Opinion

When you teach a course for which the prerequisite is “permission of instructor,” on what do you base the decision to grant or withhold permission?

When I saw Scott Jaschik’s piece today about unhappy associate professors, my first thought was, haven’t we already discussed this? Well, yes, we have! Apparently associate professors have been “standing still” for quite some time—at least since the MLA released its report on the rank in 2009, and probably longer.

Yes, I'm late to the party, but my first day at DHSI has taught me that, yes, encoding a document in TEI is an act of critical scholarship.

Every time that I fork over $229.50 to renew my Platinum membership plan at Audible (an Amazon company) I like to mark the occasion and think some about the meaning of this purchase.

I recently finished The Information Diet, and I felt that the metaphor was the most powerful part of this book. Johnson's assertions that our current informational climate serves us up cheap fillers in the way of celebrity news and downright unhealthy partisan rhetoric rang true for me. I have long been concerned about the issue of the Filter Bubble in which all the data that Google, Facebook, and more are collecting about us lead to all the algorithms only showing me what it thinks I want to see. Johnson's Information Diet is a call to action against this and many other informational ills perpetuated by our networked consumption. The challenge issued is to approach consumption of all media in the same way we might approach healthy eating: recognize what is junk and stop consuming it.

Is it time for a 'global common data set' for world university rankers?http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20101125183129588

Mary E. Daly writes about why academics in Ireland – and any country that relies on oral history – are closely watching a fight over access to testimonies held at Boston College.

Sue V. Rosser writes about the importance of looking for signals -- both in policies and in attitudes -- in evaluating whether a department will be supportive of female scientists.