Listen to this interview of Paris Avgeriou, Editor in Chief of the Journal of Systems and Software (together with David Shepherd). Paris is Full Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. We talk about peer review, journal editing, and scientific writing. Paris Avgeriou : "I actually think that authoring and reviewing are very close to one another, because when you review a paper, you actually start thinking how to improve it — what the strong points are a...
Feb 28, 2024•1 hr•Ep. 161
Listen to Episode No.8 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. Today we welcome, too, Duane Searsmith, E-Learning Technical Specialist, Information Trust Institute, also at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is the meaning of generation by machine. It's stunning what Generativ...
Feb 24, 2024•59 min•Ep. 160
Listen to this interview of David Shepherd, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Systems and Software (together with Paris Avgeriou). David Shepherd is Associate Professor at Louisiana State University. We talk about writing well, researching well, reviewing well. David Shepherd : "No, with the manuscripts we screen and review and publish, it's not about language. So, we know that most scientists are writing in not their first language. And for us, it's just not about that. I mean, some of the best...
Feb 23, 2024•56 min•Ep. 159
Authorship represents a new area of policy-related work within higher education research administration, funding agencies, and scholarly journal publishing. Developing Authorship and Copyright Ownership Policies: Best Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) by Allyson Mower offers the unique aspect of combining details on copyright ownership as well as authorship into a single volume on best practices for administrators, journal publishers, research managers, and policy drafters within and outsid...
Feb 21, 2024•46 min•Ep. 45
Listen to Episode No.7 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is This is what language means. It is text, and it is speech — but is not the two wholly as one. It is speech, and then it is text, or it is the other way around — but the two cannot be one, because between ...
Feb 16, 2024•58 min•Ep. 158
The Discourse of Scholarly Communication (Lexington Books, 2023) examines the place and purpose of modern scholarship and its dialectical relationship with the ethos of Enlightenment. Patrick Gamsby argues that while Enlightenment/enlightenment is often used in the mottos of numerous academic institutions, its historical, social, and philosophical elements are largely obscured. Using a theoretical lens, Gamsby revisits the ideals of the Enlightenment alongside the often-contradictory issues of d...
Feb 14, 2024•47 min•Ep. 42
Listen to this interview of Christopher Reddy, environmental chemist and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. We talk about his book Science Communication in a Crisis: An Insider's Guide (Routledge Earthscan 2023). Christopher Reddy : "Communication definitely teaches us scientists things that we hadn't knows or appreciated, even in our own research. I mean, when you have to rethink about how and why you're doing something and what the outcomes mean, tha...
Feb 13, 2024•56 min•Ep. 157
Listen to this interview of Prem Devanbu, Distinguished Research Professor in Computer Science, University of California, Davis. We talk about using cross-disciplinary pollination to interrogate ideas and also oneself. Prem Devanbu : "Science is a social process. You put some idea out, and other people try to figure out if it makes sense or if you've made some mistake with it, or whether you've asked the right question and gotten the right answer. And then you go from there." Here's the paper by...
Feb 10, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 156
Listen to this interview of Katherine Firth, academic at, Australia. We talk about the necessary trouble that people have when they write new knowledge. We also talk about the unnecessary trouble that people have when they imagine that this first sort doesn't exist. Firth is the co-author of How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble: A Practical Guide (Open UP, 2018). Katherine Firth : "Most people write to the computer screen. They write perhaps to their supervisor. But they don't actually have ...
Feb 09, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 155
Listen to this interview of Christian Kästner, Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about reading papers, and how to do that while balancing speed and accuracy, and we talk about writing papers, and how to do that for a reader going fast and moving with purpose. Christian Kästner: "I don't want my reader to be doing a lot of work synthesizing details across a paper of mine. I want to make it obvious what the key idea is. And honestly, I think we al...
Feb 07, 2024•56 min•Ep. 154
Listen to Episode No.6 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and today as well, Bradley Alger, Professor Emeritus, Department of Physiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is How the hypothesis means. What does out knowledge mean after it’s been hypothesiz...
Feb 04, 2024•59 min•Ep. 153
Listen to this interview of Natalie Aviles, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia. We talk about how organizations shape people, and how people shape science. Natalie Aviles : "I think, in general, the more self-conscious that scientists can be about what motivates them, about what makes them happy, about what drives them — the more, then, they can try to imagine a future that satisfies not only their intellectual curiosity but helps them navigate, too, the very sort of prosai...
Jan 31, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 152
Listen to this interview of Wouter Lueks, faculty at the CISPA Helmhotz Center for Information Security. We talk about getting into the reviewer's mindset, and also about research collaboration outside the walls of the university. Wouter Lueks : "For first ideas, you don't need writing. You can stand in front of the whiteboard, make a couple of drawings, chat with people — and it's very engaging. But then at some point you somehow need to deal with all the nitty-gritty details — and all the nitt...
Jan 23, 2024•56 min•Ep. 151
Listen to Episode No.5 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and also Gang Wang, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is what decision means. Decision is no simple matter, whether the decider in question is human or machin...
Jan 19, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 150
Academic Librarianship: Anchoring the Profession in Contribution, Scholarship, and Service (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) by Marcy Simons is needed now as a response to how much has changed in academic librarianship as a profession (from the smallest academic libraries to large research libraries). Much has been written recently about the status of the profession of librarianship, i.e. whether or not it should still be considered a “profession,” are the same credentials still required/enough, shou...
Jan 17, 2024•48 min•Ep. 37
Can we have science without freedom of speech? Dr. Scott Atlas's professional work and personal experiences bring to light an important and often under-discussed element of speech: freedom of speech in the hard sciences. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a host of new questions and concerns surrounding our medical system and government health agencies: as Special Advisor to the President and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force from July to December 2020, Dr. Atlas was at the forefr...
Jan 16, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 94
Listen to Episode No.4 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is whether A.I. can mean. The short answer is yes, A.I. can mean... whatever we make it mean. For instance, ChatGPT does has access to text on certain kinds of subject matter, like, for example, the assembly...
Jan 13, 2024•54 min•Ep. 149
Listen to this interview of Rebecca Roache, coach and podcaster, and also Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. We talk about the application of philosophy to the problems faced by every academic every day. Rebecca Roache : "I'd say that, for many of us, we got into our particular line of research because we were interested in and energized by the topics that we were researching. But at some point along the way, we started caring too much about the measurable out...
Jan 07, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 148
Listen to this interview of Cristiano Matricardi, Senior Editor at Nature Communications. We talk about just how closely tied are the research and the communication of the research. Cristiano Matricardi : "From my perspective, that is, as a professional editor, as someone who reads above 500 new submissions a year plus all the papers for due diligence — from my perspective, I see that too many of the submissions are trying to create good narratives to sell the work better — which is okay, sure, ...
Dec 18, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 148
Listen to this interview of Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière, co-authors of Equity for Women in Science: Dismantling Systemic Barriers to Advancement (Harvard UP, 2023). Cassidy is Professor and Tom and Marie Patton School Chair in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also President of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. Vincent is Professor of Information Science at Université de Montréal, where he also serves as Associate V...
Dec 16, 2023•38 min•Ep. 147
Editor Abigail Bainbridge and contributing author Sonja Schwoll join this discussion of Conservation of Books (Routledge 2023), the highly anticipated reference work on global book structures and their conservation. Offering the first modern, comprehensive overview on this subject, this volume takes an international approach. Written by over 70 specialists in conservation and conservation science based in 19 countries, its 26 chapters cover traditional book structures from around the world, the ...
Dec 15, 2023•30 min•Ep. 32
Privacy is not dead: Students care deeply about their privacy and the rights it safeguards. They need a way to articulate their concerns and guidance on how to act within the complexity of our current information ecosystem and culture of surveillance capitalism. Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries: Theories, Methods, and Cases (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2023) edited by Sarah Hartman-Caverly and Alexandria Chisholm, can help you teach privacy literacy, evolve th...
Dec 12, 2023•55 min•Ep. 31
Listen to Episode No.3 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and as well, Kit Nicholls, who is Director of the Cooper Union's Center for Writing and Learning. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is Learning happens where there's meaning. Bill Cope : "At root, what we're talking about in this conversatio...
Dec 11, 2023•59 min•Ep. 146
Listen to this interview of John Bond, founder and publishing consultant of Riverwinds Consulting. We talk about the breadth of services and resources now on offer to publishing scientists — while the industry only grows broader and broader. John Bond : "The one thing I would say helps specifically the middle-tier author (who'll, by the way, be most reluctant to try this) is this: Feel really comfortable sharing your early work on a more frequent and a wider basis. Because these authors tend to ...
Dec 03, 2023•51 min•Ep. 145
Listen to Episode No.2 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. We talk about TMC — Too Much Communication. In the 2000s, people complained about the demand to know more stuff. Not today. It's amazing if you stop to think — if you can find the peace to stop for anything — but such a short time ago, media were ...
Dec 02, 2023•53 min•Ep. 144
Chris Hart, Director of Sales and Marketing, and Kim Walker, Director of Trade Publishing at Manchester University Press join Avi to discuss how MUP and other university publishers have changed their model over the last decade and put a major focus on trade publishing over the classic niche academic monograph. We also discuss how being the only academic publisher in Northern England forms a big part of the identity and content published by the press. Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academi...
Nov 29, 2023•17 min•Ep. 143
How do we currently preserve and access texts, and will our current methods be sustainable in the future? In From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis (Open Book Publishers, 2023), Anne Baillot seeks to answer this question by offering a detailed analysis of the methods that enable access to textual materials, in particular, access to books of literary significance. Baillot marshals her considerable expertise in the field of digital humanities to establish ...
Nov 26, 2023•52 min•Ep. 28
Listen to this interview of Yang Zhang, faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. We talk about the centrality of text to the research process. Yang Zhang : "Nowadays, especially when I talk with my students, you know, when I help them write papers, I can sorta estimate how many days or hours they'll need to finish a specific part of that paper. And if a student doesn't quite keep to that timeline, then I know I should check in with them to ask where they've gotten stuck an...
Nov 23, 2023•51 min•Ep. 142
Listen to Episode No.1 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. We talk about what meaning actually is. Meaning is form, and meaning is function. Meaning is made, for example, when a scientist sees the image of a celestial object which till that very moment has been unseen by human eye. But meaning is also mad...
Nov 19, 2023•54 min•Ep. 141
In Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday (MIT Press, 2016; paperback edition, 2023), Gabriella Giannachi traces the evolution of the archive into the apparatus through which we map the everyday. The archive, traditionally a body of documents or a site for the preservation of documents, changed over the centuries to encompass, often concurrently, a broad but interrelated number of practices not traditionally considered as archival. Archives now consist of not only documents and sites but also ...
Nov 18, 2023•45 min•Ep. 25
