An aspect of academic research that interests me is how it seeps into everyday discourse. This is nothing new but it is an aspect of scholarly communication (and behaviour) that continues to change.
Popular science has a long history, with a lot of scientific work capturing the popular imagination. Magazines such as Scientific American and Popular Science are quite accessible to readers, both in terms of attainability and language.
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| Source: Buzzfeed |
There are also online magazines such as JSTOR Daily (tagline: "Where news meets its scholarly match"). JSTOR Daily, just like the JSTOR databases, is interdisciplinary.
JSTOR Daily focuses on stories about research that can be retrieved through JSTOR. The citations on the articles (JSTOR Citations) link directly to the database. In my case, it prompts UTOR weblogin. But this brings up different issues for people who aren't paying UofT tuition, such as access to scholarly work and the ethics of paywalls.
What is interesting about the JSTOR Daily example is that it allows for a peak over the paywall. It's a wonderful place to find articles such as:
- "Satanism and Magic in the Age of the Moulin Rouge,"
- "The Sad Story of Booming Ben, Last of the Heath Hens," and
- "Do You Even Language, Bro? Understanding Why Nouns Become Verbs."
However, it is not an open access academic journal. These stories draw on academic work and are written by qualified individuals but they are not peer reviewed articles. JSTOR Daily could be seen as popular liberal arts. Or popular sociology. Popular academia? However it's conceived, Daily is a fascinating way of bringing scholarly pursuits into the popular imagination.
If we look at "Satanism and Magic in the Age of the Moulin Rouge," Burton brings together an article from Victorian Review and one from The British Medical Journal. This is interesting to me, as someone who is entirely biased towards interdisciplinary education (can there really be another way?) in the way that this article puts disciplines into conversation with each other. Ultimately, that is always my hope for online scholarly communication.
I feel ashamed to admit that I didn't know JSTOR Daily existed. But this is quite exciting. Like you, I feel that education, in all of its many facets and varieties, should be interdisciplinary. More often than not science speaks to art, religion speaks to medicine, cultural studies speaks to history etc. so it is important to foster these kinds of connections through academic writing. I just bookmarked the journal page so hopefully we can have some interesting interdisciplinary-based conversations soon!
ReplyDelete(I feel ashamed that I didn't realize Blogger doesn't send email notifications for comments as a default...)
DeleteI keep pointing out to people that the strict separation of disciplines is relatively new. It's also a dangerous trend. If you separate pure, experimental physics from its socio-political implications, things can get out of hand pretty quickly (as they have before). I feel so happy that I had all of these different influences in my life!
In my undergraduate studies a common limitation, I realized as I stumbled across it in different research papers and courses, was that there was a lack of interdisciplinary research and overall collaboration. To go a little bit off topic, it sort of led me to question the point of specialization but also respect the fact that education institutions do make students go through 101 type courses (among other ‘requirement’ courses) and offer choices for exploration. Still, as just as you mentioned Jelena, collaboration is quite dependent on the accessibility of the language and communicating the importance (to a degree raising awareness and participating it what makes them “popular”). I personally remember not fully understanding why taking advance functions math was important to a liberal arts uni/college degree—only to find out it would be useful for me in the future, in a digital libraries course to understanding the basics of a program, and perhaps who to look for, in search of authentic/accurate help (e.g. determining who to hire to help fix).
ReplyDeleteI too like Angelique did not know JSTOR Daily existed, but now that I do, I am hopeful for the formation of more various types of news outlets, among others that bridge (or at least attempt to bridge) the gap between the formal and informal.