Jennifer Howard

I’m a guest on this week’s installment of Digital Campus, a podcast hosted by Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The episode’s theme is “Publishers Bleakly”, and Dan, Mills, Tom, Josh Greenberg of the NYPL and I talk about some of the changes besetting (or reshaping) scholarly publishers and libraries. If you listen, I hope you find it useful. And if I said anything I’ll regret, don’t tell me…. Read more...

Today is Armistice Day. It doesn’t seem appropriate to dwell here on how powerfully affecting I find the Great War and the poetry that came out of those bloody years. Instead I’ll point you to The First World War Poetry Archive, an amazing online collection of manuscripts, photos, and other artifacts and echoes of the war and the people who fought and died in it. The archive, which is hosted at Oxford University but draws on other archives as well, has just launched its Siegfried Sassoon Collection. Here’s one of my favorite passages from Robert Graves’s memoir Good-Bye to All… Read more...

Journalists are handed a lot of evidence that the world at large doesn’t think much of our trade. No-one seems to appreciate how selflessly we serve the greater good, what keen-eyed observers and trenchant analysts we are. So there we are, feeling all righteous and aggrieved, and then the news cycle coughs up a reminder that sometimes we really don’t have a clue. One recent example I found especially painful because it involved literary journalism, which has more or less been my home turf since the dawn of time. On Nov. 3, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story headlined “Celebrating… Read more...