Forgotten Appalachia Series – Hope Cottage and the Ivis Community Center of Knott County, Kentucky If you follow Right Fork of Troublesome Creek out from Hindman, the road narrows into a string of houses, churches, and hollows that once centered on a small country post office called Ivis. For more than half a century that post office linked an out of the way community to the wider world.

Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Abisha Johnson of Knott, Kentucky On a narrow shelf of land along Caney Creek in Knott County, Kentucky, a hillside campus climbs toward the trees. Students hurry past the Founder’s Shack on their way to class, and visitors read a historical marker that tells how Alice Lloyd and June Buchanan built a work college in this valley.

Appalachian History Series – Founder’s Shack of Pippa Passes, Kentucky: One Room Beginning of Alice Lloyd College On most college campuses the oldest building is a brick hall or a stone chapel. At Pippa Passes the story begins in a small shack of rough boards and a sagging roof, tucked beside the creek that gave the institution its name.

At the 4th Ontologies4Chem Workshop in Limburg an der Lahn, I proposed an initial crosswalk between the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM) and the Wikidata semantic mapping data model. This post describes the motivation for this proposal and the concrete implementation I’ve developed in sssom-pydantic.

Our next meeting is Monday 2nd February at 2pm. We’ll be discussing Semantic Waves with Jane Waite and Paul Curzon.

Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of George Johnson of Mason, West Virginia On a cold week in November 1966, the Mason County sheriff’s office suddenly became the front desk for a national monster story. Within days of the first “man sized bird” sighting near the old TNT area north of Point Pleasant, reporters were calling, cars were lining the back roads, and frightened residents were phoning in strange lights and red eyes in the dark.

Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Gray Barker of Braxton, West Virginia If you follow the Elk River up into central West Virginia, you eventually reach a little place called Riffle. It is the kind of rural crossroads that rarely appears on national maps, a handful of homes and hollows near the point where Braxton, Gilmer, and Calhoun counties almost touch.

Appalachian History Series – Leeco Coal Company: Jeff, Vicco, and the Stacy Branch Fight If you drive north out of Hazard along Kentucky 15, the road climbs and curls through Perry and Knott counties past places that once lived by the coal check. Tucked in those bends are Jeff, Vicco, Sassafras, and the Lotts Creek valley.

Appalachian History Series – James River Coal Company and the Mines of Central Appalachia If you drove the back roads of eastern Kentucky in the early 2000s, you could find the James River Coal name on tipples, prep plants, and mine signs from Bell County to Pike County. On paper it was a Richmond based corporation.

Appalachian History Series – Revelation Energy and the Unfinished Mines of Central Appalachia In early June 2016, the creek that runs past the mouth of California Hollow in Harlan County turned the color of chocolate milk. A berm at an active surface mine had failed, and water from a pit rushed out through a gap that was not supposed to be there.

We are pleased to announce that—effective 1st January 2026—we have made two changes to grant record registration fees that aim to accelerate adoption of Crossref’s Grant Linking System (GLS) and provide a two-year window of opportunity to increase the number and availability of open persistent grant identifiers and boost the