Links: National Inquirer meets Scientific Research, Social Media and Academics, DIY Academic Sentence Generator

This article from Inside Higher Ed describes an attempt by the Association of American Universities (AAU) to defend scientific research from mockery and poorly informed funding cuts. Make sure you follow the link that the article provides to the Scientific Inquirer: it will take you to the inaugural issue of a faux tabloid that the AAU has created to show how easy it is to make valuable peer-reviewed research sound daft and wasteful.

Here is something from The Chronicle of Higher Education on social media use among academics. The author summarizes a new report from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research, a report which found that academics are using social media for “collaborative writing, conferencing, sharing images, and other research-related activities”. Interestingly, the researchers found that the biggest users of social media were scholars from the social sciences and humanities; they suggest that the appeal of social media for these scholars may be the increased speed of dissemination. The Scholarly Kitchen provides a nuanced and critical response to the study, focusing in particular on the fact that ‘social media’ has been defined so broadly in this study as to be potentially meaningless.

Finally, if you have some extra time on your hands this weekend, The University of Chicago Writing Program has a great game for you: Write Your Own Academic Sentence. Here is my first attempt: ‘The linguistic construction of the gaze invests itself in the historicization of agency.’ To get the full effect, you need to use the ‘Edit It’ option on your sentence. Once you are satisfied, you can even get a second opinion from a virtual critic: ‘Your desultory treatment of the linguistic construction of the gaze deserves the obscurity into which it has fallen.’ Hopefully, once you are done playing, you’ll be able to get back to writing sentences that don’t sound like this!

P.S. I mentioned the Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities project last week. If you are interested in seeing how this project is shaping up, you can follow blogs from all the participants here.