Featured posts
Richard M. Holmes and the high-price island of Switzerland
by Beat Suter The video game publisher Black Legend was founded in Switzerland in 1992 by Richard M. Holmes. Holmes lived in Uster in the Canton of Zurich, had grown up here and had just graduated from KZO Wetzikon. The 20-year-old young entrepreneur wanted to produce games for Amiga computers…
Unlocking the Past: A Journey Through Manuscripts and Digital Tools in Göttingen
Author: Davide Obili, PhD student at the University of Bologna Attending the Summer School of Digital Palaeography in Göttingen was a fantastic experience, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in Manuscript Studies or Digital Humanities. The programme offered a well-balanced mix of theory and practice, giving…
On Computational Historical Ecology, Part I
I have often pondered how different our society might be today if we had been more deeply inspired by the holistic ecological principles envisioned by Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), rather than by the 19th-century political doctrines centred on power and dominance. Imagine a political philosophy that prioritises creating a better…
“What’s cooking, Nara Smith?” Culinary Comedy: Online Recipes and Their Parodies
As our project shows, cooking recipes have a long history and their relevance is not declining. Today, the internet and social media provide a seemingly endless well of cooking recipes. Online platforms containing recipes reach from food blogs, by celebrity chefs or laypeople, to Instagram accounts dedicated to the how-to…
Revolutionary Biographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Imperial – Inter/national – Decolonial Sandra Dahlke, Nikolaus Katzer, Denis...
TAKE 5 With PALOMERA partners – University of Coimbra
The “Take 5 with PALOMERA partners” is a blog series featuring the members of the PALOMERA project; you can get to know them with 5 questions and a quick read! The PALOMERA project is dedicated to understanding why so few open access funder policies include books, and to provide actionable recommendations to…
Review: Paula Pico Estrada, Nicholas of Cusa on the Trinitarian Structure of the Innate Criterion of Truth
Paula Pico Estrada, Nicholas of Cusa on the Trinitarian Structure of the Innate Criterion of Truth. Leiden: Brill, 2022. XIV + 237 pp. $119 (105,93 €).[*] This volume explores “the philosophical foundations” of Cusanus’ ethics from an unusual angle: Nicholas’ concept of the ‘innate power of judgment (iudicium concreatum)’. Pico Estrada’s…
Systematic Literature Reviews – In the age of AI, what is the added value? (Opinion!)
September is a month of conferences, and I attended the CHER conference (Consortium of Higher Education Research). There were numerous engaging presentations, including a comprehensive series on systematic literature reviews. During these presentations, I reflected on the value of such literature summaries in the age of artificial intelligence. If they…
Systematic Literature Reviews – In the age of AI, what is the added value? (Opinion!)
September is a month of conferences, and I attended the CHER conference (Consortium of Higher Education Research). There were numerous engaging presentations, including a comprehensive series on systematic literature reviews. During these presentations, I reflected on the value of such literature summaries in the age of artificial intelligence. If they…
On ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ and the War on Palestine: Gender Violence, and the Struggle for Transnational Feminist Solidarity
By Fatemeh Shams August 2024 marked the third anniversary of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, after twenty years of US-led military occupation. As they retook control of the country on 15 August 2021, a new ban was imposed on girls’ education, preventing millions from attending school beyond sixth…
Understanding the “New and Deeper Perspective” of a History Course: Digital Word Clouds and Student Self-Reflection
Can digital tools help students reflect on the knowledge and skills they have learned throughout a history course? This blog post argues “yes” and proceeds to explain how Mentimeter and a double use of its responsive word cloud function can encourage retrospective and reflexive processes among undergraduate history students. Maja…
How to write a lot [Book Review]
Here’s my review of Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (APA LifeTools). I loved it so much that I listened to the audiobook three times in a row. In short: read it, I loved it Overall, I have to say, this…
Report on “How to deal with China - A Dialogue between European and Japanese experts on China”, DIJ Tokyo, 4 April 2024
[gab_log] Geisteswissenschaft als Beruf Event Website Report by Torsten Weber, DIJ Tokyo The impressive rise of China has had a major impact on the world economy. There has been a strong belief or hope that China’s economic development and its increasing integration into the world economy would also spur political…
Dealing with the grey zone of publishing or… how I will never be an editorial board member of MDPI Publications.
The “predatory publisher” category raises more questions than answers. Just like “academic fraud”, it tends to validate a black & white world in which rules and norms are clear-cut and universally shared through time, disciplines and countries. There is now an extensive literature presenting lists, criteria and even automatic detection…
An Angry Ukrainian Syndrome: Stereotypes About War, Peace, and Injustice
By Olena Komar In this article, I aim to demonstrate that a set of prejudices exists in Western countries against Ukrainians, which I term the “Angry Ukrainian Syndrome” (similar to the “North African Syndrome”). This is a set of biases that have emerged through the way Ukrainians communicate about the…
A Phenomenological View of Anti-Sodomy Laws during Colonial Rule
LOONG Dien Min is a 2023-24 Gates Cambridge Scholar interested in maritime Asia’s legal and normative regimes of sexuality. Having graduated with a MPhil in World History from the University of Cambridge, she studies the nexus between law and sexual norms in the most intellectually, culturally and linguistically vibrant region…