Visualising, Violating, and Humanizing Scholarship

Your Scholarly Digest 18th September, 2025

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Hi Scholar,

Last weekend, we made a trip to Hay-on-Wye, known as the National Book Town of Wales. Cynics might dismiss the title as little more than a marketing gimmick, but to us, it felt entirely deserved. We had never before encountered so many bookshops concentrated in one place, especially second-hand bookshops, which have become somewhat of a rarity these days.

Aside from the thrill of discovering and hunting, there was a particular pleasure in the slow, almost strenuous mental work of browsing for books without any algorithmic curation or endless “for you” feeds so typical of our digital world. And perhaps even more appealing was the sense of being among so many others who shared the same fervent love and respect for books. We also couldn’t help but notice the quiet reverence with which people treated the bookshops – whispering as though to preserve their sanctity, much as one does in a library.

BRAIN FOOD

On the Violence of Review

Our brain food typically tends to be a sort of food for thought for the mind. But today, perhaps, it is more of a food for thought for the soul – for it is concerned not with matters of fact, but with matters of concern: generosity, kindness, and care, particularly in the context of review work. This concern arises from multiple observations within the academic milieu – across conferences, supervision meetings, peer review, and even on academic niches of social media platforms. It is the sense that while receiving reviews – comments, feedback, reports – can be incredibly developmental for one’s work, they can also be deeply destructive to the morale, spirit, and soul of the person being reviewed. 

The first part of that sentence is perhaps obvious to anyone reading this. But the second part may cause eyebrows to furrow in confusion or disbelief. To explain how reflections on someone’s work – work which has been arduously done – might nevertheless be devastating to the author, we turn to Lisa Jardine’s introduction to Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts. 

Using diary entries and other sources, Jardine gives us an inside look at Woolf’s mood as a writer and the behind-the-scenes process of writing Between the Acts. She tells us that Woolf judged the book – on which she had laboured for nearly three years and already substantially redrafted three times – to still be irredeemably “slight” and “trivial.” 

Jardine explains that Woolf had initially intended Between the Acts to be a light, inconsequential work, “random and tentative,” a relief from the heavy responsibility of writing Roger Fry’s biography. Yet within the first few pages, she introduces a serious note of violence through a newspaper clipping she had saved – about a trial of a group of guardsmen for the rape of a fourteen year old girl. Despite wanting to write “light” literature to counterbalance the sombre atmosphere of war, her preoccupation with men’s authoritarianism and women’s social and educational disadvantage entered the text almost unbidden.

“How was the enormity of the ongoing war and its total impact on English life to be conveyed in a novel?” – Jardine tells us that this was a question Woolf had been provoked into asking by Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield had written a negative review of Woolf’s Night and Day in the Athenaeum, attacking the way it focused on the minutiae of English daily life, as if World War I had never happened. She described the novel as “trifling”: 

Woolf had been deeply hurt by Mansfield’s criticism. Later, when she chastised herself for not having made Between the Acts sufficiently a novel of the Second World War, rather than the “rambling, capricious” piece of writing she had embarked upon in 1938, Jardine asks us to consider if she was still haunted by Mansfield’s earlier complaint about Night and Day. Did she fear she had once again failed to capture the pain, destruction, and dread of possible invasion? As Jardine tells us, it is not difficult to imagine Woolf – struggling with depression, a sense of worthlessness, and the anxieties of war – reviving her rival’s disappointment and chastising herself for being insufficiently serious for the times. Yet she was too hard on herself: Between the Acts is in fact shot through with reminders of war, of vulnerability to invasion and bombardment, even in its deceptively tranquil English setting.

For years, Woolf sought ways to make her writing more “serious” – in ways that would speak to the present moment – despite believing that such work belonged to polemical non-fiction. In the deep forests of her mind, Mansfield’s words had lodged themselves in ways that profoundly shaped her thinking, writing, and even being. She had developed an acute sense of inadequacy as a writer equal to the times. Yet, reading her work nearly a hundred years later, one hardly finds Between the Acts unworthy. Quite the opposite: it provides rich commentary on social issues of gender, war, and the self. Mansfield, of course, was not a formal reviewer of Woolf’s work. Yet her thoughts had such a profound effect that Woolf began to imagine herself as a different kind of writer. 

If this is the case, is it really so difficult to believe that when we peer review each other’s work, we leave similarly lasting impressions – not just on the work, but on the researcher, the author, the person themselves? 

There is, of course, no denying that the purpose of review is to produce change in the work, to make it “better.” But can we deny that reviewer comments sometimes cut so deeply that they corrode the self of the author? We like to tell ourselves that reviews are impersonal, that nothing of the “person” enters into them. But such a claim is impossible: it is always a person who has done the work, is it not? To review work is, inevitably, to review its author. What, then, is to be done? The solution is not to abandon review, nor to demand that every work be met only with praise. Instead, it is to recognise that behind every text is a person. Rather than pretending that our comments are purely objective or detached, perhaps we might place the human at the forefront. We might learn to offer critique with care rather than cruelty: the kind of care that builds up the person behind the work, rather than violence that breaks and diminishes their sense of self.

CURRENT AFFAIRS

Move Fast, Editor, That Paper Is Compromised

The number of published journal articles being retracted has risen sharply in recent years - you’re probably aware of previous instances where hundreds or thousands of papers were retracted en masse. Despite the danger of contaminating the scholarly record that compromised articles present, retractions can sometimes take years to be processed, with publishers often waiting for the outcome of investigations by the institutions affiliated with authors.  

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is as close to a regulator of academic publishing as one can get. Since its inception in 1997 it has sought to provide guidelines on everything from how to handle authorship disputes to a code of conduct for publishing companies themselves. Three weeks ago, COPE published new guidance for how to handle retractions of published articles - highlighting just how pressing the problem is becoming. The guidelines provide a definitive list of reasons why an article may be retracted, and emphasise moving quickly when a retraction is warranted. Virtually all major publishers are members of COPE and subscribe to their guidelines, leading us to hope that moving forward publishers will treat safeguarding the scholarly record a core responsibility, not an afterthought. 

RESOURCE

Human Writing for Human Readers

This week’s resource is about academic writing. More specifically, it’s on post-academic writing, a concept introduced by Graham Francis Badley. As Badley suggests, it is simply 

“human writing for human readers.”

At first sight, this may come across as a pushback against the rise of AI-based writing. But it isn’t. Instead, it’s a pushback against the convoluted, robotic, monotonous, and depersonalised – yet oddly pretentious – style of writing that has come to dominate so much of academia. This is the kind of writing that suppresses the author’s natural voice and disregards readers through obscure, theoretical prose.

In his essay “Post-Academic Writing: Human Writing for Human Readers”, Badley takes to the task of answering a simple question:

To answer this, he offers seven notes for cultivating accessible, human-centred scholarship rather than using writing as an abusive instrument of intellectual elitism:

• Adopting a Human Stance

• Revealing a Human Perspective

• Developing a Human Voice

• Improving Ourselves as Human Storytellers

• Learning More About the (Human) Craft of (Post-Academic) Writing

• Enjoying Our Serious and Playful Manifoldness as Human Creatures

• Continuing Our Human Conversations

We’re not providing a summary of each of these points, as they have already been lucidly written by Badley himself in his article. It’s worth a read if you believe your work deserves to be read by more than just a handful of specialists in your niche field. To quote Nick Cohen, as cited by Badley in his essay: 

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• PhD, Postdoctoral, and Faculty Positions @ University of Helsinki, Finland: click here

• Research and Faculty Positions @ The University of Manchester, UK: click here

• PhD, Postdoctoral, and Faculty Positions @ Lund University, Sweden: click here

• PhD Positions @ University of Copenhagen, Denmark: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

Visualizing 100 Million Books At Once

Despite being a shadow library, Anna’s Archive is possibly the world's largest collection of books with current holdings of 53 million. In comparison, the British Library, considered the world's largest with 200 million items, has “only” 25 million in its collection. If your mission was to catalogue and make accessible all the books in the world, how would you do it? First, you would need to know how many books you already have and simply count them. But how would you know which books are missing? A good place to start would be to gather as many ISBNs (unique numbers assigned to books at publication) as you can and match the books in your archive to this list. If you were Anna’s Archive then visualizing your efforts would look like this:

That’s a lot of red. Based on the visualization above, Anna's Archive estimates it currently has a file for 16% of all the ISBNs ever issued - meaning there is still 84% to go. The image above is illustrative, but it is not a tool for exploring the ISBN landscape. Anna’s Archive issued a $10,000 bounty to address this problem. The winner, Github user phiresky, has created something quite remarkable:

Their fully interactive representation of the ISBN landscape, integrates coverage data from Anna’s Archive and uses an original “Bookshelf Curve” to represent ISBNs. Unless you’re a librarian, this tool is unlikely to be particularly useful. It is, however, truly and utterly, beautiful. We have written in The Scholarly Letter about the significance of aesthetics in scholarship before - particularly drawing on the work of JWN Sullivan. This visualization is, in our opinion, a perfect demonstration of how an act of scholarship can be useful, aesthetically beautiful and satisfy the curiosity of the scholar themselves. All at the same time. 

You can access it here - it’s worth your time to spend a few minutes exploring it. If you’re interested in the specifics of the code that built this visualisation you can read about it in phiresky’s blog post.

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