Author: Anne Baillot

Spring Rebellion – May 2023

As a scientist, I have to live with an unbearable contradiction: while science is producing all the data that show that we find ourselves in the midst of a massive climate and biodiversity crisis – as well as the models that would make it possible for us to avoid worst…

Talking peer review series #2: Experiences in Optimizing Peer-Reviewing – A success story in five acts, three years, and two astonishing voting rounds

Peer review is a central scholarly practice, a practice that carries an enormous weight in terms of gatekeeping, shaping disciplines, publication patterns and power relations. It governs the (re)distribution of resources such as research grants, promotions, tenure and even larger institutional budgets. As such, it is crucial to deeply understand…

On speaking up or not

I have always loved the DHd conferences, but this year’s is even better. It’s organized by people that are uniquely dear to my heart, and they have done an amazing job organizing this (now fully online) conference. They have even managed to bring together a long paper session with people…

Going global, going regional

A few months into co-chairing the DH 2023 conference, it turns out to be more complicated to proceed with the conference setting I had in mind when this whole adventure started than I first imagined. In this post, I want to explain exactly what I have in mind – at…

Travels (finally arriving at the European Researchers’ Night 2021)

The European Researchers’ Night takes place every year on the third Friday of September, on about 60 sites in Europe. This map presents the French cities that took part in it on September 24th, 2021. I travelled from my current research institute for this Academic year (ICAR, at the ENS…

Blogging journeys

For years now, I have only seldom managed to blog. It has to do with having time or not having time to blog, obviously. Still, even in the phases when I least had free time, I managed to blog. Ten years ago, I needed it as a mental and discursive…

Of sitting and standing

I have never liked, nor really been able to perform, hour-long sitting. Actually, if there is one thing I hated in school, it’s the sitting. Inevitably, your back aches, your belt hurts, you fall asleep, you can’t help but concentrate on a minor detail at the blackboard or in the…

Growing trees

While the garden is getting greener, it seems that we are going to be trapped in this situation for quite some time still. For the first time since the beginning of the lockdown, we plan on watching the presidential announcement on TV tonight, although I don’t expect much surprise there:…

One doorstopper later

Easter break at  last! The past four weeks feel like an eternity that would have passed by eerily quick. I remember, vaguely, the chaos of the first weeks. I remember realizing painfully it was almost impossible to find time for daily hours of work. There have been week-ends I spent…

Boeckh strikes back

You know how research takes a lo-ong time, and publication processes too? Let me tell you a story about it, and one that ends well at that. A decade ago, when the projet “Berlin intellectuals 1800-1830” started, there were three main focus points reflecting the main spaces of public involvement…

It’s about the science we do

My last blog post was written in German and published on one of my other blogs; it presents the results of a hackathon-like workshop given at the DHd conference in Paderborn at the beginning of March 2020. I tell about a dog no human eye had really noticed on an…

Adding sound

My first classes are online! – after a somewhat discouraging start, I got the whole system working now. I decided not to give virtual classes at a fixed times because it would require too much organization from some of the students, or even a quality of internet connection they don’t…

I hate grading – but still

I have always hated grading. It has always felt like a total misunderstanding of what teachers are there for. We are not here to grade, we are here to teach. In an ideal world, there would be no grading at all. Now, we are not in an ideal world, and…

A Neighbour’s Tree like Totoro’s

On the street side of the house, it almost looks like on the very, very hot days, when everyone avoids setting foot on the hot asphalt. It is as if all life was reserved for the garden side. A large part of Le Mans urbanism dates back to the beginning…

The alpha and the beta

Homeschooling seems to work better now that we have a system – a system that supposes that each child can use a laptop on their own for 3 hours in the morning. I have no idea how people who are less well equipped than us, both technically and pedagogically, can…

Two Minutes To Lockdown

At 7:58 PM yesterday, two minutes from the official announcement of a lockdown of the whole country that is bound to last for weeks, I took my kids out and we threw seed balls. I had prepared them the day before, while the sun was shining on our little garden,…
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