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The Art of Academic Peer Reviewing

Shalin Hai-Jew, Author

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Cover

A Word Cloud of the Initial Draft of This Short Book (based on a Word Frequency Count)


"The Art of Academic Peer Reviewing" (2014) is a short on-the-fly book about the art of academic peer reviewing. This was created as a simple proof-of-concept to train the author in how to use some of the simple features of Scalar. (The Scalar platform is a very forgiving one of experimentation and outright gaffes. More observations are in the Comments section below.) The contents of this work are original.  

This will be an evolving text, with the addition of Q&As with professionals who have worked as academic peer reviewers, editors, researchers, and authors. As their pieces are finalized, they will be integrated into the book's path.  A preview of forthcoming cases (along with a few already completed) is available in the Main Menu to the left.  A video is in production, and some interactive elements will be added as time allows.  Thanks to all who are contributing!  

Try out the View dropdown at the left...and go to the various Visualizations...and fresh ways to navigate and explore the text.  

We are happy for your interest in this topic and this short text.  
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Discussion of "Cover"

Addendum: Initial Impressions of Scalar

Scalar is a robust platform with plenty of resilience for experimentation. It enables easy re-naming of pages. It enables easy swapping content in and out.

The visualizations of the book encourage the creation of complexity and linkage. It also encourages commentary.  I am especially thinking of the radial diagram and the content-types visualization (where the elements show as different colored blocks).  Clearly, I will have to enhance my data visualization vocabulary to use this tool in an articulate way.  

One of the charms of Scalar is that the tool itself encourages a kind of human creativity.  

This tool evokes WordPress a little.  

I have to go back and add some Description features to some media.  I think I have to go into the page versions of them to do that. Well, yes, but not quite.  It's Dashboard -> Media -> Click on media link... -> Edit...  

It is important to develop clear workflows and standards or else I will be going back to fill in the occasional blanks.  

If I am feeling adventuresome, I will have to go grab some CSS to affect over-all book look-and-feel.  Or JavaScript, too?  That will have to be for later.  It's good to know of the possibilities.  

It does not seem like readership statistics are available yet.  

I like that this is part of the Semantic Web endeavor.  More on that will be interesting...  I think the machine-understanding of the work is evoked by the visualizations, but maybe some next steps is for someone to show what the benefits of a Semantic Web would be...besides lovely visualizations and a sense of smarter machine finding of works (with a more nuanced sensibility).  

The 2 MB size limit on visualizations has not actually crimped my style.  It may be that I just adjusted to the limit.  Nothing has been denied though in terms of what I've tried to upload (various .jpgs and one .png so far).  And there are options if the size limit is an option...in terms of third-party hosting.  (I won't have to go to university servers to host anything, which is a real benefit.)  

Very shortly, I'll have to stop posting to this area because it's no longer "initial" impressions.    

There is very much a sense of text hierarchy and sequence.  I think that's the point.  

The thing about having an evolving book is the wait for everyone to get their pieces in...but being comforted that at least the e-book is available and out in the world--although it does not seem like it's indexed or even easy to find off of the Scalar site.  There's not a clear repository with search.  Or maybe I missed it.  

Posted on 17 August 2014, 10:25 am by Shalin Hai-Jew  |  Permalink

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academic publishing    academic peer review

Related:  General Observations about Academic Publishing,  Case 5 Gladys Palma de Schrynemakers,  Intro to “The Art of Academic Peer Reviewing”,  Case 3 Kakali Bhattacharya,  Case 4 Roger McHaney,  Case 1 Nancy Hays,  Case 2 Brent A. Anders,  How Academic Peer Reviews are Conducted (Generally Speaking),  Case 6 William H. Hsu,  Peer Reviewer Ethics,  Nurturing New Talent as an Academic Peer Reviewer,  References,  Case 7,  Addendum: Initial Impressions of Scalar