Tag Archives: science

February 2, 2012, 8:00 am

How to (Try to) Get a Lot Done in the Sciences

In a previous post, I described how reading How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing proved to be beneficial to me, a fairly skeptical scientist, in increasing my writing productivity. (A brief summary of my post: the book recommends scheduling writing time and participating in a writing group. Do it. It works.)

I also alluded to the fact that reading the book has boosted my productivity in other ways, which I’ll now describe in this post. But first, a disclaimer. I’m a science faculty member at a small liberal arts college, and I work solely with undergraduate students. My semesters are primarily focused on teaching (which can include classroom and instructional lab time) and mentoring, with some institutional service thrown in. Research theoretically is partitioned to the summer, but in my world (doing experimental nuclear magnetic resonance research with…

June 30, 2011, 8:00 am

A Political Scientist Walks into a DH Gathering…

By Amy Cavender

There’s already been a lot written here at ProfHacker about the recent THATCampLAC held at St. Norbert College. Ryan’s covered organizing the event, Celeste Marshall Kahn has described her experience attending as a student, and Heather’s given us a non-humanist’s view of the event.

I attended as a someone who sometimes feels like she’s neither fish nor fowl, as I noted in my session proposal; though I’m in a social science discipline, I’m in a subfield of that discipline that’s closer to the humanities than most of the social sciences are. I’ve also long had an interest in digital tools, both for classroom use and for my scholarly work.

My questions centered around two principal concerns: (1) Where do I fit with respect to the digital humanities, and how do I explain my interests to others? and (2) How, concretely, do I go about discovering and learning the digital tools that will …

June 14, 2011, 8:00 am

Non-Humanist Report from THATCamp

By Heather M. Whitney

Like three other Profs. Hacker, I recently attended THATCamp Liberal Arts Colleges (LAC). Unlike the three, I’m not in the humanities. Yet, I found the experience to be enriching and inspiring.

Why did I go? You can read more about that at my blog. I don’t think my attendance was too far-fetched, given my background (I double-majored in both physics and performing and visual arts, concentration in music, specializing in piano [whew, that always is long to get out, but it's not accurate to say that I have a full music degree.] I also teach a course on the physics of music.) And I’m a whole-hearted enthusiast of the liberal arts mindset and try to teach physics in a holistic manner, appealing to my students’ analytical and creative sides as I guide them in the ways of learning the topic, ways that include steps such as reading historical narrative of science. But in short, I went to see…