A pivotal moment in my academic career, or at least one I remember clearly, was when a very senior professor in the US sent me his book proposal for an academic book/monograph on the author Thomas Pynchon. The other thing he included was a crossed off list of all the presses he had courted with the proposal and with whom he had not succeeded.

Appalachian History Series – The Monongah Mine Disaster of 1907: Coal, Immigrants, and the Worst Day in American Mining On a cold Friday morning in early December 1907, the town of Monongah in Marion County, West Virginia, woke to a sound that people later said could be heard for miles along the West Fork River.

Appalachian History Series – Tupelo’s Dark Sunday: The 1936 Tornado and the Making of Modern Appalachian Mississippi On a warm Palm Sunday evening in April 1936, the people of Tupelo, Mississippi settled into the usual routines of a small hill country town. Families finished supper, children were put to bed, and the lights of north Tupelo glowed around a shallow body of water locals called Gum Pond. Within a few minutes that quiet vanished.

Appalachian History Series – Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster: Silica, Silence, and Memory in the New River Gorge If you stand at the overlook near Hawks Nest State Park in Fayette County, West Virginia, the New River looks calm and distant. Freight trains slide along the riverbank, and tourists lean on the stone wall to photograph the gorge.

Appalachian History Series – Walking the Hill: The Clinton Twelve and Appalachian Tennessee’s First Integrated High School A Mountain Town Drawn Into a National Story On the map, Clinton looks like one more small town in the ridge country north of Knoxville. The courthouse square sits above the Clinch River, with the Cumberland Plateau rising in long, timbered ridges to the west and the Great Smoky foothills not far to the east.

Forgotten Appalachia Series – Lilly on the Bluestone and the Flood That Never Came On a quiet day in the Bluestone Gorge, if you follow the old river road that hikers now call the Bluestone Turnpike Trail, you can walk for miles with the river on one side and deep forest on the other.

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO There is a tendency, among both scientists and non-scientists, to assume that our current scientific theories are correct in some fundamental sense … but the history of science suggests otherwise.

TL;DR It’s annoying to be plagiarised, but what I’ve come to worry about more is how pay-to-publish predatory journals forgo peer review in order to prey on fellow academics and rob them of learning opportunities. Even if you know better than to publish in them, they are a symptom of the collective action problem that plagues much of academic publishing.

AIxBio is here: Navigating the pacing problem and the future of global biosecurity

JSKOS (JSON for Knowledge Organization Systems) is a JSON-based data model for representing terminologies, thesauri, classifications, and other semantic artifacts. Like the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM), it can also encode semantic mappings. This post is about developing and implementing a crosswalk between them in the sssom-pydantic Python package.

The African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA) is the umbrella body for the African library sector. It focuses on building the capacity of librarians and related professionals to promote equitable access to information, increase the visibility of African knowledge and research outputs, and adapt effectively to evolving knowledge and information trends in order to drive sustainable development on the continent.