My "favourite" thing about this study is the part where achaeologists who found hunting tools/weapons in women's graves assumed they were kitchen implements.
Like, "well Hans, in this woman's grave, we found what inscriptions at the time have named the Flail of Vengeance. As of right now, we are not sure to what culinary task this tool was turned, but conjecture that it was possibly the preparation of small pies."
Testing the #academia outreach here on Mastodon. Please boost if you think you know others who might know.
I'm looking for some good light undergraduate-level books/articles in English about Taiwan under the Japanese and during the White Terror. History, culture, I would even love recommendations of short fiction if you have any.
"Duke University has decided to close its herbarium, a collection of 825,000 specimens of plants, fungi and algae that was established more than a century ago. The collection, one of the largest and most diverse in the country, has helped scientists map the diversity of plant life and chronicle the impact of humans on the environment.
The university’s decision has left researchers reeling."
I think this is interesting and welcome, especially on mobile devices. It is not without problems to want to quickly check some fact on your phone, download the PDF, go to landscape mode, find the right location in the paper, zoom in, etc.
1/4
Last term, I had a final assignment option having students use #ChatGPT to write their final essay, then critique the results. It was great, and I'll be doing it again. Everyone in #academia should do something like this with their class if they can. Short 🧵 on what we found.
The Media History Digital Library (MHDL) is a free online resource, featuring millions of pages from the histories of #film, #broadcasting, and #recorded#sound. We provide access to industry trade papers, magazines, Hollywood pressbooks, technical journals, and more.
Lantern, the MHDL's full-text search platform, enables researchers to query specific words or phrases within scanned pages.
We hope the MHDL has had a transformative impact on the study of film & broadcasting history. The sources we have digitized for open access, and the large-scale queries that our platforms allow, have enabled ambitious research projects and the production of new knowledge.
We look forward to sharing interesting content from our collection and learning about projects that use the MHDL.
One of the largest science funders, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will cease paying journal “article processing charges” and instead asks funded researchers to publish their work as preprints. This is fantastic. The costs of the current publishing system drain research funds and exclude too many scientists solely due to financial constraints. Funders are in a much better position to rock the “publishing” boat than researchers. https://gatesfoundationoa.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24810787662100-Policy-Refresh-2025-Overview
You gotta understand that professional titles are vital to state for minoritised groups. Basically an ethnic minority woman feels she needs to state her title and/or qualifications to be taken as seriously as a white man. It’s not showing off. It’s a necessity for doing the work. #science #academia
“…the Fediverse’ provides tools and technologies that are ideally suited to bring scholarly societies out of their digital caves and into the 21st century.”
“The root of their names contains their essential function, as described in 1660 for one of the first such societies, the Royal Society:
“Their first purpose was no more, then onely the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being ingag’d in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age”.
I would really appreciate it if some of my white coworkers would stop telling students that identity politics are "on the rise," when this whole fucking country was literally founded on identity politics. Like, ask the Native Americans. Or read a book.
Hold the British Museum accountable for copyright and moral rights infringement and the erasure of feminist poet Qiu Jin!
Recently, I discovered that the British Museum's "China's Hidden Century" exhibit used my published translations of Chinese feminist poet Qiu Jin's poetry without contacting me, and thus without any permission, credit, or payment.
Academic mastodon! Especially people with specialities/focuses in environmental politics, environmental justice, and/or environmental governance - I am the book review editor of Global Environmental Politics, one of the leading journals on the global environment. I am looking for reviewers for several very exciting looking publications on (among others) ecocriticism and environmental narratives/storytelling, plastic pollution, and environmental securitization.
If you are a potential reviewer, or interested in becoming one, please contact me. I am particularly interested in promoting the voices of women and/or BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+ and other marginalized voices, but of course, am not restricted to that.
Some friends have started this petition to support me and to hold the British Museum accountable for their use of my translations of Qiu Jin's poetry without permission, credit, or pay in an exhibit for over a month.
An ex-philosopher friend remarked to me yesterday that academics judging prestige and success by citation metrics incentivizes the same thing in slow-motion as social media algorithms judging success of content creators by engagement metrics, and it has thrown me into an existential crisis.