“New Measures of Scholarly Impact” and an academic roundup

New Measures of Scholarly Impact

Data analytics are changing the ways to judge the influence of papers and journals. more

Picking on Social Science

House Republicans invite scrutiny of federal funding for social and behavioral sciences. Is anyone biting? more

Endgame capitalism: an interview with Simon During

Simon During is a professor at the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland, having previously taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Melbourne, and elsewhere. In addition to editing The Cultural Studies Reader, now in its third edition, he is the author of several books, including Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard, 2002) and Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory and Post-Secular Modernity (Routledge, 2010). In both, he brings questions of the secular to bear on historical, literary sources both obscure and revelatory. His Compulsory Democracy: towards a literary history is forthcoming.

Data mining the intellectual history of the human race with Google Book Search

Harvard’s Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden and colleagues have been analyzing the huge corpus of literature that Google digitized in its Book Search program, and they’re uncovering absolutely fascinating information about our cultural lives, the evolution of language, the secret history of the world, censorship and even public health. It’s all written up in a (regwalled) paper in Science, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books“:

What Makes Grad Students Happy

Graduate officials who want to improve students’ quality of life — but admit they don’t know how — get some pointers. more

Turkey’s highest science council invites Turkish academics in US to come home

from Hurriyet Dailynews

Goethe and the German Enlightenment

Learning spaces. Virtual spaces. Physical spaces.

from edu.blogs.com by Ewan McIntosh

Friday photo: Christmas trees that confirm national stereotypes

An Emirati man walks past an 11-million-dollar Christmas tree at the Emirates Palace hotel in the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi on December 15, 2010. Christmas came in extravagant fashion to the Muslim desert emirate of Abu Dhabi as a glitzy hotel unveiled a bejewelled Christmas tree valued at more than 11 million dollars.