Jennifer Howard

As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t get to the MLA this year; I was hanging out in Chicago with the historians. What’s been interesting to me, as I read reports from this year’s MLA in various venues, is to see themes re-emerge from previous years. Some of those reports inspired a sort of scholarly-conference deja vu. Twitter, anyone? Pedagogy? Rethinking standards of tenure and promotion? Out of curiosity, I went back and looked at my MLA coverage from years past. Here’s a sampling. One difference between then and now: I wouldn’t say “Twittering” in 2012; I’d say “tweeting.” (N.B. Some… Read more...

This winter, for the first time since I joined the Chronicle in 2005, I won’t be at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference. I’ll be at the American Historical Association’s confab instead. (Hello, Chicago in January!) Every conference has its own style. The MLA is not the AHA is not the APA is not the [insert association acronym here]. No matter whose meeting it is, though, conference-going is a grueling experience. Germs are abundant; sleep, good food, and power outlets are not. Sessions start too early and go too late. Here, learned the hard way, are my survival tips for… Read more...

Today’s New York Times has a front-page story about scholars challenging the old-school system of peer review (“Scholars Test Web Alterntive to Peer Review”). The story focuses on an experiment at Shakespeare Quarterly, the leading journal of Shakespeare studies. The journal put some submitted articles online and opened them up for public comment before deciding whether to publish them. I’m happy to see this subject getting front-page treatment in the NYT. I’m even happier to say that I wrote a story about SQ and open peer review for the Chronicle a month ago (“Leading Humanities Journal Debuts ‘Open’ Peer Review… Read more...

There’s an intriguing project under way right now called Hacking the Academy. The basic idea is to crowd-source a book in a week. The topic? How to overhaul/undo/redo/reshape the mechanisms that govern scholarship and how it is created, taught, and shared. Read the details here. It’s not my place to suggest answers but I can ask questions. Here are a few. To: The forces of change From: JHoward So you want to hack the academy? I can’t tell you how to do it. I can ask you a few well-intentioned questions, though, because journalists ask questions. These are a few… Read more...

I was down in New Orleans late last month to give a talk at the Society of Biblical Literature conference. The topic: How to Talk to the Media. It was useful for me to think about the transactions between experts and journalists. I heard some eye-opening war stories from scholars who feel that they have gotten burned by media folk, especially by film-and-TV people in search of a quick sound bite about the Lost Tomb of Jesus or whatever the sensational find of the moment is. My message was simple, obvious, and worth repeating: Journalists are not necessarily the problem…. Read more...

In my latest Hot Type column, I ask whether all authors are created equal under Google—under the terms of the proposed settlement in the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers’ lawsuit against Google Book Search, that is. If you’re a professional author, by which I mean one who counts on book sales and royalties for income, you may feel just peachy about what the deal (if approved) could do for you. But a group of scholarly authors, led by a law prof at Berkeley, believes that their book-writing colleagues in academe don’t appreciate how the deal could affect research… Read more...