Scientia et Humanita Issue 7 has been published!!!

Okay, okay, technically, the print version of the journal came out several months ago. Yet, due to various technical foibles, the online open access version has just been put up here. Okay, technically, the print version has been up for a few weeks, at least the full pdf version and the individual articles . . . but lacking the editor's introduction. Now, though, everything's fine and dandy. Issue 7 can be found here.

 I'm very excited about this issue. Not only was this my first tenure as editor in chief, overseeing all aspects of production, but we had a quite nice mix of authors this year -- see my editor's introduction here for more details. Included in this year's issue:
  • "Corpus Christi, Superstar? Decoding the Enigma of the York Mystery Cycle"
    • by Hillary K. Yeager, grad, English
  • "Self-Leadership Strategies and Performance Perspectives Within Student Aviation Teams"
    • by Christopher R. Bearden, undergrad, psychology
  • "Does Criminal History Impact Labor Force Participation of Prime-Age Men?" 
    • by Mary Ellsworth, grad, econcomics
  • "Playing Games as Cultural Expression: Mah Jong, Chess, and Bourré in the Works of Amy Tan and Tim Gautreaux"
    • by Sara Hays, grad, English
  • "Bram Stoker’s Anxieties Concerning the Emancipation of Women"
    • by Rebecca Clippard, undergrad, Japanese & Spanish
  • "The Impact of the HOPE Scholarship on High School Graduation in Georgia"
    • by Muhammad A. Yadudu, grad, economics
  • "Policy Analysis on Youth Aging Out of Foster Care"
    • by Calista Barberi, grad, social work
  • "An Analysis of Euroskepticism’s Influence on Britain’s Vote to Leave the European Union"
    • by Kayla McCrary, undergrad, international relations

We had a record number of submissions this year (25) but only accepted 8 articles, making this our most competitive issue yet. Nice mix of grad/undergrad  as well as mix of disciplines. It also may be our best looking issue yet, since  we did extensive proofreading and layout-checking.

Major innovations accomplished under my tenure:
  • re-vamped our main libjournals.edu Scientia website.
  • re-builted our mtsu.edu/scientia website
  • Composed a Scientia style guide
  • Developed criteria for accepted articles from the social sciences and natural sciences
  • Formalized my criteria for acceptance of articles, which'll be useful for future issues
  • instituted a new process of proofreading that sees both editorial, staff, and author proofs 

Fun stories:
  • One of authors, when I asked which citation style she was using, replied, "APA . . . I think." (Okay, that counts as a horror story.)
    • In fact, judging from this year's issue, APA is apparently the hardest citation style for anyone to get right.
  • When I asked our layout editor why, for her contribution to the issue, she wasn't using the hanging indent formatting for her works cited page, we both realized that, somehow, she never realized that function existed in Word. Instead, she did hanging indents by hitting "enter" and tapping the spacebar 5 times.
  • When we had one econ article unfortunately not make it past faculty review, our reviewer suggested Mary E. as a possible replacement. She revamped a class presentation into an awesome article in the few weeks just prior to us going to press.
  • Chris Bearden, our undergrad winner of the Deans' Distinguished Essay Award, also gets the informal award of "Most Improved Essay in Shortest Amount of Time." He managed to do an unholy amount of revision to his article in only 10 days. He's also a veteran who's just been accepted into the MA program for psychology at MTSU.
All in all, I'm extremely proud of all our authors and staff -- the amount of work everyone put in to make this a quality issue was immense. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distin...
Read more

A Look at Charles R. Saunders and "Sword & Soul"

Image
So, I've been reading lately about Charles R. Saunders, the black author of sword-and-sorcery fiction, and man .... poor guy. If there's been ever a case of someone being born about 30 years too soon, it's Saunders. Usually, when people mention about black S&S authors, they mean Samuel R. Delany. This makes sense. As a queer, Marxist deconstructionist, Delany established his street cred first by writing SF before wading into the "gutters" (ahem) of S&S fantasy. (Sidenote: are there any black fantasy writers except maybe Jemisin who didn't first establish their street cred by writing SF?). Although I personally never much cared for Delany's  writing style or Nevèrÿon books , which are basically what happens when someone who holds a subgenre in contempt decides to write in that subgenre, it is true that academic critics love Delany .... especially critics who hate S&S themselves. So if they mention Saunders at all, which is rare, it's usuall...
Read more

NEW POETS OF RUM-RAM-RUF: Zach Weinersmith & Boulet

Image
In the opening paragraph of my metrical appendix to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival , I raised a conundrum: how do revivalists today officially arrive at an alliterative meter? The question’s a good one. In every case known to me, at least in English, revivalists never “grow up” with alliterative poetics. They don’t – they cannot – know the meter on an intuitive cultural knowledge, not as medieval skalds or scopas did. In other words, the meter has been moribund for centuries, and if young poets today – those crazy kids – experiment with alliteration at all, it is only of the ornamental variety. That’s what tongue twisters teach you: the rum-ram-ruf of sounds jingle-jangling together. Accordingly, if revivalists know what they are doing at all, they deploy a poetic form learned only as an adult. Someday, though, I hope to eat those words – or at least chew them slowly. The parties responsible are author Zach Weinersmith and the artist Boulet, the creators of a w...
Read more