…