Today I’m using my post as an excuse to read an article titled “Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ Technologies in Academia” by Olivia Guest and 18 other authors based mostly in the Netherlands. This text can be found in a pre-print repository (https://philarchive.org/rec/GUEATU) where it was filed on 7 September of the current year. […]
This is a report of the ‘Vision and Support Session’, an open discussion held last week, on 30 July, within the Science Fiction Research Association conference, “Trans People are (in) the Future: Queer and Trans Futurity in Science Fiction” (University of Rochester, New York), a conference which lasted until yesterday, August 3rd. The organizer of […]
I was supposed to take part in a seminar next week, which I’ll have to miss, with a talk about how to use AI correctly. In this talk I was going to describe, once more, how the late Iain M. Banks presents AI in his Culture novels (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series). The Culture is a post-scarcity, […]
Sooo….. I asked ChatGPT after failing to find the information on Google about two matters. Here we go… I wrote: “I have read an academic book by Christopher Gillie called Characters in English Literature (1965), which has no bibliography. When did it become compulsory for academic books to have a bibliography or a works cited […]
I’m beginning to read (and in some cases re-read) the bibliography for my future book on secondary characters. I wish I could jump straight into the matter that interests me, for which there is relatively scant bibliography, but I need for my theoretical framework in the introduction an overview of the secondary sources discussing the […]
My weekly posts have become almost fortnightly posts because I am distressed by the events happening in the USA and I can’t focus. Since the beginning of the year I am having serious difficulties to concentrate and read books; the very few I have read (Kidnapped and Catriona by R.L. Stevenson) are novels I needed […]
[This is a really complicated semester, with lots to mark and edit, and pressing personal issues, which explains why I’m being so irregular in my supposedly weekly posting. Apologies!] Today I’m writing about writers and my parasitical syndrome. You may have heard of impostor syndrome (feeling you’re underqualified for a task you’re doing proficiently) and […]
When the new Head of Department was appointed back in February 2023, we also appointed informally a ‘party planning committee’, constituted by two of my colleagues and myself. Perhaps you are part of that kind of Department in which people meet regularly for coffee breaks and lunch, and after hours for drinks, meals, or partying, […]
I’ll begin today by citing the post “Types of Open Access Publishing and the Benefits of Each” by Denise Mager from the blog Researcher.Life (16 August 2022), where I have found information on, precisely, the different types of open access publishing. Ready? (I’m shortening a bit the text): Are you puzzled? Me too… Let’s […]
A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of helping to consolidate the academic career of a brilliant young scholar, Pablo Gómez Muñoz, whose excellent volume Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures, Cosmopolitan Concerns (Routledge, 2023), I earnestly recommend. Pablo, who has been working for some years now at the Universidad […]