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Hi Scholar,

We must beg your forgiveness for our absence from your inbox last week. One of the most amazing things about the digital era we live in, is the relative ease with which so many of our letters can be delivered to scholars scattered all over the world. We have added emphasis on the word relative with good reason, for it was technical difficulties (read: our lack of technical understanding) that kept us away. We have been working on upgrading our website and, in our eagerness to launch it, temporarily broke the backend of The Scholarly Letter. For now, the new website remains ready, but offline until we can figure out where we went wrong. 

We would usually be taking a two week break over the festive period starting from the 18th of December before picking up again in 2026. But consistency matters to us, and we hope it matters to you too. When Thursday passed without an edition of The Scholarly Letter being sent, something felt… off. To make it up to you, an extra edition of The Scholarly Letter will be sent on Christmas Day - but it won’t be Christmas themed, we promise. If you celebrate Christmas, consider your post-lunch reading sorted. If you don’t celebrate Christmas… then it’s just another Thursday The Scholarly Letter lands in your inbox.    

Nearly ten months ago, when we wrote The Scholar Manifesto, we argued that the scholar should not be working in a knowledge economy, but situated within a knowledge ecology. Ever since, this idea of a knowledge ecology has stayed with us. At the time, we introduced it while it was still in its infancy – at least in our own heads. It wasn’t that no one had ever used the phrase knowledge ecology before. In fact, an organisation called Knowledge Ecology International uses it to describe the management of “knowledge resources in ways that are more efficient, more fair, and responsive to human needs.” In more techno-instrumental discourse, knowledge ecology is used to refer to the inputs, throughputs, and outputs of interlinked knowledge databases, experts, and artificial knowledge agents that collectively provide online knowledge for seamless organisational performance.