A Day at the Art Museum

Saturday, January 28, 2017

At Elena’s suggestion, we spent the afternoon at the newly reopened SF MOMA, described by Wired as “a slab of glacial ice floating down Third Street” since its opening last spring. The review in the NY Times pointed out that “subtle flexing of the senses continues, stimulated not just by the art but also by the continual surprises of the building’s design and details.” It really is an impressive building, light and airy, but we decided to focus instead on the “details.” A photo essay from SF MOMA.

No question about it, the building is still a work in progress.…

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The Scholarly Epiphany Fix

Thursday, January 26, 2017

There’s that moment just before every performance. Curtain is closed. Stage manager, hooked into his headset, gives the ok. You’re in the wings, restlessly stretching, madly running choreographies in your head, patting pesky costume parts to ensure they’re anchored.  Then the stage lights awaken in a snap. It’s that moment—the floor before you awash in bright light; your body filled with anticipation,  fear, electricity before being catapulted onto the stage; the musicians waiting for the first downbeat—that is the highlight of every show for me, more than the bow and applause at the end.

I dance. When an academic publisher…

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Which Mitch is Which?

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Time for a contest!! In my last blog post, I went looking for other Mitch Allens. I found a whole slew of them. Can you identify which Mitch is which? Link the numbered photos with the following identities:

1 Retired scholarly publisher

2 Software engineer

3 Real estate agent

4 Clothing store manager

5 Construction professional

6 Musician/ sound engineer

7 UX designer

8 Football player

9 Chef

10 Creature from the black lagoon

A       B 

C       D 

E      F   

G      H  

I  …

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Expanding the Resume

Friday, January 20, 2017

Time to redo the resume. I’m discovering a Mitch Allen with a far wider range of skills than I ever imagined. This started when one of my FB companions, a woman of my age in Oakland, found the page of someone who shared her name, a cute young stud in Germany. I decided to track down the other Mitchell (and Mitch) Allens of the world. What would my namesake family look like?

The simple answer is, we’re a big clan.

I’m glad I never tried to capture the web domain mitchallen.com, because it’s been in the hands of…

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Guest Blog: What Authors and Reviewers Want From Journal Editors

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

by David Morgan

I responded to one of Mitch Allen’s previous blog posts by expressing my frustration with editors who deal with Revise and Resubmit evaluations by telling authors nothing more than “read the reviewers’ comments and respond to them.” Mitch, being Mitch, asked me to expand on those comments, and I am more than happy to do so.

            Besides an extensive history of publishing in peer-reviewed journals, I’ve also been a reviewer for nearly 50 different journals (and an editorial board member for eight of them), so I have a lot of experience in both the author…

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The Problem with Digital Books

Sunday, January 15, 2017

If you’re expecting a screed from an ex-publisher about how ebooks are ruining the world, destroying the book business, and how much I love the smell ink in a new book, you’ll be disappointed in this piece. Move on to the next cute cat photo. This story is actually about Amy the Automaton.

But first, the problem(s) with digital books. A decade ago, they were going to make paper books obsolete, save many trees and swallow up the earth’s entire bandwidth, once Google finished digitizing them all. As most people who follow the book industry know, the ebook revolution hit…

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How to Slam Dunk a Journal Editor

Friday, January 13, 2017

Joya Misra and Jennifer Lundquist, two well-known sociologists at U Mass Amherst, wrote an article for yesterday’s Inside Higher Education called How to Slam-Dunk a Revision, part of IHE’s practical advice for young academics on how to survive in higher education. I’ve written on this topic myself, including in my Essentials of Publishing Qualitative Research and a blogpost for the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology (Nov. 2014), and discuss it regularly in getting published workshops I regularly give for academics.

For the most part, Misra and Lundquist’s article is on target and well worth…

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Dr. Lincoln Packs a Nail Gun!

Thursday, January 12, 2017

Last week, I had the pleasure of a catchup conversation with Yvonna Lincoln. Yvonna and I go back a long way in our respective careers and have been collaborating on books, journals, series, and dinners for at least three decades.

For those who might confuse her with a descendant of Honest Abe, Professor Lincoln is a big deal in both research on higher education and in qualitative research methodology.  Her official title is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and Human Resource Development and the Ruth Harrington Endowed Chair of Educational Leadership at Texas A&M University. Until recently, she was also…

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Are you a Writer?

Monday, January 09, 2017

Are academics writers?

A provocative article on writing by Cydney Alexis, who runs the writing center at Kansas State, answers strongly affirmative, writers of many genres. Most of what she says are things I can easily agree with: “creative writing” exists in forms other than novels and poetry and should be banned as a term when developing writing programs at universities. People should embrace all forms of writing, not just the novel/poetry kind as being “writing.” We should make writing part of our lives as much as people have made reading, or at least as we did before the advent…

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Join the Calendar Revolution!

Saturday, December 31, 2016

“I have found it fascinating how an arbitrary measure of time can become personified, despised, & blamed for all the events we've decided it contains. Someone with more time should write about this.”

That was the challenge my brilliant archaeologist friend Jane Baxter posted on FB a couple of days ago in response to the endless comments of people hoping for the many sorrows of 2016 to end.

“Get lost, 2016… Fuck you 2016... 2016: What else can go wrong?” They’ve been all over my feed as people mourn the losses of favorite musicians and celebrities, the ascendance of…

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