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Scholarly Communication

Marginalia as Scholarly Communication

Although we may think of scholarly communication as the process of disseminating research through formal publication or online distribution, scholars have been communicating with and responding to each other since well before the advent of the Internet or even print journals. One way in which modern scholars can understand earlier processes of communication is through the study of marginalia, or the notes to themselves or others that previous scholars have left in the margins of the texts they read. Works have been published on the marginalia of single writers, such as Voltaire’s Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau (Havens, 1971), or on marginalia as a topic unto itself. H.J. Jackson has published two books on marginalia:

(Note: Both titles are available as e-books to members of the NU community.)

Recently, the personal library of Charles Darwin was digitized and made available freely online through the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Darwin himself frequently made notes in the margins of his books, and one special feature of this online collection is the full transcription of all his marginalia. Being able to read the notes that Darwin made to himself as he read gives scholars today insight into how his ideas, well, evolved over time. Marginalia were also a way for Darwin and others to share their ideas informally with their contemporaries through exchanging personal copies of their books.

Of course, marginalia aren’t only created by the greatest scientific minds – one of my favorite poets, Billy Collins, wrote a poem on the margin notes left by everyday readers:

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive –
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” –
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

— From “Marginalia” (Billy Collins)

(Read the full poem here.)

RSS Feed Available for NU-Authored Articles

I’ve created an RSS feed for anyone who would like to be alerted when new scholarly articles are published by NU-affiliated authors. It pulls information from Web of Science, which includes not only the Science Citation Index but also the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index. In total, Web of Science indexes over 10,000 journals, including open-access titles.

For current NU faculty, students, and staff:
Click here to add the feed to your RSS reader of choice.
⇒ Using this version of the feed will allow you to click through to view more details about an article within Web of Science even if you’re off-campus. (You’ll be prompted to enter your myNEU username and password from off campus.)

For alumni and members of the public:
Click here to add the feed to your RSS reader of choice.
⇒ This feed still provides complete bibliographic citations for new articles, but if you’re off-campus, you will be unable to access further information, such as the abstracts, via Web of Science.

Note: Google Chrome requires a plugin/extension in order to handle RSS feeds correctly, however, Internet Explorer and Firefox are two browsers that work well.

Please let me know if you have any difficulties with this feed.

Northeastern Researchers Study Gossip

Northeastern researchers recently published a study on the impact that negative gossip has on the brain’s ability to remember a person or face.

According to their research, test subjects were more likely to remember a person if they heard a piece of negative gossip about them when they were shown a picture of that person’s face. If volunteers spent more time hearing positive connotations about a person they were more likely to forget their face.

Interestingly, Dr. Lisa Barrett, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, believes that the result of this study directly helps people remember and avoid people who may cause them harm.

Snell Library also contains some resources on the subject like the online report, The Relative Effect of Positive and Negative Humorous Gossip on Perceptions of the Gossiper and the Target of the Gossip, which discusses a study on the perceptions and effects of gossip and gossipers. Other related articles can be found by doing a Discovery or NuCat search on the library’s homepage (www.lib.neu.edu) for subjects like “gossip”, “psychology of the brain”, “memory”, etc.

You can also view Northeastern’s recent interview with Lisa Feldman Barrett discussing her study on YouTube. In addition, you can find more of her work in IRis, Northeastern’s Institutional Repository.

Northeastern Researchers Make the Cover of Nature

Our very own Northeastern researchers have offered a new look towards “merging the tools of network science and control theory” to better control complex systems. Their findings were featured on the cover of the May 12th issue of the journal Nature.

Albert-László Barabási, a professor in the Departments of Physics and Biology and in the College of Computer and Information Science, and Yang-Yu Liu, a postdoctoral research associate in Physics, coauthored the paper, along with an MIT colleague.

Their focus was to merge control theory with network science research in order to create more efficient methods of gaining control of a complex system, such as cellular networks or social media, by identifying the driving nodes of the system. Read more about their research in this news@Northeastern press release. You can also find more of Professor Barabási’s research publications in IRis, Northeastern’s institutional repository.

Congrats to our NU researchers for this inspiring breakthrough!

Snell's Corbett Presents at ACRL Annual Conference

Snell Library’s Scholarly Communication Librarian, Hillary Corbett, presented a poster at the Annual Conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries in Philadelphia at the end of March.

Hillary’s presentation demonstrated how the power of Google Analytics helps her to market an important library service: IRis, our institutional repository.  She has used Google Analytics to study how the research created at Northeastern is used and cited by writers and scholars around the globe.  This helps make a persuasive case for all you Northeastern researchers to archive your work in IRis!

The poster is available here in IRis, along with thousands of other papers, presentations, and documents by Northeastern researchers.

Ten other librarians from Snell also attended the conference, including Dean Will Wakeling, pictured above with Hillary Corbett in the exhibit hall at the Philadelphia Convention Center.