Scholarly Communication New Books Network

The Comic Book as Research Tool contributes to a growing body of work celebrating the visual methods and tools that aid knowledge transfer and welcome new audiences to social science research. Visual research methodological milestones highlight a trajectory towards the adoption of more creative and artistic media. As such, the book is dedicated to exploring the creative potential of the comic book medium, and how it can assist the production and communication of scientific knowledge. The cultural blueprint of the comic book is examined, and the unique structure and grammar of the form deconstructed and adapted for research support. Along with two illustrated research comics, Toxic Play and 10 Business Days, the book offers readers numerous comic-based illustration activities and creative visual exercises to support data generation, foster conversational knowledge exchanges, facilitate inference, analysis, and interpretation, while nurturing the necessary skills to illustrate and create research comics. The book engages a diverse audience and is an illuminating read for visual novices, experts, and all in-betweeners.
Dr. Stephen O’Sullivan is lecturer in marketing and consumer culture at University College Cork, Cork University Business School. His research is primarily situated in the consumer culture theory dimensions of marketplace cultures and consumer identity projects. Current research involves an investigation of contemporary play, particularly that which is harmful in nature. Stephen is an advocate for the greater application of creative media in social science. His published works can be found in the Marketing Theory, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Consumption Markets & Culture, Advances in Consumer Research, and Journal of Customer Behavior. Contributes research films to the Indie Cork Film Festival.
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The Little Guide to Getting Your Book Published (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) takes prospective authors from idea to draft manuscript to published book in a step-by-step process. The book advises writers on creating a book proposal and then how to find a publisher or agent. Whether a trade non-fiction work, monograph, or textbook, the book is guaranteed to motivate and inspire you to get started on the road to publishing today. 
Written by a book professional with 30 years of experience on hundreds of publishing projects, The Little Guide will help you decide which route is right for you: a big publisher or self-publishing. It discusses the secrets on what you need to know when signing a contract, creating a winning title, and how to find the time to do it all. It includes valuable listings of publishing resources and suggested readings you will want to have at your fingertips. The Little Guide answers all of the beginner’s questions in a direct and useful fashion. The book can be read all the way through or serve as a spot reference guide as authors wind their way through the process. The book is divided into 32 short, focused chapters. Sections include: “Getting Started,” “Writing Your Manuscript,” Selecting a Book Publishing Model,” “Getting Published,” and “What is an Author Promotional Platform and Why it Matters?”
John Bond is a Publishing Consultant at Riverwinds Consulting. To connect with on a proiect, see his website PublishingFundamentals.com. His YouTube channel contains over 100 short videos on academic publishing. Or connect with him on LinkedIn.
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Listen to this interview of Rajkumar Buyya, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, University of Melbourne, and Director there too of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems Labs. We talk about collaborating within a discipline, collaborating across multiple disciplines, and also collaborating with industry partners.
Rajkumar Buyya : "I consider the research coming from my group not just as the publication of a plain paper, but also as what we call paper++ and by that we mean, a paper along with something extra. So, we publish a foundation paper but we also release our software via Open Source in the community. That way, when we've shared our software, people start using our technology, and that sparks another kind of collaboration, because now the community might find some weakness in the software and if they come back to us with that, we can do that work together."
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Today’s book is: Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012), by Helen Sword, which dispels the myth that you only get published by writing wordy, impersonal prose. Dr. Sword reveals that journal editors and readers alike welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Her analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a range of fields documents the startling gap between how academics describe good writing, and the prose they actually produce. Too few scholars were taught how to create accessible prose, a problem Stylish Academic Writing addresses by showcasing works from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences written with both vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure. Stylish Academic Writing also offers examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master.
Our guest is: Dr. Helen Sword who is an international expert on academic, professional, and creative writing across the disciplines. She received her PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University, and is a former Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland. She now specializes in facilitating retreats, workshops, and masterclasses. She is the author of The Writer’s Diet; Air and Light, Space and Time: How Successful Academics Write; Writing With Pleasure; and Stylish Academic Writing.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Listeners may also like this playlist:

Becoming the Writer You Already Are

Top 10 struggles in writing a book manuscript and what to do about it

Exploring the emotional arc of turning a dissertation into a book

Tackling your writing roadblocks

An editor shares about writing for the general public

Demystifying the path to publication

DIY writing retreats


Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Please support the show by downloading and sharing episodes.
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Listen to this interview of Claire Le Goues, Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about writing to present versus writing to express.
Claire Le Goues : "Really, the very best natural writers that I've ever had in my group were not native English speakers. Because writing a good paper is very much not about idiomatic or expressive language. I mean, sure, there is a point at which grammar becomes prohibitive to understanding. I mean, it needs to be correct enough that we can understand it without ambiguity. But good writing — it's about the argument, it’s about the order the information’s being presented in, it’s about hitting the appropriate level of abstraction or granularity. And that really has, fundamentally, very little to do with the language it's written in."
Links: squaresLab
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Listen to this interview of Diomidis Spinellis, Professor of Software Engineering, Athens University of Economics and Business, and as well Professor of Software Analytics, Delft University of Technology. We talk a lot about audience — especially how to reach them.
Diomidis Spinellis: "They say that traveling enriches the mind. I think that the same applies to working outside your own narrow discipline. You get to know different ways of conceptualizing problems, of attacking them — you witness the value in other methods or entire other structures for building up knowledge — and also, you may learn to appreciate things you've come to look down upon because those things don't follow the conventions of your home discipline. All of this is enriching, and all of it improves the research."
Links: Advice for Writing LaTeX Documents
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