Tag: academic-writing
8 items with this tag.
Still Yours: a doctoral researcher's guide to AI
A book written with Benita Olivier for postgraduate researchers, on using AI without giving up the development a research degree exists to produce. It takes seriously the question researchers are already asking: why bother doing a research degree when AI can produce much of the work? We think the answer is that, while a thesis is the artefact, the researcher is the point. The practical middle is organised by the kind of relationship a researcher has with AI rather than by research stage: thinking partner, research assistant, writing collaborator, mediator of relationships, project manager. Springer Nature, expected November 2026.
An open scholarship workflow: What academic publishing can learn from open source
Academic publishing treats scholarship as a finished, individually owned artefact. This post describes a writing and publishing workflow built on a different premise: that a scholarly corpus could work like an open source project — readable, contributable, forkable, and never permanently owned by anyone.
The writing was never the point: AI and academic writing identity
When AI could write everything I'd ever written, I had to ask: what had I been doing all this time? The answer changed how I understand both writing and AI — and what it means to be a scholar in a world where words are cheap.
Building arguments with AI
A field note on building arguments with AI: the brainstorming command I use to engage with any source, with an excerpt showing what a session looks like — Claude surfacing vault notes and Zotero sources, and why the conversation living in markdown matters.
The quality of the challenge: AI as a thinking partner
Most discussions of AI in writing focus on output. This post describes a different experience—using AI as a thinking partner to challenge my choices and claims during a writing session.
LaTeX
A high-quality typesetting system that separates content from style, designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation.
Markdown
A lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using plain-text syntax, enabling portability and interoperability.
Essays as scholarship
Academic culture has converged on the peer-reviewed journal article as the default unit of scholarly output, creating a hierarchy that excludes many valuable forms of intellectual work. This post makes the case for essays as a legitimate form of scholarship—not as a lesser alternative to empirical research, but as a distinct mode that enables exploration, synthesis, and engagement with audiences that traditional publishing cannot reach. Drawing on Boyer's model of scholarship, it argues for a more generous conception of what counts as scholarly contribution.