Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Charles Davis of Perry, Kentucky On paper, “Charles Davis” ought to be the kind of name that disappears into the background of Perry County history. It is common, Anglo, and shared by more than one man on the North Fork. Yet when you start working through the records, the Davises refuse to stay generic. One Charles Davis from Hazard carried a rifle from the hills to the Olympic Games.

Abandoned Appalachia Series – Nuttallburg, Henry Ford, and a Smokeless Coal Town in the New River Gorge If you follow Keeneys Creek down from the highlands of Fayette County, West Virginia, the pavement narrows to a one lane road and drops into a gorge that feels closed off from the rest of the world. Trees lean over the hood of your car, rock walls press close, and the sound of the New River grows louder around each curve.

Appalachian History Series – The Johnstown Flood of 1889: Disaster in the Conemaugh Valley On the last day of May 1889, a muddy wall of water rushed down a narrow Appalachian valley toward the industrial town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Within minutes it ripped houses from their foundations, swept locomotives away like toys, and left thousands of people dead or missing.

There are many challenges associated with the curation, publication, acquisition, and usage of semantic mappings. This post examines their philosophical, technical, and practical implications, highlights existing solutions, and describes opportunities for next steps for the community of curators, semantic engineers, software developers, and data scientists who make and use semantic mappings.

Accelerationists vs. catastrophists in the decade defining convergence

Wie steht es um Diamond Open Access in den Bundesländern? In der ersten SeDOA-Online-Veranstaltung berichteten vier Landesinitiativen über ihre Aktivitäten, Herausforderungen und ihre Wünsche an SeDOA. Die Veranstaltung eröffnete Möglichkeiten für länderübergreifende Vernetzung, Austausch und Synergien.

Long-term readers will remember that waaay back in 2011, we started the process of putting together a checklist for people naming new zoological genera and species, distilling the relevant portions of the long and complex International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). Across twelve days of intense discussion, we got as far as DRAFT v3 of […]

If only we fixed the publishing system. If only we fixed the incentives, rewards and recognition. Open Science (OS) likes to position itself as a systems problem. And whilst these things do matter, decades of the same conversations and limited change is unveiling an uncomfortable truth: The biggest barrier to change in Open Science isn’t systems or structures. It’s people. And I don’t just mean people in the abstract;

We cannot teleport physical proximity, but we can replicate its psychological effects in remote teams. This has everything to do with propinquity. If the physical world provided connection by accident, the digital world requires connection by design. The most critical loss in the shift to remote work is “propinquity,” a fancy word for physical nearness.

John Willinsky was named a Member of the Order of Canada on December 31st, 2025, for almost three decades of dedication to making knowledge public through his PKP work. In this post, we reflect on how the generous support of PKP’s contributors, reflecting the deeply collective nature of the project, made this work possible. In […] The post PKP Founder John Willinsky Appointed to the Order of Canada appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

After passing through rOpenSci peer review, the distionary package is now newly available on CRAN.It allows you to make probability distributions quickly – either from a few inputs or from its built-in library – and then probe them in detail.