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Free supports for academic writing: weekly writing communities, the Academic Phrasebank, citation alerts, and tools your university library already provides.
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Latest posts by Adam DJ Brett on web development, digital publishing, teaching, and independent scholarship.
Apps and Tools for Research and Writing
A guided tour of free and low-cost apps for reference management, distraction-free writing, note-taking, and time management for doctoral and academic writers.
The Kanban Method for Dissertation and Journal Article Writing
How the kanban method turns a dissertation or journal article into small, visible units of work you can actually finish, one card and one column at a time.
In Praise of Zotero
Why Zotero is the one tool every doctoral writer should adopt: free citation capture, automatic bibliographies, and no vendor lock-in for your research library.
Review: Frame Analysis, Critical Theory, and English Language Teaching
Robert J. Lowe builds a genuinely usable qualitative method out of early Horkheimer, then undercuts almost none of his own methodology's real weak points, a candor that makes the book more trustworthy than most methods guides and no less compromised.
Review: Kant Machine: Critical Philosophy after AI
Yuk Hui's compact rereading of Kant as a philosopher of machines is the most original framing yet for the AI debates, though its analogies sometimes do work that arguments should, and its quarrel with actual machine learning stays at arm's length.
Review: Big Data in the Arts and Humanities—Theory and Practice
A book that came from a business-analytics book series and reads like it—except for one chapter on the Gothic novel that shows what the volume could have been throughout.
Review: Another Universalism—Seyla Benhabib and the Future of Critical Theory
A festschrift that solves the coherence problem many multi-author theory anthologies stumble on, by organizing itself around one scholar's own vocabulary—at the cost of testing that vocabulary from the outside.
Review: Critical Theory and the Authoritarian Personality
Geoff Boucher builds a genuinely disturbing archive of rightwing insurgency fiction and reads it through a Lacanian update of Adorno, but the psychoanalytic technique that produces his best insight is also flexible enough to find that insight almost anywhere.
What Is Critical Theory, and Why Do We Need It in the Age of AI?
Critical theory is a method for asking how a technology is made, whose interests it serves, and whose labor it depends on. AI makes those questions a basic literacy for democratic life.
Review: American Philosophy and the Intellectual Migration
A conference volume that pairs a genuinely valuable prosopographical database with twelve case studies chosen more by who showed up to a 2022 conference than by any systematic survey of the field.
Digital Humanities Part 6: Preservation through Minimal Computing and GO::DH
The series finale: how minimal computing and GO::DH turn digital preservation into a shared practice of plain text, static sites, and global collaboration.